MiniMonos

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

~ the eulogy ~

A virtual world for six-year-olds is one of the few categories where I can claim no contact of any kind. I was twenty-five when it started and had no reason to be on an island of cartoon monkeys, and that is the whole of the distance. What I can speak to is the thing that killed it, because it killed a lot of other software I did know.

The origin story is unusually clean for a startup. Melissa Clark-Reynolds took her daughter swimming with turtles in 2008 and worked out that the child might one day have to explain to her own children that there used to be turtles. So she built somewhere online for children where the fun came first and the message about looking after the place came second, which is the correct order and the one almost nobody manages.

She brought in the interactive producer Deborah Todd and the game designer Noah Falstein, who had been making games since the LucasArts years, so the thing was not amateur. You made a monkey. You got a treehouse. The mini games were about catapulting trash into the right recycling bin or growing berries in as few moves as you could manage. Doing well in them powered a windmill back at your house.

After a beta stretch through 2009 and 2010 it launched properly on 1 April 2011. By June 2012 close to a million children had signed up and over a million pounds had gone in behind it, and there were paid membership cards hanging in Sainsbury's in the UK and in shops in Australia and New Zealand.

~ the dossier ~

~ the monkey and the message ~

The genre it was born into was crowded and rich. Club Penguin had sold to Disney for 350 million dollars in 2007 and Moshi Monsters was counting registered accounts in the tens of millions, so every investor in children's software knew the shape of the business: free to play, with a paid tier for the extras that supermarkets would sell you on a card.

MiniMonos took that shape and pointed it at something. The recycling was not decoration, it was the mechanic. Players adopted real orangutans and the company gave to environmental causes off the back of subscriptions. It is easy to be cynical about a monkey lecturing a child about compost, and I would rather have the version where the lecture is a catapult game than the version where a child spends the same hour opening loot boxes.

~ what the ipad did ~

Everything in that market was built in Flash, which meant everything in that market was built for a mouse and a browser on a family computer in the living room. The iPad shipped in April 2010, eighteen months before MiniMonos had its full launch, and within two years the family computer was no longer where a seven-year-old went to play.

The numbers tell it plainly. Close to a million registered players by mid 2012, and by 2013 fewer than fifty thousand of them were active. Rebuilding an entire Flash world as native apps is not a patch, it is starting again with the same amount of money you had the first time and none of the runway. Club Penguin had Disney behind it and still went in 2017. A small company in New Zealand did not have that option.

~ the two week notice ~

Clark-Reynolds put the closure on the game's own homepage on 29 April 2013 and gave everyone until 12 May. Two weeks is short for adults and enormous for a nine-year-old, which is roughly the right instinct: long enough to say goodbye to people, short enough not to be a funeral you have to attend daily.

The island went dark on schedule. The domain still answers today and immediately bounces you to a lander page belonging to whoever owns it now. Of the whole crowded Flash-era children's web, what MiniMonos had that the others did not was a point, and having a point turns out not to change the outcome when the hardware underneath you moves.

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