We got in contact with Matt Furie on his official Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/c/mattfurie/posts
and had a conversation with him in the main chat about his older artwork. We asked him about the art we found, and he responded that it’s an old piece created back in 2002.
We take our source from https://web.archive.org
to check the history of the website that have been officially indexed or recorded by the web.
The way it works is too details for now, but essentially, everything uploaded under a
specific domain is recorded over the years.
From the image shown, we searched for the earliest indexed site of
http://www.mattfurie.com
and found it to be from April 18, 2004.
Originally, the main page of the website displayed a random image every time the page was loaded.
However, there is a thumbnail menu link
here
that shows all the images in order.
The order of the images is sorted by ID number,
with lower ID numbers indicating that the image was uploaded earlier than those with higher ID numbers.
From here, you can see that the image has an ID number of 1, which means it is the earliest artwork ever uploaded to his website. Link here.
This is proof of when the domain name mattfurie.com was first registered (link). It shows that the domain was registered on March 10, 2004, which is about one month before the website was archived. This proves that the website was archived from its first-ever version for mattfurie.com.