In 1995, we built a persistent online body piercing game where you pierced, scarred, and tattooed your way to victory and fabulous prizes. User accounts, weekly leaderboards, a community newsletter called Hole World Weekly Update, and actual cool oddball items mailed to winners. We sold a lot of t-shirts.

By our calculations, over a million characters were created over the lifetime of the game. Nobody had a job title for what we’d made. This was before “viral” was even a word.

Wired covered it: “Piercing Mildred is a bookmark for sure. Here’s a site dedicated to the two favorite pastimes of the ’90s: body modification and the Internet.”

Chicago Tribune covered it. It was in the book The World’s Weirdest Websites And The People Who Create Them. We trademarked it. It ran until 2003.