This year marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of the much maligned grandaddy of peer-to-peer music piracy, Napster, and the eighth of the music industry’s first terrible move.

Napster founder Shawn Fanning didn’t exactly invent music file sharing—before Napster, Mac people had Hotline, which, being Mac software, presumably had better fonts, a gorgeous interface, and seven rabid users. What made Napster more than piracy was its many millions of users and billions of downloads. Napster had a population of music fans communicating their preferences and acting as free distributors and archivists, as well as consumers.

It wasn’t the 72,000 copies of Enter Sandman that made Napster interesting. It was finding out that someone out there had digitized their beloved recording of the TV musical version of Around the World with Nellie Bly—some crazy wonderful someone. It’s amazing that Napster didn’t result in more marriages based on hopelessly obscure tastes. It was the only moment when we could tell what bits of 20th century music people care about today, or had a chance to let tomorrow care about them too.

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Ringu, the movie that kicked off the Japanese horror craze, scared me as much the third time I saw it as it did the first. It’s a moody, unsettling movie that still packs a punch and its signal image of Sadako, a creepy little girl with long dark hair and ashen skin, quickly entered the visual vernacular.

Monolith did a fair job of exploiting elements of J-Horror to create a genuinely creepy FPS experience with FEAR (2005). The developer understood that Ringu was successful because a) it used atmospheric, psychological horror to produce unease, and b) relied on fleeting images of horror, glimpsed as if in passing. This, coupled with the relative freshness of J-Horror and its stock images, made FEAR one of the few truly frightening PC games in recent memory.

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