I believe fan sites like Habbox will outlive Habbo itself.” Is there still a future for Habbo? “I think there is – for a few more years,” Jarkie says. It’s nice to go back there to remind yourself of a time when you were finding yourself,” says Hilde Van Den Bulck, a professor of communication at Drexel University. “Websites such as Habbo can act as anchor points, especially in times where everything is moving so quickly and keeps changing.
Our parents might have looked through photo albums or home videos, but millennials like Katie and Sam are logging back onto their MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) accounts to re-immerse themselves in a platform that once offered so many hours of escapism. The games, roleplays and discussion rooms seem to have all but vanished, aside from a handful of sparsely populated ones.”Īs the internet grows older, the first generation to log online en masse are now considering how our younger selves are being archived. “You used to have to wait in a queue to get online – now I see hardly any people.
Seeing these things from the past is a comforting trip, but they have also been moved to a very unfamiliar place.”įor Sam, the changing audience means Habbo will always feel like a ghost town to older users, many of whom made life-changing friendships on the platform. “All the pictures I made with the old camera don’t seem to exist anymore. When I visit now, my pet dog and all the texts on my sticky notes remain untouched.” This nostalgia, however, is tinged with the reality of a digital space that has only been partly preserved. Katie, 27, also uses Habbo as a portal to the past. My favourite room was a meditation studio where a man in a face mask sat on a tree trunk, simply eating ice cream cones from a fridge. Nothing was the same, of course, but it still surprised me how easily I slipped back into the cosy routine of chatroom hopping. I desperately searched for the old diner I used to visit and typed swear words just to see “bobba” (the filter word that censored profanity) appear. While I couldn’t remember the login details to my original account, the process of creating a pixelated me (complete with blonde bunches) and wandering the soothingly square rooms chatting to strangers lulled me into a swimmy state of nostalgia.
When I logged back in for the purposes of this article, I felt like I was travelling back in time. Other players left following a merge of all the different hotel servers into one, which messed up the Habbo economies (the ice cream machines’ values fell dramatically) and hurt certain communities.ĭespite everything, Habbo Hotel is still going and has outlived more modern social networking sites such as Vine and Google Plus. While live chat eventually returned, the damage was done – its user base had started abandoning Habbo.ĭespite everything, Habbo Hotel is still going and has outlived more modern social networking sites such as Vine and Google Plus. The following day, Sulake issued a site-wide mute on its chat function, which led to hundreds of users protesting within the hotel lobby, a popular gathering space for those just logging in. In 2012, a Channel 4 investigation found that pedophiles were regularly using Habbo to engage children in sexual conversations. I cried for a week, and so did my dad (all that furni had to be bought with real money).įor most Habbo fans, it was a site-wide mute (or “ The Great Mute” as it’s known within the fandom) that changed everything. The next time I logged into my account, my furni was gone and XxGoldilocksxX modelling agency had fallen into administration. My Habbo journey came to an abrupt end in 2006, when a male avatar with a buzzcut asked me what my pet’s name was. He occasionally gave me a palm tree or pastel pink dining chair. It was a bit much, to be honest, but I didn’t ask any questions. I’d visit his overcrowded rooms to gawp at his golden statues, golden eggs and gold-rimmed jacuzzi. I was 13 and had a crush on my real life neighbour, who was the only other person I knew that played it. I first played Habbo in 2004 and used the site to set up my own modelling agency, which other players would sign-up to. On its 20th anniversary, however, Habbo Hotel offers something very different to its dwindling user base – a relic of early internet culture that conjures up all the nostalgia of being online in the first flush of the 21st century.
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