Welcome to the AIM Fight Archive

This website intends to bring back an interactive demo of the AIM Fight website, which was active from 2005-2013.

Select a fight version from the navigation dropdown above to get started.

Note that this archive uses a static result regardless of the screennames entered.

How AIM Fight Worked

For AOL's official explanation, see What is AIM Fight?

To quote the old Wikipedia page, AIM Fight was a web app designed to compare the popularity of two AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) screen names. It was not an official AOL product, but was a side project of 2 developers at the company.

Several news articles from the time suggest it was released in July 2005.

To "fight," two screen names are entered into the Web page and then each screen name was run through an algorithm that runs through the buddy lists of everybody signed on at that particular moment. The algorithm returns a score that represents the sum of the number of people who have those screen names listed as a buddy out to the third degree. As explained on the AIM Fight Web page, the score cannot increase by adding people to that user's buddy list, but rather having other people add the user to their buddy list. Depending on how well-connected these people are, the increase in the score can vary.

Although the score represents a numerical sum of the people who have that screen name listed as a buddy and are currently signed on, the help page later states that the actual score was relative to how many people are connected to AIM. Although the term rank usually assumes that each person has a unique position, multiple users can share the same AIM Fight rank, including rank 1.

There were several versions or styles of AIM Fight, usually sponsored to advertise an upcoming movie or video game. This site may not have every version, just what has been found so far (mainly from Archive.org). If you have a copy of a swf that's not on here, please submit a pull request on GitHub.

More Info

To read more details about AIM Fight, such as an API info, decompiled flash and action script assets, visit the aimfight-archive GitHub repo.