Aapeli.com

» see aapeli.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Aapeli opened on 10 October 2002, built by a small Finnish outfit whose people had previously run a game portal called Pasimaailma under the ISP Saunalahti. The company was Apaja, later Apaja Online Entertainment Oy, later Playforia Inc. Asmo Halinen and Pasi Laaksonen wrote the code and Janne Matilainen drew everything, including a yellow star called Sparky who ended up on the logo and in the farewell note seventeen years later.

The games ran in the browser as Java applets, with some Flash alongside. Minigolf was the one that mattered, a top down course editor and a scoreboard that produced an entire player culture, formal enough that Finnish game studies researchers published a paper on it in 2017. There was also a side scrolling dogfight game, Lentokonepeli, that people are still writing open source reimplementations of on GitHub.

How big this got inside Finland is easy to understate from outside it. At its peak Aapeli sat among the country's ten largest websites by traffic. Taloustutkimus, running brand awareness studies on young Finns, found it second only to Google. Over five million registered accounts existed across the family of sites by 2011, in a country of about five and a half million people.

~ the dossier ~

~ minigolf ~

The reason Minigolf held people for fifteen years was that the courses were user made and the physics were consistent enough to be worth mastering. Players built holes and published them, and the arguments over which ones were fair ran for years. The whole thing was a Java applet in a browser window with a chat panel beside it.

~ sixteen languages, one of them Turkish ~

Outside Finland the same service ran as Playforia, and for a while as Playray. The language list was Finnish, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Spanish, Estonian, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Turkish, Polish and Russian.

So there was a Turkish Aapeli, and it left no mark here that I can find. Nobody in the internet cafes I remember was playing browser minigolf in 2003. Those machines were booked by the hour and the hour went to Counter-Strike. Turkish was on the language dropdown the way a lot of languages were on a lot of dropdowns in that decade.

~ greener pastures ~

Java in the browser died slowly and publicly. Every release of every browser through the 2010s made applets harder to reach, first behind a warning, then behind a click, then behind a setting, then not at all. A site whose whole catalog was applets did not have a strategy available.

The archive has aapeli.com serving a full 26,819 byte front page on 5 January 2019 and a 1,869 byte page a month later. The small one is still up. It says goodbye in Finnish, tells you that from 7 January Aapeli is moving to greener pastures, thanks everyone for the memories, and signs off from Sparky and the Aapeli crew. Underneath the note are store buttons for a bubble shooter, which was what the company had left to sell you.

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