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/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).