Cybertown

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

~ the eulogy ~

cybertown launched on april 19 1995 as colony city, a showcase project for blaxxun interactive's vrml platform. vrml was the virtual reality modeling language, an attempt to make 3d scenes a first-class object on the web the same way html had made hypertext a first-class object. by 1996 the site had renamed itself cybertown, and by 1999 it had merged with a portal of the same name and grown to a few thousand active citizens who built their own homes inside its virtual colonies.

the platform was a mix of chat room and home-building game. you earned a virtual currency called citycash by holding civic jobs, then spent it on a better apartment and on vrml objects other citizens had built and listed in the marketplace. you walked your avatar through public plazas and attended weddings and town meetings as a 3d figure, all of it running through a 1997-era browser plugin. blaxxun sold the property to integrated virtual networks in 2002, after the dot-com bust had quietly killed the original vrml-as-the-future thesis. the new owner ran it as a much smaller community service until membership decay caught up. the servers were powered off in february 2012.

i missed cybertown by a year or two on the dial-up side. by the time i was online in 1998, the vrml plugin layer was already a slow novelty on a 33.6k modem in ankara, and i was not going to download a chunky 3d browser extension to walk an avatar around a virtual plaza. cybertown was the kind of product that ran on lan-party broadband eight years before broadband had reached me. the screenshots in old web galleries today are recognizable from the same lineage that produced the palace and worlds chat, but i never logged in.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

vrml had a real moment in 1996 and 1997 when the industry talked about it as the next layer of the web. netscape shipped a vrml plugin in its enterprise build while silicon graphics evangelized the standard. blaxxun was the german company that built the most credible vrml multi-user server, and cybertown was its visible reference deployment. when vrml lost the standards-and-investment race to flash and then to the native plugin ecosystem that flash bootstrapped, the entire vision evaporated, and cybertown became a 3d community without a 3d-web future around it.

~ the long tail ~

former cybertown residents launched a fan revival in 2019 using archived materials and recovered user data. cybertownrevival.com is still up at the time of writing. the broader vrml standard never died on paper either; x3d still exists as its iso descendant. but the lived-in 3d-community version of the web that cybertown promised did not come back, and the second-life and decentraland-era attempts that arrived later inherited a different set of assumptions about what 3d on the internet was for.

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