Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, Sweeet is (kinda) back!

Way back in 1997, I can’t remember how or where (probably a pirated copy!), but I saw my very first episodes of South Park. I was pretty much hooked on the show, and like anyone who discovers a new show, I started looking online for more info!

This was about a year before Google was a thing, so through the use of Yahoo or Lycos I found a bunch of fan sites online. Among these sites there were some 3D renders of the boys done by a guy named Ian Dale. I thought his pictures were great – simple, but full of emotion! I’d been dabbling with 3D modeling since the late 80s and thought it might be cool to see if I could make some 3D South Park pictures as well.

So I started experimenting with making the SP characters in 3D. My models were pretty basic and really lacked a lot, but luckily for me the show was all about a rough and crude look so my 3D stuff wasn’t hated – in fact people seemed to like them!

I started posting my pics online (remember this was before Instagram and Tik Tok!) around the place and people started to notice them. I was hosting the pictures on my personal site on my ISP and the traffic to site got to the point where I was asked to politely “get off” the server, which is what lead to me seeing if I could create myself a website with a domain name and hosted by a 3rd party hosting provider.

So firstly I had to find a name for my site. “Sweet” was pretty commonly said in the show so I thought that it would be a cool name. Unfortunately the domain was already taken so the next best thing was to add an extra ‘E’ and so sweeet.com was born!

I’m not sure of the exact day I opened the site, but an early FAQ I created mentioned that I started creating images on 11 April 1998 so it would have been around this time. At the time of writing this, that’s just over 26 years ago!

Once the site was up and running it was then a matter of getting some traffic. Sticking my URL on the images I was releasing was bringing some traffic, but nothing too impressive. At the time the two biggest SP fan sites online were Mr Hat’s Hellhole and Beef-Cake.

Luckily for me Mr Hat’s Hellhole was running an art competition, so I figured I could enter this (and hopefully win!) and gain a bit of free PR for my new site. So I finished off a picture (see the picture just above) and sent it in!

Shortly afterwards I won the art competition (I can’t remember the prize, but do remember getting it in the mail). My winning picture was posted to the Hellhole and I started getting more traffic to the site. Fun fact: I ended up making a logo for Mr Hat’s Hellhole (the one shown here).

Around about the same time as winning this art competition I created a Beef-Cake picture and sent it through to Elvis and Taison at beef-cake.com which also got me a heap of exposure!

Something that a lot of people probably don’t remember is that I was also releasing some pictures in what I termed “Real™3D” (I know, such an original name!). These picture just required you to look at them cross-eyed until the 2 pictured merged into one and you saw the picture in full three dimensions. I liked them, but a lot of people had trouble seeing them to the point that I made less and less of them and then stopped them altogether.

Sweeet.com went through multiple redesigns over it’s lifespan, sometimes by choice, other times by necessity. There were a couple times when I had lost the site completely due to issues with the host at the time. I was never particularly careful to back everything up, so lost a bunch of images over the years as well.

Around February 2001 I switched the site my favourite of all the designs I ever made (featuring Professor Sweeet) and to pay homage to that layout I’ve repurposed it to kinda work on this one! No more HTML tables to be found, just some dodgy CSS work by me! 🙂

Notable Sweeet.com things

My Wedding – On 21 November 1998 I got married. I documented it a bit on the site, and did have a little page set up. I’m pretty sure no one was interested at the time, but it was an important one for me!

My Daughter – And another life event which I also documented on the site a bit, the birth of my first child on October 22, 1999. That little girl is turning 25 this year! Sheesh, how old does that make me?

South Park Forum – In the early days (October 1999) I had a web forum on Sweeet called sweeet.talk. At some point in time I started the South Park Forum to replace this. The idea was to have a forum that wasn’t affiliated with any one particular site and a good place for everyone from all the fansites out there to use. At the time of making the forum Timmy had been introduced as a new character to the show, so I registered gotimmygo.com and set the site up there. You can see the internet archive’s earliest capture here.

Sweeet Gear – Like any site with a decent following, I attempted to cash in on the popularity! So through the magic of Cafepress I set up some gear with my Professor Sweeet logo on them. Just now I was shocked to see they’re still available! Did I make any money from this? That’s a good question! Discovering that my stuff was still on sale, I managed to log back into Cafepress and it appears that in the 23 years since I put the Sweeet gear up for sale, I have made $14.64 revenue! Cafepress has a minimum payment amount of $25, so I’ve never actually received that money! lol!

eSweeet email – I was forever having people asking if they could have a sweeet email address, so in the end signed up for some provider that allowed you to use your own domains to provide email addresses. I wanted to keep the “exclusiveness” (lol) of a sweeet.com email address, so I registered eSweeet.com – unfortunately when I shut down Sweeet, I also shut down eSweeet emails.

World Domination – On the 2nd November, 1998 I thought it would be funny to see where my wallpapers were ending up around the world. I asked that people email through with details of where the wallpapers were being used. It was amazing (at the time) to see some of the places they were being used (like the Center for Disease Control in the USA, NASA, etc). I ended up with a list of hundreds and hundred of places! Here’s a snapshot of the World Domination page from about a month after starting it.

Sweeet Greets – This was just a little site that used a script that allowed you to send greeting cards to your friends. Using my 3D images, I created some funny card-like greetings for this. It was purely for fun and probably not that popular!

Picture Database – With Sweeet’s collection of images growing to quite a large number, editing the website by hand became a bit inefficient. I decided I needed something in the back end. Things like WordPress didn’t exist yet, and content management scripts were just starting to appear. I ended up finding a decent online database script which I was able to modify to allow me to add new images quickly which also added the ability for people to rate my images. I actually wish I had something these days that would offer the same features, but a simple gallery plugin will have to do!

Stomped.com – Some time in 2000, due to the success of Sweeet I was hired by Stomped.com (a huge gaming site/network at the time) to work on their webpages and to bring across Sweeet. It was great and it was my original experience in working remotely/WFH well before it became a requirement during COVID! Unfortunately the internet advertising bubble burst in 2001, and advertising dollars dried up and so Stomped had to let me go (and just about everyone else I think).

What now?

In recent years I’ve been a bit more active when it comes to 3D stuff. I’ve ventured out into other fandoms and I’m always looking for the “next big show” to try and jump on the bandwagon (lol!). I’m currently doing a lot of Rick and Morty images, but also revisiting my old South Park models. You’ll see all my stuff on my Instagram account, but if there’s anything that’s South Park related, I’ll be sure to add it here!

One thing that going back through all of this has done has really made me miss a bunch of the people I befriended online due to South Park. If any one from the early days of the fandom manages to stumble across this, I’d really appreciate if you were to make contact. Instagram is probably the easiest method!

Apologies for how badly this is written. I was jotting things down as I was remembering things, so it tends to jump around a bit!