Hello Kitty Online

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

~ the obituary ~

Hello Kitty Online was built for players who were nine, or for adults who wanted an online world with no killing in it. In 2008 I was twenty-four and in neither group, so this one is written entirely from the outside. What pulled me toward it was not the cat. It was the shutdown, which does not have a date on it.

Sanrio Digital and Typhoon Games made it in Hong Kong. The engine was written mostly in Delphi with Flash for the mini-games, which is its own small artifact of 2008. Closed beta applications opened that February and more than fifty thousand people applied for a limited pool of accounts, so applicants were asked to record a video explaining why they deserved one. Closed beta itself ran from 23 April to 1 June 2008. A founders' beta followed that October, and a public stress test went out the following February.

Commercial launches came one territory at a time through local publishers: Indonesia in July 2009, Europe in September, Singapore and Malaysia in October, the Philippines in November, Thailand the following July. It picked up a Hong Kong ICT award in 2008, before most of the people who would eventually play it had seen it running.

By most accounts it was charming and unfinished in roughly equal measure, and it stayed that way permanently.

~ the case file ~

~ how it played ~

Combat existed but had been demoted. The loop was gathering resources, crafting, farming your own plot of land and building a house on it. Monsters got hit with brooms and flyswatters, and once beaten some of them could be adopted as pets, up to and including a tyrannosaur. Character creation asked for skin tone and blood type, which is a very Japanese question to put in a character sheet.

The map was a set of real cities rendered as themselves and not quite: London, Paris, Beijing, New York. Guilds existed. So did charity events, which are the part most worth recording. Players crafted in-game items during timed events and Sanrio Digital converted them into real donations, more than twelve thousand dollars to UNICEF in one 2008 run and around eighteen thousand across ten days in early 2010.

~ the five silent years ~

The Tokyo zone was announced and never delivered, and enough of the map stayed thin that players finished the story and stopped logging in. The physical retail release underperformed. In Europe the publisher Burda:ic dropped the game and switched its servers off on 7 April 2010, after which Sanrio Digital took the territory back and published it itself.

The last piece of content was a Valentine's Day quest in 2012. MMO Fallout put the end of support at March 2012, which is when account creation and the download links came off the site. The servers were not turned off. They were left running, which is a different kind of death and in some ways a worse one, because the game stayed reachable long enough for people to keep checking on it. By 2013 the concurrent population was in single digits.

~ the funny part ~

For a game with almost nobody in it, it managed one real news story. In December 2015 the SanrioTown database leaked, exposing 3.3 million accounts with names, birthdays, passwords and email addresses. The Item Mall was stripped of its functionality afterward. An abandoned MMO with single-digit concurrency was still holding personal data on 3.3 million children and the parents who had signed up alongside them.

The servers went off somewhere in 2017. Wikipedia says around 2017 and leaves it there. A fan blog says the last successful login was in August. Sanrio announced nothing, which means a game that ran for nine years has no recorded date of death. The formal ending arrived six years later: on 21 September 2023 Sanrio emailed SanrioTown members that the site and their accounts would stop existing on 1 November, and that finally closed the file on both.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »