FunOrb

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

~ the eulogy ~

funorb was the kind of thing runescape kids used. i was not a runescape kid. in february 2008 when jagex launched the portal i was 24, on ttnet broadband in ankara, and out of the browser-arcade slot that funorb was built for. jagex made the portal because they had a userbase of teens who had grown attached to the jagex account system through runescape, and they wanted a second product to sell that same account into. a casual-games site that ran on the same java stack was the obvious next move.

the portal shipped with a few dozen titles, all coded in java, all playable in the browser through the npapi plugin that every mainstream browser still shipped in 2008. the two flagship titles were arcanists (a scorched-earth-style projectile duel with wizards) and armies of gielinor (a small real-time strategy game set in the runescape universe). the rest of the catalog was casual pieces like sudoku and block puzzles. the members tier at about five dollars a month unlocked fullscreen mode, immediate forum posting and access to every achievement.

funorb held a specific position in the java-in-browser stack. by 2010 the runescape audience had grown into millions of registered accounts. jagex's decision to launch a separate portal instead of just adding minigames to runescape was a bet that the casual-games audience was a different demographic from the mmo audience. that bet did not fully pay off. funorb never reached anything like runescape's numbers, and by 2012 jagex had stopped adding new titles.

~ the dossier ~

~ the long tail ~

between 2012 and 2018 funorb ran mostly on legacy. the catalog was frozen and a small members population kept paying the roughly five dollars a month to grind the achievement list on the frozen leaderboards. jagex kept the servers up because the marginal cost of running a java portal was near zero once the code stopped changing. this was also the window where chrome pulled npapi in september 2015 and firefox followed within a year. every casual-games site that had shipped as a java applet had to either rewrite in flash and then in webassembly, or accept that a shrinking share of players could actually load the games at all.

jagex chose the third option, which was to keep funorb running for whoever could still load it. by 2017 that was almost nobody. internet explorer was the last mainstream browser with java support, and even that was on borrowed time.

~ the day it died ~

jagex announced in june 2018 that funorb would close on 7 august 2018. the timing was one day after runescape classic itself shut down on 6 august, which meant jagex was closing the entire pre-html5 java product line inside a single window. members got a small pack of runescape bonds as compensation and instructions to download any of their in-game data. the servers went dark on the announced date and never returned.

the jagex statement pointed at the hardware and software gap that had opened. the actual public phrasing was that advancements in software and hardware had made the games increasingly difficult to access. the plain reading of that is nobody could load the java applet anymore and jagex did not want to port the catalog. funorb was retired quietly on the same weekend as the classic mmo it had been paired with in 2008.

~ what got buried ~

the whole java-in-browser gaming layer went with it. runescape classic and funorb, alongside dozens of academic and hobbyist java applet games. the browser had been a java runtime host for a decade, then it was not, and every casual game that had shipped as an applet became unreachable on the same three-year timeline. funorb was one of the last commercial portals to still be running when the servers finally switched off.

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