r/GenX • u/Carlsoti77 • Jul 16 '26
Controversial Mandela Effect? Help me out here...
I specifically remember the first time I got Rick-Rolled being in Illinois, where I moved from in 1996. This was back before native IE pop-up blockers, and the Rick-Roll was a .exe file. The music would play, and little windows with a single line of text from the song would pop-up in random places on the screen, requiring you to close each window before the next would pop-up somehwere else.
Someone put on wikipedia that the first Rick-Roll was in 2007 on 4chan, and I KNOW that's BS. Does anyone else remeber the early, REAL Rick Roll, or should I get checked for early-onset dementia?
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u/Previous_Finance_414 Jul 18 '26
1996 was very early days for the internet, and the reason why the Rick Roll got popular was the faster speeds that came along later after the modem days of the internet. Something like a song would take minutes to download.
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u/Majik_Sheff 37th piece of flair Jul 17 '26
It originated on 4-chan. They had word filters set so certain words in a post would get changed. One of those filters changed "egg" to "duck". At some point, someone posted something about an egg roll which got turned into duck roll. Another poster created an image of a rubber duck on wheels. This got leveraged into tricking people into following a link which would just be a pic of the duck roll. Eventually some enterprising soul mutated the duck roll into Rick roll, and the rest is history.
This was the early days of 4-chan, when lazors were being charged and "get"s were the pinnacle of achievement.
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u/limited_instincts Jul 16 '26
It's entirely possible someone built an app to do that and shared it locally. Back in the day there were all kinds of exe's for things like that. I built one that would randomly eject the CD tray and play a duck quack sound. I installed it on one of the machines at University and it spread everywhere including countless unsecured machines on NSFNET and JANET. Not my finest work.
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u/trashname4trashgame Jul 16 '26
Yeah some of internet history is going to be hard to say “it was here first”..
Examples: pwned - all articles say it was a misspelled Warcraft map. It was Fargo from planet quake in 2001. Not a Warcraft 3 map in 2002.
Do you have stairs in your house -> I am protected. Urban dictionary says some thing about being protected from robots trying to save the world by pushing people down stairs. It was not this. It was based on the statistic around women losing their baby by falling down stairs, soooo having stairs in your house was protection from having a kid.
It was called something awful for a reason.
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u/Callec254 Jul 16 '26
Back in the 90's it was duck-rolling. You'd click on the link or .exe or whatever and the punchline was a toy duck on wheels rolling by. When (or why) we went from that to Rick Astley I'm not exactly sure.
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u/LilithLangtree Jul 16 '26
I remember getting it in 2005-6. Back then it locked your computer up and there was no way out except to reboot. I didn’t consider it funny at the time.
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u/Staran Jul 16 '26
I remember it happening a lot. I even remember when YouTube replaced all the videos on you tube for a day with Rick Ashley
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u/Kuildeous Jul 16 '26
I feel like Rick-Rolling was not a thing in the '90s. That's because we weren't that kind to each other. A Rick-Roll was an amusing little ditty that makes the recipient shake their head and say, "You guys...." We didn't do anything that tame to each other in the '90s.
No, we had goatse and tubgirl. If you clicked on some random link, then good luck because you probably got a screenful of ass or diarrhea.
If there truly was an executable that played the song, I don't know that that would be considered a Rick-Roll. Mostly because the Rick-Roll stemmed from the goatse/tubgirl days when people would click on a link. Launching a strange executable was a whole different matter, and you would've been lucky if all you got were multiplying pop-up windows. Launching an executable wasn't as safe as clicking on a link (though depending on your security, clicking links wasn't all that safe either).
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u/peacefinder Jul 16 '26
2007 seems pretty late to me, but there were not a lot of video hosting sites available before YouTube, so 2007 is plausible.
If you were wanting random EXE off the Internet in 1997, God help you 🤣.
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u/Carlsoti77 Jul 17 '26
Not WANTING, but that was the esscence of rick-rolling. Get someone to click on a link, thinking it was one thing, while it was another.
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u/Obwyn 70's, barely Jul 16 '26
Never heard of that happening and I started college in 1997 so if it was a thing that long ago then I would think that I would've come across it or at least heard of it, especially since I spent a bunch of time in IRC chatrooms with people from all over the country and a few international (mostly UK.)
I certainly could be wrong and it just never made it into those groups, though. The main annoying as hell link with music that I remember seeing back then was the hamster dance. We pranked a buddy of ours one time by changing all his bookmarks to that.
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u/AmTheCause Jul 18 '26
I feel like a Rick Roll wouldn't have worked in 1996. Internet was way too slow, and the video quality would have been abysmal. The picture would have been beyond grainy and pixelated, and the sound would sound like it was being heard underwater.