not just by special interest groups but by the general public the world over. In the next section, we look at the earliest examples of work that truly deserves the label WebAL.

4 The 1990s: Early WebAL Section: Choose Top of page Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Review Scope and Method... 3 The Precursors to WebAL 4 The 1990s: Early WebAL << 5 The 2000s: WebAL Develo... 6 The 2010s: Current WebA... 7 Emerging Themes and Fut... 8 Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes References CITING ARTICLES One of the first examples of WebAL was Michael Witbrock and Scott Neil-Reilly's evolutionary art project International Interactive Genetic Art 1 (IIGA1), developed in 1994, along with the subsequent IIGA2 system developed by John Mount [134].10 In this work, the fitness of images generated by geneticand virtual worlds (a recurring theme that has come up in various of the projects already discussed). A related web-based system, Verbarium, was also introduced in 1999, and allowed users to create shapes and forms in real time using the same idea of a text-to-form encoding and an online interactive text editor [112, 113]. In addition to arts projects, the mid-1990s saw the birth of many WebAL-related projects in the fields of computer games and animation. 1996 saw the release of the ALife focused game Creatures, designed by Steve Grand.21 The characters in the game were digital life forms, called Norns, that were capable of lifetime learning, and possessed a physiology, drives, and communication abilities, all of which could evolve over generations. Although the first version of the