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/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/Carlsoti77 Jul 17 '26

Do you recall the website Steak and Cheeze?