Do you remember… Miniclip?

If you went to school in the 2000s, you know the routine. The ICT lesson finished early, the teacher looked away, and thirty browsers all landed on the same website.

Miniclip launched in London in 2001. Its very first game was a cartoon of George W. Bush dancing, and it went everywhere. Within a few years it was full of small, brilliant games you could play in a lunch break: digging for treasure in Motherload, potting balls at pool, launching things a very long way for no reason at all.

Almost everything ran in the browser, in Flash or Shockwave, so there was no game to install and nothing for the school network to stop, at least until the IT department caught on. When they did, someone always knew a mirror site.

By 2005 Miniclip was calling itself the biggest games website in the world. A lot of those visits came from the back row of a computer room, with the volume turned all the way down.