Laura Flight

In Bearville, the virtual world for Build-A-Bear, there was a coffee shop. You could either get a table and order virtual snacks, or you could play the waiter minigame and take people’s orders. It was so much fun to bring people their food that there were always more people trying to work than there were ordering, and when you sat down at a table, multiple employees would race to you, fighting to earn their scant amount of virtual coins.

My best friend and I both had landlines in the cordless bar style, where you’d have four different phones standing in their little recharging stations all around the house. One would be the Head Honcho station with a built-in answering machine. It was a really nice upgrade from the banana-shaped phone with the curly cord that always got tangled. You could take the bar phone with you anywhere in the house, so long as you remembered to put it back on the charger before it died and became lost for all eternity. These even had “Caller ID”, so you could tell who was calling before revealing you were a potential customer for a brand new top-of-the-line vacuum cleaner. This meant kids like me could be awarded the high honor of being allowed to sometimes answer the phone, whereas my friends without this new technology had to just wait for the phone to stop ringing every time.

In Club Penguin, there’s a nightclub that has a disco ball and a dance floor with color-changing tiles. The closest real life equivalents I can find are roller rinks, and I’ve never lived close enough to one to treat it as a social space and not just a place where the cool kids have birthday parties and old people gather to effortlessly glide around in synchronized circles like a school of retro fish.

The thing about getting your first phone is that you’re usually not the first kid in your friend group to have one. If you are, who are you going to text? Your mom?

There was a very brief period of time in my childhood where we had both a set of walkie-talkies and an actual reason to use walkie-talkies. Unfortunately, using them to reach someone two rooms away just isn’t the same. The allure never left, though. It’s like a phone call, but the other person will only be bothered by you if they’ve already turned theirs on and tuned to the same channel, waiting.

My best friend and I sometimes called each other on our landline phones and played Bearville together. One hand holding the phone, the other on the mouse. There weren’t a lot of ways for us to communicate back then. We tried snail mail, but we had to ask our parents for stamps and help addressing the envelopes, and we learned the hard way that if you put a marble-sized rubber animal in an envelope, you have to add extra stamps or else the post office will return it to the sender. We also tried Zoobuh! Safe E-mail for Kids, but my mom had it set so that she had to manually approve everything before it could go into my inbox, which meant I couldn’t just refresh to see if I had mail. I had to go ask my mom every time.

There was one memorable moment when my mom said yes to impulsively buying me merch for a virtual world, and it was in the form of a stuffed animal purple puffle for Club Penguin. It just so happens that 

    1. the novelty of this creature wore off almost immediately because it was so ugly, and 

    2. the members-only feature most prominent to me was access to human-style wigs for your bald little penguin, which I was ethically against because they were penguins, not humans. 

    The purple puffle was the one who tore up the nightclub dance floor, though.

I had a neighbor who wasn’t allowed a phone or email, so the only method she had to communicate with her boyfriend was via safe-chat approved post-it-notes on the bulletin board in her virtual house in Moshi Monsters. I didn’t know if she knew him in real life, so this was probably for the best.

Pixie Hollow was the virtual world for the 2008 Tinkerbell movie series. In your home, tucked away inside a sunflower or an old teapot, you were free to place your furniture wherever you wanted, regardless of walls or gravity. I used this to create an abstract depiction of a monster with a hollow stomach, which I then became trapped inside. The person I was playing with tossed a rope in after me. I asked her to “tie a note”. There was a pause. “A knot?” she asked. “Yeah,” I responded. I wondered if I was too young to be playing this game. Maybe she wondered if she was too old for it, or if English was my second language.

In 2013, Zoobuh went to court to try and prevent their clients from being flooded with a ridiculous amount of spam emails for florists and porn sites. They still seem to own the zoobuh.com website now, but when I try to go there, nothing happens.

When some kids in the group already have phones, you start to feel a distinction between those who do and those who don’t. Those who are stuck watching over shoulders, asking if they can have a turn at Temple Run, and those learning for the first time why you really do need to set a phone password. When you finally do get a phone, do you leave your old brethren in the dust, getting yourself added to the group chat and speaking in a language of convoluted in-jokes too advanced for their mortal understanding? Or do you still sit with them and resist the urge to look up the answer to the question they’ve been arguing about for twenty minutes? If you’re the last to get a phone, will they have already gotten used to talking without you? Your parents are focused on not getting you one while you’re too young, but the longer they wait, the longer you’re on the outskirts.

There’s an island in Poptropica that lets you travel through time and see an older version of yourself. The futuristic world is colored in optimistic sky blues and grass greens with shiny glass elevators that gently levitate you upstairs. Every change you make to your character is instantly reflected in the older version, meaning there is always a timeline where you stopped playing right then and there, and no changes to your outfit were ever made again. Since the original game shut down with Adobe Flash and came back different, that timeline has now progressed to the end for everyone. I don’t remember what my future self looks like now.

The idea of giving someone your cellphone number and then saying “And here’s a second number in case you want to just call my house!” sounds ridiculous nowadays, but sometimes I really do want to just call their house. What if they’re in class or at work, and they’re not the type to put it on Do Not Disturb? Conversely, what if they’re sleeping with Do Not Disturb on and don’t have it set for me to call three times for emergencies and it’s very important that I cause the loud box in their kitchen to start screeching its dated ringtone? Sometimes I want to leave a “Happy Birthday!” message for them to come home to, not to give them a heart attack during their lunch break.

Barbiegirls.com, the virtual world designed by Barbie, only lasted from 2007-2011. While a lot of these games had some form of VIP membership, Barbiegirl.com’s was notable in that if your subscription expired, you didn’t just lose access to the members only items. Your entire account would be deleted. It was literally extortion.

Build-a-bear Workshop has electronic buttons that let you record your own sound to put in the paw of your bear. My best friend had the brilliant idea for us to record each other’s sounds in the bathroom and surprise each other. I thought this was an excellent opportunity to play a hilarious prank on her, so I recorded my very best velociraptor screeches onto hers. When we got back, I discovered she’d recorded a heartfelt poem onto mine. I still think the velociraptor noises were pretty awesome, but I can only hope she appreciated my recording as much as I did hers.

Moshi Monsters launched in 2007 and kept running all the way until 2019, when they shut down the servers a year before Adobe Flash Player ended support in 2020.

Club Penguin was born in 2005 and ran until Disney shut it down in 2017, citing declining popularity as the reason. The same day Club Penguin shut down, its sequel Club Penguin Island was born. It only survived until late 2018. Wikipedia says it lacked features for non-subscribers.

Bearville opened in 2007 and permanently shut down in 2015.

There are so many stories where friends lucky enough to live near one another use walkie-talkies to converse in secret, whenever they want. In my quest to live this fantasy, I’ve spent many nights window-shopping for these beautiful devices. You still need someone else to talk to, though, and oddly enough, everyone I’ve asked has said “Why not just call on the phone?” And then we don’t call on the phone either.

Pixie Hollow ran from 2008 to 2013. The explanation they gave for shutting it down was sketchy at best. You could tell it was going downhill long before they announced it, though, because they kept putting more and more things behind the membership paywall. Every virtual world that went down before Adobe Flash followed this pattern, and each time I saw it, it was like watching a looming storm on the horizon.

One time, my best friend gave me a stuffed-animal raccoon she’d made from a sewing kit that had pre-punched the holes. It had a little pocket on its stomach that you could put things in. I was so enamored with it that I made her a matching cat, also with a pocket. She came up with the idea that they were magically linked, and if we put something in one pocket it would come out the other. I still have mine. I don’t know if she still has hers. Every once in a while, I look up her Facebook account and find a picture where I can still recognize her face.

Not every Flash game died in 2019. Some, such as Webkinz and Animal Jam, switched to a downloadable format. They’re still active, although huge swaths of the code are now outdated and unchangeable. They’ve both made new versions of their games that they have more freedom to work with. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before they shut down the ‘classic’ games. Maybe everything is a matter of time.

For every virtual world that died, there is a dedicated cluster of fans working to recreate it. There is a Pixie Hollow: Rewritten. There is a Bearville rewritten. There is a Moshi Monsters Online. There are at least three different fully playable Club Penguin remakes. Some of them prioritize archival of the game they remember, while others try new seasonal events and areas, making the game their own. None of them can legally profit off their work, but they’re doing it anyways. Just because they want to. Just because they love it.

Maybe someday these, too, will die. Maybe I will never work up the nerve to send my old friend a picture of the little raccoon she made me flipping pancakes on the stove. But it always will have happened, and nothing can change that.

---