Netbabyworld

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

~ the obit ~

The games came before the company. In 1997 the Swedish design and advertising agency Acne International was producing little browser games as client work, and enough people were playing them without caring who the client was that the games started to look like the product. Netbaby World AB was incorporated in April 1999 by Acne together with Nightscape Communications, which owned the Stockholm listings magazine Nöjesguiden. Michael Marlow was chief executive. Acne's Jesper Kouthoofd and Mats Johansson stayed on as creative consultants for the whole of the company's working life.

What they made was a world rather than a menu. There was a recurring cast with names like Pekka and Monique, and areas named Nettown and Peninsula. The visual style was deliberately low-polygon 3D, done well enough that it read as hand-made rather than as cheap. The titles give you the register: Whip-It, Boatrace, Hi-Jump, Ninja Girl, a thing called Ping vs Pong. Around twenty of them were produced between 1999 and 2003, first in Macromedia Shockwave and later on a proprietary engine, with a museum section on the site for the ones that had been retired.

In May 2000 Netbaby World bought Game Design Sweden AB, the studio that had made Kula World for the original PlayStation, and renamed it PlayCom. That gave the company a real games studio and the engine that the later titles ran on. It also gave it a payroll sized for a console developer during the two years when the Swedish advertising and dot-com money was draining out of everything at once. PlayCom went bankrupt in 2003. In April of that year a management buyout handed ownership to former PlayCom and Netbabyworld staff, who stripped the community features out and stopped updating the site.

Browser games in 1999 were a European format as much as an American one, which is why the Games Webby that year went to a studio in Stockholm instead of to anyone in California. A Shockwave file small enough to be worth waiting for travels anywhere, and nobody in Turkey in 2000 was checking what country a game site sat in before clicking it. What kept this one local was its home market. The site was Swedish first, with a cast whose names are jokes in a language almost nobody outside Scandinavia reads.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the webby gave it ~

At the sixth Webby Awards, announced from San Francisco on 18 June 2002, the Games category went to Netbaby. The People's Voice award in the same category went to Swirve. Thirty-three Webbys went out that year, and the other winners tell you the rest: Google took Best Practices and The Onion took Humor.

The press release that announced it reads "Denmark's NetBaby (http://www.netbabyworld.com) for Best Game Site". The company was Swedish. That was the standing of a small Scandinavian studio in an American-run market, and the mistake is still sitting in the archived copy of the release.

~ the url that still answers ~

netbabyworld.com has not been taken down. The front page served today is the 2003 page: a 585-pixel centered table, GIF spacers for the drop shadow, an image map with hand-plotted polygon coordinates so you can click individual characters, a house banner at the top pointing at worldsudokuleague.com. The museum section still loads, and it still calls out to google-analytics.com for urchin.js, the tracking script Google retired years ago.

What does not work is the games. Adobe ended Shockwave Player in April 2019 and the browsers had stopped loading plugins before that, so the Shockwave titles are now dead files behind live links. One of the original producers, Nick Sakellariou, put out a mobile version of Ninja Girl in the late 2000s. Two others off the same payroll, Jens Rudberg and David Eriksson, went on with Kouthoofd to found Teenage Engineering, which makes synthesizers that sell on exactly the quality this site had: expensive-looking geometry with a joke hidden in it, and nothing where you expect it to be.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »