Doctor Who Monster Invasion Time-Capsule Recreation
We rebuilt a dead 2011 fan-favourite website from the internet’s archives — cards, games, and all — and gave it webcam AR the original never had.
Built with
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind
- AR.js
- Ruffle
- Framer Motion
Services
- Web archaeology & recovery
- Full-stack build
- 3D / AR development
- Flash emulation & preservation
The outcome
Overview
Monster Invasion was a 2011 Doctor Who trading-card website (originally BBC Worldwide) that vanished when Flash died. We rebuilt it from the Wayback Machine — faithful to the original, rebuilt on a modern stack, and extended with the AR feature the 2011 web could only dream of.
The challenge
The original site was gone. Its interactive heart — a Flash card tracker and a set of Flash mini-games — was dead the day browsers dropped Flash, and the assets survived only as fragments scattered across web archives. Recreating it meant recovering the pieces, reconstructing a 164-card dataset from scratch, and making decade-old Flash run again in a modern browser.
The approach
We treated it like a restoration, not a rewrite: recover everything salvageable, rebuild the shell faithfully on a current stack, and only then modernise — bringing the dead interactive features back to life and adding AR on top.
We pulled the original site, assets and games out of the Wayback Machine, then rebuilt the shell on Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind, with Framer Motion for the interface. The look and copy were reconstructed from the recovered 2011 originals.
The card tracker runs on a hand-curated dataset of all 164 cards (plus the elusive "Infinite"), rebuilt from archived sources — every name, both stat sets, UNIT ratings and Fact Attacks — with 165 card scans behind it. It’s a full collection grid with detail modals and local "have it / need it" tracking, saved in the browser and shaped to sync to the cloud later.
The showpiece is a webcam AR viewer built with AR.js and GLB 3D models: hold a card’s marker to your camera and its monster renders in 3D on the card, with animation controls. It’s the feature the 2011 original never had.
Finally, we brought the games back. All six original Flash mini-games — plus the original 2011 Flash TARDIS app itself, long thought unarchived — now run in-browser through Ruffle, recovered and patched back to working order.
Want results like A lost site brought back — 164 cards, 7 playable Flash titles, AR?
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