8

I'm trying to figure out what the first instance was of a website being created specifically for a movie. I've narrowed it down to Star Trek Generations (1994) and Stargate (1994).

I was pretty sure it was Star Trek Generations, because I had it from a couple of sources, but then after a little bit more googling I found that people make the same claim for Stargate.

According to IMDB, Star Trek Generations was released in November 1994 and Stargate in October 1994. I don't believe the fact that Stargate was released first necessarily means that the website was too.

For Star Trek Generations:

For Stargate:

2 Answers 2

5

Although it was obviously quite close between them, I believe the answer to the question is that the Stargate website came before the Star Trek Generations website.

Although there are lots of pages and references to both sites as being first, I have only been able to find a single reference for either of them that includes a date.

From the Star Trek Generations entry on the Memory Alpha website:

The official website for Star Trek Generations, created on 28 October 1994, was the first site on the internet to officially publicize a feature film. Memory Alpha

While this quote does state that Generations came first, the launch date for the website happens to be the exact same date that IMDB states the Stargate movie was released (28th October, 1994). Given that the Stargate website was created as a promotional tool for the movie, it stands to reason that it would have been launched before the movie was released (i.e. before the 28th of October).

2

It's probably Stargate. The registration record for startrek.com lists 1995-02-27 as the creation date and for stargate.com as 1986-08-05. This date corresponds not to the movie stargate, but to the much earlier TV show "The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers" in which one of the episodes involved finding a "stargate".

5
  • Sorry, why does that mean it's probably Stargate? I mean, if that registration date corresponds to a tv show then it doesn't really shed any light on the Stargate movie v's Generations debate does it? Nov 17, 2014 at 6:29
  • 2
    Yes it does. Since the domain name was in use very early, it is more likely the film makers became aware of it before the movie was even released and took action to control it, because otherwise it would cause confusion with the movie. Since startrek.com was not registered until 1995, that would suggest it was later. Nov 17, 2014 at 6:32
  • Ok yeah, I can see your logic there. There's a lot of assumptions though. I think I'm actually getting closer to deciding it's Generations, because I've been able to find more actual references to it being the first dedicated movie site than I have for Stargate. Stargate I've only been able to find one liners from third parties. Nov 17, 2014 at 6:36
  • 1
    If you're going by domain registrations, you're implicitly ruling out web sites of the form http://startrek.paramount.com/ or even http://www.paramount.com/startrek/ both of which currently exist. Those types of URLs would have been more common than the http://www.startrek.com/ type in the early days of the web. The DNS really was a hierarchy once. It wasn't always a flat namespace with .com stuck on the end.
    – user6436
    Nov 18, 2014 at 1:27
  • @WumpusQ.Wumbley Subdomains generally still have semantic meaning, even if the internal implementation differs from how it was in the past.
    – JAB
    Sep 7, 2017 at 20:15

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .