Cartoon Doll Emporium

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

~ the obit ~

Cartoon Doll Emporium went up out of New York in 2005, built by Evan Bailyn, and the whole thing ran on one activity: you dragged clothes onto a drawing of a person until the drawing looked right. The site aggregated dress-up games made by other people and commissioned its own, then filled the rest of the navigation with arcade games and picture galleries. Its audience was stated openly as girls between seven and thirteen. The slogan, as the fan wiki its own members kept still records it, was "A safe Heaven for the Imagination", spelled exactly that way.

It got very large. At its height the site was taking over seventy million visits a year, which in the middle 2000s put it well past most of the children's properties that had television budgets behind them. In 2009 it sold, for a figure the dress-up community has always put at five or six million dollars, and the buyer's name never really attached itself to the thing in public. The games kept arriving for a while after that.

The part members talk about now was called MyCDE. It was a profile, an avatar you dressed from a wardrobe, a set of rare items that circulated among users like currency, and a forum underneath. For a site whose front page was free games with no account, MyCDE was the reason an eleven year old stayed for three years and knew other members by their usernames.

I have no claim on any of this. The way I met Cartoon Doll Emporium is the way almost everyone meets it now, as a directory of preserved SWF files and a wiki written by people who were eleven when it mattered to them. That is a thin kind of acquaintance with something that was one of the largest children's sites on the web.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

Flash dress-up was a real economy between about 2004 and 2012, with its own makers, its own copying disputes, and a handful of sites at the top that everybody's younger sister had an account on. Stardoll took the fashion-celebrity route and raised money for it. DollDivine and Roiworld and Rinmaru built reputations on the quality of the individual dollmakers. Cartoon Doll Emporium took the aggregator position, which meant traffic first and authorship second.

That position aged badly. An aggregator of Flash games has no catalog it can carry to a new runtime, because the games belong to the people who made them, and the audience for browser dress-up was already draining toward phone apps by 2013. What held the site together after the traffic peaked was the community, and the community was the half that went first.

~ the day the logins stopped ~

In June 2015 members found they could no longer sign in to MyCDE. There was no notice, no closing post, no date announced beforehand. People logged in the way they had logged in the week before and the account was simply not there, and the pages they had built on top of those accounts stopped meaning anything. The games on the front of the site went on working for another four years, which made the whole property feel like a shop with the back rooms locked.

~ what the crawler saw ~

No announcement exists for the rest of it either, which leaves the capture index to settle the date. Through July 2019 the Wayback Machine is crawling cartoondollemporium.com every two or three days and pulling down the whole catalog with it, the anime games and hundreds of individual dolls. The run ends on 30 July 2019. Then the index goes empty for nine and a half months, which is not how an ailing site looks but how one that has stopped answering does.

When captures resume on 12 May 2020 the domain is answering every path with the same page of about fifteen hundred bytes, including paths that only ever existed inside MyCDE, and the old forum avatars come back as clean 404s. Two days later the home page itself is 1,664 bytes. Today cartoondollemporium.com still resolves, through Cloudflare, and Cloudflare returns error 522, which means it is dutifully forwarding requests to a machine that no longer picks up.

Adobe switched off Flash on 31 December 2020, eighteen months after the site stopped answering, so the games were due to stop working regardless. A good number of them survived that: Flashpoint and the Internet Archive hold playable copies, and the dollmakers that were worth keeping were rebuilt elsewhere by hand. The accounts did not survive. Nobody archives a login.

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