Headbone Zone

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

~ the obit ~

i was thirteen in 1997, which is exactly the age Headbone Zone was built for, and i was in Ankara without a modem, which is exactly the wrong place to have been that age. My internet started the following year at a Turkish dial-up prompt, and the safe, moderated, english-language children's web was not something that reached it. This one belongs to American kids who had a computer in the house before they had a job.

Headbone Interactive was founded around 1993 in Seattle by Susan Lammers and her husband Walter Euyang. Lammers had spent about eight years at Microsoft and put her own money into the company, which started out making edutainment CD-ROMs. The Gigglebone Gang and the Elroy titles came out across 1995 and 1996, and in 1996 Broderbund took exclusive North American retail distribution, which at that point was the best distribution a children's software house could get.

The website arrived in march 1997 and quietly became the real business. Within about a year the company had walked away from CD-ROMs entirely, citing eight well-reviewed titles that had not sold well enough, and cut staff. The discs were the thing they knew how to make. The site was the thing people showed up for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was actually on it ~

The Headbone Derby is the piece with the longest reach. It was a series of internet research adventures, effectively a structured scavenger hunt across the real web, and teachers ran them in thousands of classrooms as an actual lesson. For a lot of American children this was the first time anyone told them that finding a fact online was a skill you could get better at.

The rest was a proper portal rather than a set of banner ads with games attached. Riddleopolis was the trivia game and Mystery on Mars made you solve puzzles by searching the open web for the answers. Camp Champ was an online trading card game that mailed out real prizes, next to a band management sim called Rags to Riches that you played against other people. There was a pager built into the site, polling every few seconds so children could message friends who were online at the same time, and the chat rooms were staffed by human moderators and marketed openly as mom-monitored. In 1997 that combination barely existed anywhere.

~ the postmortem ~

Headbone tried television first. It set up Headbone Television in 1998 and got two series on air in 1999, one on Fox Family and one on Discovery Kids, which is the usual move for a children's brand looking for money that does not come from banner advertising.

Bonus.com, a rival kids site, bought the company in 2000. The Headbone Zone went dark under the new owner and Headbone Interactive folded in october 2001, with the site gone by then. The timing is not a coincidence. The market for advertising aimed at children on the web collapsed with everything else in 2001, and COPPA had just made a moderated chat room for minors a legal liability instead of a selling point.

~ what got buried with it ~

Sites for children die harder than sites for adults, because the people who used them were too young to save anything. No screenshots kept on a hard drive they controlled, no domain of their own to move the memories onto. One former user who went on to build a community site of their own years later wrote that they had unconsciously been trying to rebuild Headbone Zone the whole time, and only worked it out afterward.

headbone.com is not what it was. What Lammers built was a place made by adults who assumed children could handle something interesting, staffed with real moderators because that costs money and mattered. Both halves of that are still hard to find.

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