MOPy fish

» see mopyfish.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

MOPy stands for Multiple Original Printouts, which is the least romantic name ever attached to a pet. It was a freeware screensaver released in October 1997, a single blood parrot cichlid swimming in a tank on your monitor, commissioned by Hewlett-Packard from a London agency called The Global Beach Group. HP had an interest here that went past goodwill: printing one original document ten times sells less ink than printing ten originals, and the fish existed to teach you that preference.

So it had an economy. Every original document you sent to the printer earned MOPy points, and points bought furniture for the tank. Twenty of them got you a baby fish. At the top of the ladder, for three thousand two hundred points, sat an item the documentation called aphrodisiac fish food, which required a key HP mailed you once you qualified. The incentive structure of an entire hardware business, rendered as aquarium furniture.

The behavior underneath was better than the premise deserved. The fish kept a rolling memory of about a week and adjusted its personality to match how you had treated it. Leave it five days without feeding and it turned aggressive; ten days and it went listless. Three weeks of neglect killed it outright, taking every accumulated point with it, and you could only bring it back through a menu command or by lying to the computer's clock. Its own site called it the first lifelike virtual pet fish and, with real confidence, the world's most downloaded virtual pet as featured on Big Brother.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the numbers it actually did ~

That boast was close to true. The 2001 edition of Guinness World Records listed MOPy as the most downloaded cyberpet, and by 2000 the count had passed ten million. For scale, that is a promotional screensaver for printer consumables outperforming most commercial software of its decade on raw installs.

It also means the thing was a UK marketing object that happened to go global. The Big Brother reference was to the British series and the agency was in London. Pulling a 1997 Windows screensaver down a 33.6k modem in Turkey was an afternoon's commitment, and at the end of it you owned a pet whose currency was printer pages you had no HP printer to produce.

~ the day the download went ~

There was no announcement. For most of a decade mopyfish.net served a frameset that loaded the real site underneath, and the last capture of that working version is 15 October 2008. The next capture, on 12 November, is a black page carrying two header images and four lines of Arial. The software was originally released in 1997 and is no longer available for download, it said, and there is no support available for this product. Underneath sat a link to the agency that wrote it.

The gap between those two captures is four weeks wide, and the tombstone file closes it by itself. Its HTTP headers still carry a Last-Modified of Friday, 24 October 2008, 13:44:58 GMT, served off a Microsoft IIS 6.0 box. That is the moment somebody at the agency wrote the replacement page and the fish stopped being available from anyone official. The domain went on serving that notice for another four years, then started redirecting to a private jet charter company in October 2012.

~ the fish that outlived the fish ~

MOPy was 16-bit, so it stopped working properly the moment Windows XP arrived and stopped working at all on 64-bit installs. The community response was the usual. A man named Bill Greganti hosted the original program alongside his own patches for it, including a hack that let you accumulate points without printing anything at all, which undid the one thing HP had been paying for. Copies are still findable on fan pages today, eighteen years after the company that funded it decided it was done.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »