Herotopia

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

~ the last words ~

Herotopia released on 14 July 2010 with a design brief you can state in one sentence: a superhero game for children in which the villains are bullies. The antagonists were a gang called the Bully Bunch and their schemes ran to pranks rather than crimes, including a plan to deface the Statue of Liberty. A player built an avatar with a chosen superpower and went around the world solving things that turned out to be reading puzzles and geography questions wearing a cape.

It was built in Flash by Herotainment, a small American studio started by Brian Krauss along with Wade and Caryn Temanas, and it got the kind of reception a worthy kids product gets. USA Today ran a column on it in July 2011 and Common Sense Media gave it high marks for positive messages. PC Mag called it a child friendly environment, which is the review every parent reads and no nine year old does. Jagex, the British company behind RuneScape, signed a global release deal on 10 May 2011, and that November Peter Cuneo, who had been chief executive of Marvel, put money into Herotainment.

So the pieces were all there. A publisher with real distribution, and a world children could be allowed into without a parent worrying. It ran until 2019 and then it was gone, and no one wrote anything down about the ending.

~ the record ~

~ the smighties ~

Players adopted pets called Smighties, and the Smighties are the reason the ending is confusing. By 2016 the front page was still the game, Flash and all, asking visitors to update their player before continuing. By early 2019 the same address had become a community blog, and what it was promoting was Smighty Sweeper, a mobile puzzle game that Apple had picked as a Kids Game We Love, plus a YouTube channel of Smighties cartoons. The pets had outgrown the world they came from, and the studio had followed them onto phones.

That transition was never announced as the end of the game. Herotopia the virtual world simply stopped being what herotopia.com was for, somewhere in the stretch between 2016 and 2019, and the address carried on under the old name while pointing at something else entirely.

I was twenty six the year this launched, which is about as far outside the intended audience as a person can get. The children it was built for are in their twenties now, which is roughly when people start typing the name of a dead site into a browser to see what happens.

~ the parked lander ~

The archive holds a working copy of the site dated 4 February 2019 and nothing working after it. From 20 February 2019 onward every single capture is an HTTP 500, the generic error a web server returns when something behind it has broken, and the crawler kept getting that same answer for two more years, the last of them in March 2021. Nobody fixed it. Nobody turned it off properly either.

Today herotopia.com answers with 114 bytes of parked domain, and herotainment.com answers with the same 114 bytes. Flash itself stopped being supported in December 2020, so even a rescued copy of the world would need an emulator to open now. There was no closing notice and no final day with the servers full. What the game got instead was an error page that nobody came back to clear.

@}-->--

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       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
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