Ate My Balls

The internet wasn’t always as it is today. Long back in the Digital Dark Ages of the mid-90‘s, long before Myspace, You Tube and yes, even before the infamous Napster there was another breed of online craze. Ate My Balls. But what was Ate my Balls? And where did it go?

Long forgotten, and only remembered by those of us who were around for the Explorer v.3 days, crawling at slower than 56k, and looking for something other than free porn to kill time. This was the hay-day of Ate My Balls.

According to Wikipedia, the first Ate My Balls page was created by a man named Nehal Patel at some point in ’96. The fad soon reeked havok like a 50 car pile-up across the Information Super-Highway. During this glorious era there were thousands of these pages across the net and no one was innocent. Mr. T, South Park, and even The Care Bears had their own Ate My Balls pages. Today only a sack full survive.

These classic web pages are rather simple in design, as most meme parody pages, even from a mid-90’s standpoint. They usually consist almost solely of pictures of the poor soul who entered the artist’s crosshairs that have comicesque speech bubbles crudely edited in with ms-paint. These captions usually consist of a the character exclaiming their love of consuming testes. To take an example from “Pac-Man Ate My Balls“, “I turn blue when I eat blue balls!”

Some of the Ate My Balls creators even took the time to put crude storylines together, or have some sort of ongoing narrative to ad to the story. “Jar Jar Binks Ate My Balls” does so in a sad attempt of replicating the classic Star Wars prologue by typing the text in a triangular fashion.

But what happened to this once flourishing species? Nobody truly knows. Some people think that they were simply deleted by their host servers. Others believe they were wiped out by some strange virus that destroyed any site with the words “ate” and “balls” in the same sentence. Perhaps Star Wars Kid hunted them all down as Darth Vader did to the Jedi. But most agree that their creators just simply found something better to do.

All we have left today are a few scattered pages such as “Ric Flair Ate My Balls” and “Krazy Keith’s Ate My Balls Links Page” which will surely become some sort of Rosetta Stone of Internet history. Although 99% of these pages no longer exist, Krazy Keith has a list of over 320 Ate MY Balls links. Because of this cryptic roster we have some sort of idea as to who ate who’s balls back in those dark days of the late 90’s.

Perhaps someday, by the grace of the almighty Ceiling Cat, Ate My Balls pages shall once again rear their head.