GoPets

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

~ the goodbye ~

In August 2005 I was twenty-one and about to finish university, and the thing I wanted from a computer was a faster connection, not a pet. GoPets was built for people younger than that, and it asked for something I would not have given it either: an installer, and a Windows machine left running with a small animal permanently in the corner of the screen. Everything here comes from the record.

The company was GoPets Ltd., based in Seoul and run by Erik Bethke, incorporated a year to the day before the service opened. What it sold was a three-dimensional pet rendered on your desktop itself rather than inside a browser window. You picked an animal, chose a color and a pattern, and from then on it wandered around over your icons. You fed it and washed it. Somebody on the team had decided a bathtub should be a purchasable item, so you bought it one of those too. If you neglected it, it did not die, which was a deliberate design decision; it got tired and went to sleep, or it left for a while.

The part that made it worth remembering is that it left for somebody else's computer. Pets visited other players, sent over as gifts or wandering off on their own, and they arrived on a stranger's desktop in Brazil or Finland and were made welcome or were not. Your desktop had a name in the game, GoLand, and you bought the land it sat on with in-game currency.

By October 2006 there were fifty-five people working on it. In 2008 Konami published a Nintendo DS version, GoPets: Vacation Island, built by 1st Playable Productions with Engine Software, which could reach the PC players over Nintendo Wi-Fi. That is further than most virtual pet sites of the era ever got.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a language made of pictures ~

Because pets crossed borders, the players did too, and GoPets had to solve a problem most of its competitors never faced. Its answer was IKU, a messaging system with no words in it. You assembled a message out of pictures and sent that, and a player who shared no alphabet with you could read it. The DS coverage described it as haiku with pictures. Alongside it sat ordinary chat and a forum for everybody who did share a language.

There was a Child Safety mode too, with a guardian setting up a Protector ID that restricted who could reach the account and what the child could do with it. In 2005 that was ahead of most of the category.

~ the shell economy ~

Money in GoPets was seashells in three denominations, green at the bottom and gold at the top, with gold selling for ten American cents each. You got shells from daily fortune cookies, and subscribers got better cookies. The economy broke at exactly the point you would expect: somebody worked out that the fortune cookie payout beat buying gold shells with a prepaid card, so the studio capped the daily cookie yield and revalued the whole ladder.

Land worked the same way. A camping site cost a thousand green shells and held seventy-five objects. A tier one plot cost seventy-five gold shells and held two hundred and fifty, or four hundred if you paid the subscription. Minigames were items you purchased and kept in your inventory, including a licensed copy of Diner Dash 2 that ran on your pet's lawn.

~ the last month ~

Erik Bethke posted the closure notice on 4 October 2009 and the players carried it to the LiveJournal community three days later, under a subject line that gave the date: GoPets would be shut down on 7 November. His reason was unusually direct for a shutdown letter. Despite what he called heroic work by staff and volunteers, the fundamental structure of the thing, a downloaded client rather than a web application, had kept it from growing large enough to pay for itself.

He was describing 2009 accurately. Pet Society was inside Facebook by then and needed no installer at all. The comments underneath that post run on into December, mostly people who had logged in too late and lost the animal, and one who wrote that she wished she had taken a screenshot before it went down. English Wikipedia records the closure one day later than the announcement did, on 8 November, and the company was in Seoul, so the two dates may be the same evening seen from different sides of the planet. gopetslive.com has not answered since. The old gopets.com belongs to a pet information site that has nothing to do with any of this.

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