Be-Bratz.com

» see be-bratz.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

MGA Entertainment announced Be-Bratz.com in beta on 2 August 2007, and the Internet Archive has it serving a login screen two weeks later. The pitch was ordinary for the period: girls aged six and up got a virtual character, a page to decorate, a salon and a game zone that paid out points. Chat was moderated, and live chat was promised for later that year. What made it unusual was the door.

You could not sign up. To get in you bought one of three new Bratz fashion dolls at $29.99, and each one came with a necklace that was also a USB key. Plug the necklace into a computer and the world opened, with your character already tied to the doll you had bought. It was a dongle, the copy-protection hardware that software companies had mostly abandoned by then as too hostile to customers, reissued as jewelry for eight-year-olds.

The site itself was a Flash front end over an ASP.NET backend, with a footer linking out to the rest of MGA's catalog: bratzpetz.com, bratzlilangelz.com, yummi-land.com, rescue-pets.com, myepets.com. Every doll line had a website and every website wanted an account. Be-Bratz was the one where the account came in the box.

~ the case file ~

~ the plastic key ~

The design solved a real problem and created a worse one. MGA could prove every member had bought a doll, which made the virtual world a sales channel rather than a cost center, and it gave parents something concrete to point at: you own this, it came with the toy. The problem is that the necklace was only a key as long as somebody kept the lock. A server that checks what your USB stick says is a server that has to exist.

The audience was six to twelve and I was twenty-three, so none of this came anywhere near me. The engineering is what I recognize. Anyone who has argued about licensing hardware knows the shape of the bet MGA made here. The necklace cost pennies to stamp out and shipped once; the servers it unlocked cost money every month for as long as a single child was still logging in.

~ what the redirect says ~

On 11 December 2011 the site still answers normally, member login and FAQ intact. By 17 February 2012 that same address hands back a redirect to www.bratz.com, the toy brand's marketing page, where the only thing on offer is a signup form for Bratz news. MGA had spent the intervening years fighting Mattel in court over who owned the dolls, winning on appeal in 2010 after losing badly in 2008, and the Bratz that came out of that fight was a smaller business with fewer side projects. The world closed, the brand kept the domain, and somewhere in a lot of drawers the necklaces are still plugged into nothing.

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