I don't remember exactly when I bookmarked Peter Anspach's Evil Overlord List. It was the late '90s. IE4 was probably involved. I was still on dial-up, and I was absolutely not supposed to be tying up the phone line as long as I was.
What I do remember is laughing so hard at this list that I bookmarked it on the spot. And then I never wrote about it. Not once, in over twenty-five years.
That changes today.
What is this thing?
If you've never seen it, the Evil Overlord List is exactly what it sounds like: a list of things you'd do differently if you were an Evil Overlord, based on every dumb mistake that villains make in movies, books, and TV. Don't gloat before killing the hero. Don't build a self-destruct button. Don't turn into a snake. It never helps.
The list started in 1994 on a Star Trek mailing list, grew into a top 100 by 1996, and eventually overflowed into bonus "dungeon" pages for the entries that didn't quite make the cut. It's collaborative, pulled together from dozens of contributors across the early internet, and it's been sitting on the same URL with the same copyright notice since the Clinton administration.
A fossil that still loads
Here's the thing that gets me. The page is still there. Same URL. Same layout. Same HTML that looks like it was hand-coded in Notepad. No frameworks, no build tools, no cookie consent banners. Just text on a page, doing its job.
If you've been building websites as long as I have, you know how rare that is. I've personally broken more URLs than I can count. I've migrated CMSes, switched hosting providers, let domains lapse, redesigned things into oblivion. The internet is a machine for breaking links. But eviloverlord.com? Still there. Still serving content over HTTP, not even HTTPS. It doesn't care. It doesn't need to.
There's something almost defiant about a website that just refuses to change. No responsive redesign. No analytics pixel. No "subscribe to my newsletter" popup. It's a page from 1996 that loads in milliseconds and does exactly one thing well.
The jokes that aged and the jokes that didn't
Part of the fun of revisiting something this old is watching what held up. The core premise is timeless: villains in fiction still make most of these mistakes. The MCU alone has burned through half the list.
But then you hit the items that are perfectly sealed in amber. There's a reference to "IBM and Macintosh powerbooks" as the two computing platforms an Evil Overlord should make his systems incompatible with. There's the goatee joke that namechecks Generation X. And my personal favorite time capsule moment: the final entry about keeping subjects in a mindless trance by providing them with free unlimited internet access. In 1996 that was a punchline. Now it's a business model.
Two lists, one internet
There's a detail in the copyright notice that I never caught until recently. It turns out there was a second Evil Overlord-style list being compiled at the same time on a completely different corner of the internet: a FidoNet email echo. Both lists grew independently, both drew from the same well of sci-fi and fantasy tropes, and over time they cross-pollinated as people submitted entries to both without mentioning the other.
Peter Anspach's writeup of the whole situation is refreshingly honest. He doesn't claim sole ownership of the concept. He acknowledges the overlap, notes where items might have been submitted to both lists, and basically shrugs at the impossibility of untangling it all. It's a very pre-social-media way of handling a content dispute: two people made similar things, they talked about it over email, and they moved on.
Try imagining that happening on Twitter.
Why I'm finally writing this
I think I put off writing about the Evil Overlord List for so long because it felt too simple. It's a funny list on a website. What's there to say?
But the longer I work on the web, the more I appreciate the things that just last. Not because they were engineered for permanence, not because they had a content strategy or a migration plan. They lasted because someone put something on a server and never had a reason to take it down. That's it. That's the whole architecture.
I've been building websites since 2000. I've watched the web go through about fifteen cycles of reinvention in that time. And the Evil Overlord List has outlived every single trend I've chased. It's still there, still funny, still loading faster than most modern sites.
If you've never read it, go read it. It takes five minutes. And if you have a bookmark folder full of weird '90s pages you've been carrying around for decades, maybe go check on those too. You might be surprised how many are still out there, quietly doing their thing, waiting for someone to remember they exist.