Manyland

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

~ the last words ~

Manyland opened on 29 July 2013 and closed on 29 February 2024, and the closing date landed on a leap day because there happened to be one available that year. It ran in a browser tab. You drew your own body and then you drew the ground you stood on, and every object you walked past had been drawn by somebody else the same way. No art pipeline, no asset store. If you wanted a tree in your area, you made a tree.

Philipp Lenssen built it with Scott Lowe. Lenssen is more widely known for Google Blogoscoped, the Google-watching blog from the years when watching Google was a full-time hobby for a lot of engineers. Manyland is the larger body of work by almost any measure you pick: ten and a half years of continuous operation carried by two people.

The numbers in the farewell notice are the part worth keeping. 500,000 people registered and made over 800,000 areas between them, holding 6 million distinct items. The notice also counts 900 million placements, meaning individual acts of putting a drawn thing somewhere specific. That is the real unit of labor in a world like this, and most virtual worlds cannot report it, because most of them hand you the world already finished.

I did not play it. Browser sandbox worlds arrived while I was in my thirties with a job, and a game whose whole premise is that you draw everything yourself needs unhurried hours I stopped having after university. What I can report from the outside is the ending, which was handled with about five months of public warning.

~ the record ~

~ the last leap day ~

Lenssen said publicly that the budget was short on 2 October 2023. The closure was announced on 26 November 2023 with January 2024 floated as the likely month, and on 15 February 2024 the date firmed up as 29 February. That is close to five months of warning. The median notice period on this site is nearer two weeks, and the median explanation is a paragraph about an incredible journey.

There was a farewell party on the last day. Videos of it are still linked from the museum page.

~ who kept it running ~

Two people against a world with half a million registered accounts in it. The budget line in the closing notice is not a figure of speech: a lack of budget also meant a lack of budget for updates, which is Lenssen saying the thing had been coasting for some time before it stopped. Manyland was on Steam as well.

~ what the museum keeps ~

manyland.com never went dark. It became the Manyland Museum, holding 100,000 snapshots from 25,000 areas plus 100,000 of the items people made. The area names survived too, and they turn out to be the best record of who was actually in there: Parkour Tower, Claire's Closet, Grls Chillzone, Walmart, Starvbucks, The Mall Of Everything, Meaningful Waiting Room. A middle-school internet, preserved by accident in a list of strings.

A separate effort at offlineland.io is assembling a playable offline archive out of community snapshots, run by someone who kept a personal copy of every public area before the servers went off. Most dead worlds leave a wiki and some video footage.

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