Relive the 90s web era! The Neuro Nostalgia Hackathon challenged teams to transform modern sites into retro masterpieces with spinning GIFs, clunky CSS, and nostalgic flair.
Picture this: neon colors, pixelated fonts, and spinning GIFs from an era when dial-up modems reigned supreme. This year, Hackathon Raptors set out to bring that flashy vision back to life with the Neuro Nostalgia Hackathon. In this three-day marathon, teams worldwide scrambled to transform sleek, modern websites into gloriously clunky yet fully functional, 90s-style masterpieces. From December 13 to 16, participants didn’t just add “Under Construction” animations or marquee text; they preserved critical website features, too, ensuring every retro creation still worked in today’s world.
To top it off, the results were so impressive that the converted sites have already caught the attention of design aficionados; some have been nominated for multiple awards in the creative tech space. If you haven’t checked out these 90s revivals yet, you’re missing out on a vivid, tongue-in-cheek reminder of how web history can still teach us something about creativity (and fun).
A Dash of 90s Flair
Though the concept seemed simple, give each site a retro facelift, the actual process demanded a wild mix of creativity and engineering chops:
- Hardcore rule-based transformations that replaced advanced CSS with table layouts.
- Sophisticated AI methods that guessed how to style each webpage element, then spit it back out as a 90s creation.
- Hybrid approaches mingled code logic with AI suggestions, ensuring that any pixel or color recalled an era that championed raw HTML borders and blinking text.
Participants were free to choose any route. Some coded from scratch, others used AI libraries or generative text models. But one rule stood above all else: no matter how retro it looked, the final site had to remain functional by modern standards.
The People Behind the Magic
A hackathon is only as good as the crowd it attracts. This event brought out a surprising blend:
- Retro Nostalgics who fondly remember Geocities and lime-green hyperlinks.
- Modern Developers Are itching to see if their React or Next.js apps can seamlessly degrade into neon backgrounds and marquee text.
- AI Enthusiasts are excited to push machine learning past data analysis and into the world of design aesthetics.
They formed teams or jumped in solo, uploading code daily and sharing glimpses of their progress. On the hackathon platform, you’d see everything from entire single-page apps painstakingly reworked in an authentic 90s style to Chrome extensions that magically restyled websites as soon as you clicked a toggle.
Highlights from Notable Submissions
Key Feature: Plugged into OpenAI’s API for real-time advice on color palettes, fonts, and background textures, then rewrote each page with a single toggle. It even offered the option to share your new retro CSS with friends, like handing someone a time-travel pass to 1996.
Back90s
Developer: @abdibrokhim
Pitch: “No humans, just data scraping.” This team crawled the 41 pages of Raptors.dev, automatically reshaping them into table layouts and blinking links. Imagine a modern blog you visit daily suddenly filled with spinning “New!” GIFs, no coding is needed beyond the initial setup.
Neuro Nostalgia
Team:
Approach: A Next.js app that lets you choose from multiple 90s “themes,” like Windows 95 or Vaporwave. Hit counters, “Under Construction” banners, Netscape Now! badges, every nostalgic staple was neatly packaged and easy to swap in or out.
AI Retro Engine
Team: 404 Sense Not Found
Concept: A blend of AI models and curated style libraries. You’d feed it a modern site, and it spat back out a near-immediate retro version: one moment, your website’s all minimal whitespace. The next, it’s a riot of janky scrolling text and fluorescent borders.
RetroTheme-Extension
Team: Comet (@kriithik_, @lx8879, @kathirchelven)
What It Did: Instead of building standalone pages, it created a browser extension. Any visited site can display 90s-style color combos, frames, and garish fonts with one click. The extension also offered ways to customize the retro style, so you could ramp up the nostalgia or dial it back.
90s Retro Transformer
Team: I’m running solo (@kay_jay2391)
Angle: Minimalist but dedicated. Marquee text, clashing colors, GIF-based backgrounds, classic 90s. It was a no-fuss approach that was easy to replicate if you wanted to apply retro transformations on smaller websites.
VibeCheck
Team: RetroRythm (manyaval, cheerful_wolf_50790, lost_cognoscente__)
Judges With an Engineering Perspective
While the participants were certainly the main event, the judging panel provided the contest’s rigor. Their strong technical backgrounds helped them pick through each team’s code, searching for those that went beyond flashy visuals to deliver well-structured solutions:
- Nikita Letov – With a background in maintaining 99.97% uptime for large-scale banking platforms, he contributed a firm perspective on operational reliability. His expertise helped ensure that even the most radical 90s-style makeovers in the hackathon wouldn’t undermine the functional integrity of modern sites.
- Alexandr Hacicheant – Renowned for steering monolith-to-microservices transitions, he zeroed in on how participants structured their retro transformations. Teams that modularized their “time-machine” logic and separated concerns between legacy and modern codebases received particularly detailed feedback from him.
- Artiom Kuciuk – An authority on scalable cloud architectures and performance optimization, he explored whether 90s-inspired conversions remained efficient under real-world traffic. Projects that demonstrated minimal overhead while injecting neon colors and GIF animations impressed him the most.
- Rinat Garifullin – Known for heading complex front-end migrations, he assessed teams that replaced sleek CSS frameworks with table-based layouts and marquee tags. By balancing nostalgia with maintainability, participants aligned well with his focus on preserving core functionality through phased or partial migrations.
- Vadim Goncharov – A champion of holistic performance tuning and rapid response times, approached submissions with an eye toward load times and rendering efficiency. Whether participants used AI-driven tools or custom rule sets, Vadim’s performance lens ensured the hackathon’s throwback designs didn’t come at the cost of user experience.
Their critiques were never about style alone. They asked tough questions about how teams preserved site navigation, how CSS was swapped out without crippling the layout, or how AI integrated with standard HTML rendering. Winners combined a sense of fun with serious engineering discipline.
The Winners: A Look at the Top Projects
- 1st Place (45.7 points): Demonstrated full-scale transformations on multiple websites, showcasing impressive automation that triggered minimal manual tweaks.
- 2nd Place (42.3 points): Earned high praise for balancing the best of 90s kitsch (like spinning “@” icons and vintage error messages) with a user-friendly experience that let the site remain navigable.
- 3rd Place (40.3 points): Captured the exact look and feel of mid-90s web design complete with chunky table borders and swirling color backgrounds; while keeping modern features intact.
Each winning team received a portion of the prize pool and genuinely pleased the sponsors by bridging the past with the present.
Where Does It Go From Here?
Although the hackathon ended on December 16, the conversation continues. Some teams hope to refine their 90s plugins, opening them up so anyone can “time-travel” while browsing. Others plan to experiment with aesthetics from the early 2000s or add an optional “dial-up connection” simulation. Meanwhile, Hackathon Raptors is already plotting the next big challenge, emboldened by how fervently participants embraced this retro vibe.
In the end, Neuro Nostalgia was more than just a design exercise. It reminded every developer and designer who joined that constraint; such as long-obsolete CSS specs or blindingly bright color schemes, that can foster an unexpected surge of creativity. By merging old-school quirks with modern reliability, participants proved a hackathon can be technologically eye-opening and wonderfully playful.
If today’s hyper-polished websites leave you craving some retro kitsch, keep an eye out for the results of this challenge, because the 90s, it seems, never truly said goodbye. They’ve just been waiting in the wings, ready to light up our screens with another spinning “Under Construction” GIF.
Given the enthusiastic reception, Hackathon Raptors has hinted that Neuro Nostalgia might become an annual fixture, perhaps returning in 2025 with even more imaginative expansions or fresh spins on nostalgic design. It’s a reminder that technology doesn’t only move forward sometimes, it delights in circling back, embracing the past to spark fresh inspiration and fun.
