And the visualizations. It's impossible to forget the visualizations.

I can clearly remember, with an astonishing vividness, sitting at the family computer desk listening to the Mechwarrior 2 soundtrack with a Winamp visualization of an X-Wing barreling down an endless tunnel of blackness outlined by pulsing, wispy neurons of light, on its way to the center of some impossibly massive Death Star, a trip to an unreachable and unimaginably radiant power core. I remember watching—enraptured—for what seems like it must have been hours on end, knowing there was nothing coming, no end, but unable to stop fantasizing.

I was a pretty weird kid.

But beyond the skins, beyond the visualizations, the flashing lights and llama's whipped ass, there was the radio. Good old fashioned Shoutcast radio. A playlist curated not by an algorithm, but by some flesh-and-blood lunatic with ostensibly discerning and eclectic tastes. Some crazy streaming devotee sitting in an unfinished basement, no doubt dreaming of the pirate radio station he'd never gotten around to building. No, this would have to be good enough.

And so when I was sitting in my parents' living room on New Years Eve 2004, playing Half-Life 2: Deathmatch on the brand new e-Machines PC we'd gotten for Christmas, Winamp was there too. In the background, behind the full-screen glory of toilets slung from gravity guns, Winamp sang me a hooky "la da da la di da da da" that I still whistle to myself all these years later. God only knows what anonymous Shoutcast DJ queued it up, but the song and the snapshot memory have stuck with me ever since. Together they've won Winamp a place in my heart.

Goodnight sweet prince.

You can download a last (official!) copy of Winamp here, hope against all hope that Winamp might make it through the day here, and share your own dramatic, over-written Winamp memories below. Please do. Put me to shame.

Thanks to @silvi0L0russo for alerting me to that skins video