GAZOO METAPOLIS

» see metapolis.toyota.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Toyota had a specific problem in 2008 with a name of its own in Japanese, kuruma banare, the drift of young people away from cars. City kids saw no reason to own a vehicle, and the largest car company in the world was looking at a generation that did not want its product. The answer it shipped on 17 April 2008 was a 3D city on the internet, free to enter, where the car was the point of the place.

The beta launched as TOYOTA METAPOLIS and the world opened properly on 1 October. The ground it stood on belonged to somebody else. METAPOLIS ran inside meet-me, a virtual Tokyo operated by a studio called Cocoa, so Toyota was renting a district rather than founding a city. Design was handled by Hirata Shuichi and the whole thing was supervised by Mamoru Oshii, which is an odd line to find on a car promotion. The man who directed Ghost in the Shell spent part of 2008 art-supervising a promotional metaverse for a car brand.

Inside there was an auto mall and a museum, with an event hall that ran something a few times every couple of months. On 25 November 2010 the name changed from TOYOTA to GAZOO, the brand Toyota used for its owner portal, and the city carried that name for the rest of its life.

Second Life was the one that reached Turkey, as a newspaper story in 2007 about virtual land prices rather than as anything anyone I knew logged into. METAPOLIS never left Japanese, down to the client and the account you needed to get in. I was finishing university while a car company in another country spent nine years running a city for people who did not want to drive.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was in the city ~

The highway is the part that sounds like a real product decision. Early on, driving in the METAPOLIS series meant changing lanes and nothing else, the car essentially on rails. Later, once the highway extended into meet-me proper, steering came free: arrow keys to accelerate and turn, the A key for the horn. Once you can steer, people race, so the city started running time trials.

Then there was the radio. From launch day the world carried its own station, produced by J-WAVE, the Tokyo FM broadcaster, with three named shows going out weekly through in-car receivers on the highway and through tuners in your virtual room. The episodes were also released as podcasts, so a radio show made for a fake city was available to people sitting in a real one.

~ the funny part ~

Toyota also ran a volunteer program, which is where the scale becomes clear. The call for community helpers went out at an in-world town meeting in November 2009. Nineteen people applied, three were picked, and by early 2012 the roster had grown to nine. Nine volunteers is not a failure for a virtual world. It is just a very precise number to have on record for a project backed by a company that was selling cars by the million.

~ the day it died ~

The Toyota-branded front door closed long before the world did. In November 2013 METAPOLIS was merged into meet-me, in March 2014 account management moved over to Cocoa, and the old address at metapolis.toyota.co.jp stopped serving its own page around the same time and started forwarding elsewhere. What was left was a Toyota district inside somebody else's Tokyo.

Cocoa closed meet-me on 31 January 2018 and GAZOO METAPOLIS went with it. Four years later the industry rediscovered the idea, gave it a new name and a great deal of money, and built worlds with fewer cars in them.

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