Bin Weevils

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

~ the goodbye ~

bin weevils belonged to british children, and i was neither. it sits in the part of internet history i can read about but never lived, the wrong age and the wrong country at once. in 2007 i was finishing university in ankara and nowhere near a virtual world about weevils living in a bin. so this one is reconstruction, not memory.

what it was, plainly. you controlled a little weevil in a cartoon world built out of garbage-themed places, a dirt valley and a flea manor and the rest. you customized your weevil and decorated a nest, earning in-world currency called mulch and dosh through minigames like weevil's wheels. it had the same shape as club penguin, right down to a secret-agent side quest, which is a fair comparison since both were kid MMOs from the same window.

in britain it was genuinely big. it climbed to one of the most visited virtual worlds in the uk and passed twenty million registered users by 2013. in november 2011 it took the bafta kids' vote for best website, beating out disney and nickelodeon, which for a small studio's weevil game was a real result.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was built on ~

bin weevils grew into a whole brand around the game, with magazines and a tesco presence, the usual kids-property build-out. but the core was always a website that ran on adobe flash, and that was the thing that dated underneath it. the studio pushed out apps like weevil world to move off the browser, but the app releases never pulled the crowd across the way the website once had.

there were also a couple of data breaches along the way, one around 2014 and another in 2017, which did not help a service that depended on parents trusting it. back then. the player base had already been thinning since about 2016 as flash games fell out of favor everywhere.

~ the day it died ~

the ending was mechanical more than dramatic. adobe had announced flash's end for december 2020, and browsers stopped running it in january 2021, which took out an enormous number of games built on it at the same moment. bin weevils was one of them. its publisher, 55 pixels, filed for voluntary liquidation in december 2020, so there was not even a company left to attempt a port.

the game ceased operating on january 12 2021, and the website went offline on the sixteenth. fans did what fans do and stood up an unofficial private server, bin weevils rewritten, to keep a version of the bin running. the original is gone, but the reconstruction has held on, which is more than most flash-era kids' worlds got.

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