Dizzywood

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 2007 i was twenty-three and at university in Ankara. Dizzywood was a Flash world built in San Francisco for children between eight and fourteen, and the age gap there is not a small one. This is a grave for something that was never going to be mine, written because the way it closed is worth writing down.

Rocket Paper Scissors launched it into public beta in november 2007 with money from Charles River Ventures and from Shelby Bonnie, who co-founded CNET. The pitch was Club Penguin with a plot. Kids made an avatar, got dropped into a landscape that ran from jungle to beach with a town floating above it, and were handed a running story about an antagonist called Emperor Withering whose henchmen kept breaking things. The daily activities had you growing a plant or cleaning up pollution that Withering's people had left behind.

It was free with a paid tier, Silver and Gold Explorer, which bought you access to certain missions and a house with rooms to decorate. Inside its first year it was reporting more than four hundred thousand monthly visitors, almost all of them in the United States and other english-speaking countries. For a studio of that size in that year, those were good numbers and everyone said so.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day it died ~

On 17 december 2010 the company posted the notice. It is worth quoting because it does not do any of the things these notices usually do. It does not thank you for the journey and it does not say the team is moving on to exciting new opportunities. It says: when we started the game over three years ago, we weren't quite sure what to expect and we were overwhelmed with the positive response. Then it says that although Dizzywood became popular quickly, it has been challenging to grow as a business.

Then the part that makes this one different. Rocket Paper Scissors had already gone and found another kids' world, SecretBuilders, and worked out an arrangement in advance. Your Dizzywood login would open a door at SecretBuilders, into an area built specifically for Dizzywood players, with items waiting. The post promised a farewell event and a fortnight of updates answering questions, and told Gold Explorers they would be contacted individually about their money.

~ what got buried with it ~

The world went down on 31 december 2010, though the american servers seem to have stayed reachable until 12 january. Everything a child had made in three years went with it, the avatar and the decorated house included. That is standard for the category and it never stops being the cruel part, because the audience is precisely the group that has not yet learned that anything on a screen can be switched off by an adult in another country.

The promised follow-up posts do not appear in the archive. The notice went up, the world closed, and nothing was written in between. Whether the farewell event happened is not recorded anywhere i can find, which is its own small piece of evidence about how much runway was left in that office.

~ the long tail ~

dizzywood.com resolves today. It is not the company. It is a fan project called Dizzywood Rediscovered, run off a Discord, trying to rebuild the lost world out of memory and whatever assets people kept. The description on its front page is more detailed about the mini-games than the Wikipedia article is, because the people writing it were children at the time and still remember the Mechano-Drill 9000 by name.

SecretBuilders, the site that agreed to take everybody in, is gone too. Its domain answers today with an indonesian-language calculator app, which is what happens to a kids' world when nobody renews the story and somebody renews the registration. The exit door that made this closure unusually decent has since shut behind everyone who walked through it. What remains of Dizzywood is a Discord server and an unfinished reconstruction by adults who were children when it shut, which is roughly what happens to every world of this kind about fifteen years after the last login.

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