Ekoloko

» see ekoloko.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The story inside the game was that a planet called Hetra had been poisoned by a character named Babylon Smog and his family, so the inhabitants built a ship called the Ararat and went looking for somewhere clean. They landed on Ekoloko. Smog sent his son Goliath after them in a ship called the Exploit. Everything a player did on the site was framed as helping the settlers rebuild. In practice that meant collecting recycling and running errands between the permanent residents.

It was made by two people with no background in children's media. In February 2008 Gal Darom, who had been chief operating officer at the VoIP company Delta Three, and Guy Spira, who had run the Max Brenner chocolate chain, registered a company called Virtual Tweens. During development the game was called Stardust. It went live in October 2008, written in Adobe Flash and playable in a browser, and it was the first Israeli virtual world built for Israeli children. Until then the kids here were playing Club Penguin and Habbo in a second language, or sitting in the Tipo portal.

I was twenty four when it launched and a computer engineer by the time it closed, which puts me outside its audience twice over. The language is the other wall. Ekoloko ran in Hebrew for Hebrew speakers aged seven to fourteen, and the English and French versions that might have carried it to me were the first parts of it to be shut down.

The closure was announced in December 2016 and the site stopped working on 15 January 2017. No public reason was given. In the same December, Chrome 55 shipped with HTML5 on by default and Flash switched off, and the whole game was Flash.

~ the record ~

~ the planet ~

Three main regions carried the game. The Jungle and the Eco-Eco Desert were the ground, and Ekolona was the part set in space. Around them sat smaller areas, including Lokozaurus Valley and a Greek quarter called Ekolopolis. A fourth main region, Atlantis, was planned and never shipped. Each screen held a permanent resident with their own face and backstory who handed out the missions, along with shops and recycling you could pick up off the floor.

Players were called Ekoim. Besides the missions there were pets to raise, potions to mix, cards to collect, and trades to make with other players. On 21 September 2010 the site spent fifty thousand shekels adding a private planet for every user, where you could decorate a house and run a farm. The Israeli press called it the ecological FarmVille, which was accurate and was also the point.

~ the money and the numbers ~

The founders took angel money as they went, including from Gigi Levy-Weiss and David Rosenblatt, and in September 2009 raised about a million dollars led by the Gemini fund. Local coverage at the time made a point of it being the first time an Israeli startup had raised a round on original content rather than on technology. There were eight employees in the Tel Aviv office that year and about 350,000 registered users.

By April 2011 there were roughly 1.1 million registered accounts, of which 150,000 were active and about 25,000 were paying. In July 2012 the eighteen servers filled up and six more went in. February 2013 was the high-water mark reported in the press: around three million registered users and a staff of twenty. A mobile app called Eco-App followed in December 2013 for iPhone and iPad, which let you play the small games and buy items for the character you already had on the desktop.

~ the foreign editions ~

In 2009 Virtual Tweens signed with the French company Feerik, and a French Ekoloko went live on 20 January 2010 with an Israeli team supporting it. American and British versions followed that year. The British and French communities stopped growing and both were closed in 2012. The American one was left running without attention and closed in 2013. Four years before the Hebrew site died, it was already the only one left.

~ the restoration ~

ekoloko.com does not resolve today. What does resolve is ekoloko.world, where a restoration project put the world, the rooms, the permanent residents and the original games back into service, playable in a modern browser without Flash and downloadable for Android, Windows, macOS and Linux. The Hebrew banner across the top says the site is back.

It is not the company. Virtual Tweens closed its planet in January 2017 and the people who reopened it did so from outside, from the position of having been eleven years old on it. A game about rebuilding a ruined world after its inhabitants abandoned one got the ending it had been describing for eight years.

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