Monkey Quest

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

~ the obituary ~

In 2011 I was twenty seven and writing code for a living. Monkey Quest was aimed at nine year olds in North America and it was built to sell their parents a membership, so there is no version of my life in which this one and I overlap. It goes in the file of things I can reconstruct but cannot remember.

Nickelodeon put it into closed beta on 14 December 2010 and opened it on 17 March 2011. Behaviour Interactive in Montreal built it: a side-scrolling browser world set in a place called Ook, where the Monkey King was dying and the plot was your problem. You picked one of four tribes at the start, which is how a kids game asks you to belong to something before it asks you to do anything.

The economy was the usual arrangement of that decade. Bananas came from playing and Nick Cash came from a card. The parts of the world worth reaching sat behind a membership. This is the model Club Penguin proved and every network in the business copied for about six years.

Nickelodeon reached Turkey the way American networks reached Turkey then, as a channel with dubbed cartoons on it. The web layer behind those channels stayed in North America, in English, behind US billing. Turkish children who wanted a browser world of their own went to Habbo Otel, which had an actual Turkish hotel with Turkish moderators, and I was already too old for that one when it arrived.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The important thing about Monkey Quest is that it was not a show. Nickelodeon had bought Neopets in 2005 and spent the years after that turning television properties into games, which is the safe direction of travel. This went the other way: an original world with no episodes behind it, built to become a franchise from the game outward. A mobile spinoff called Thunderbow followed, which is what the first step of that plan looks like.

It never worked at that size. By 2013 children were arriving on tablets, and a world that needed a desktop browser plugin was in the wrong place for the audience it wanted. Nothing dramatic went wrong. The traffic simply had somewhere better to be.

~ the funny part ~

The Thunderbow app came off the App Store on 31 July 2014. Two weeks later, on 14 August, Nickelodeon announced the game would close on 26 September, gave every remaining player membership for the final month and offered refunds to anyone who asked. The stated reason was a shift toward other digital and mobile experiences, which is the phrasing every network used that year.

Then came the part that says more about 2014 than about 2011. Fans rebuilt the game as Monkey Quest Reborn, and Paramount Global sent takedown notices to remove an unauthorized copy of something it had itself deleted and had no plans to restore. Open-source emulation continued anyway, quieter. A children's world with a server-side map leaves nothing when the login goes, so the only surviving version of Ook is the one the copyright owner keeps trying to close.

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