Planet Cazmo

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

~ the eulogy ~

I found this one by following a dead domain backward, and the thing that stopped me was the staff list. Planet Cazmo had twenty-five named ambassadors, volunteer kids with titles, and the blog kept a page for each of them. That is a lot of organizational structure for a website about cartoon aliens on skateboards.

The world itself launched in 2007 under Planet Cazmo, LLC, and by 2008 the homepage was calling itself "the coolest online virtual world featuring online games, skateboards, aliens, personal space ships, and more!" It ran in Flash, the entire game delivered as a single movie file called caz.swf that the browser pulled down and ran. Members got a house to decorate, a currency called Cazmo Coinz, and a store selling instruments and pets and clothes.

The president was Mike Levine, who had been making games since 1991, when he started at LucasFilm Games before it became LucasArts. That is an unusual background for a tween virtual world and it shows in the ambition of what the place tried next. Tommy Mottola, who had run Sony Music, got involved on the music side.

Being an American product aimed at eleven-year-olds in 2009, built entirely on booking US pop acts, this was never going to travel. Soulja Boy means something specific to people who were in American middle school that year. The nearest I ever got to Planet Cazmo was the Flash plugin it needed, which by then sat on every machine I touched because half the web still refused to load without it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the fifty concerts ~

The concerts were the whole business. Planet Cazmo put on more than fifty virtual shows during 2010, with Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, Shakira, Jordin Sparks, David Archuleta, Ciara, Natasha Bedingfield and Cody Simpson among the acts, each one performing to a room of cartoon avatars at a scheduled hour. The blog announcements read like a venue's calendar: the Spring Concert on Friday 8 April from 7pm, sets starting every hour on the hour. Hundreds of thousands of kids showed up to watch an animated stage.

~ bigdawg signs off ~

The end came in pieces. The official blog stops posting in December 2011. On 21 February 2012 the company put out a release headlined that Planet Cazmo had announced Happy Giant securing funding, which is a strange sentence until you notice that Levine was starting a new studio and using the old one's name to announce it. In April 2012 a fan blog reported that Planet Cazmo had tweeted it was closing after one last concert, and then nothing happened for six months. The server was still handing out caz.swf on 1 November 2012.

By 18 January 2013 the address had become a single short page. It thanks everyone for their love and support over the years, insists this is not the end, asks people to support the crew on their next adventure, and signs off as Bigdawg and the Cazmo Crew above a link to HappyGiant's new games. The copyright line on that farewell reads HappyGiant, LLC, so the goodbye was published by the company that replaced the one being mourned. Today planetcazmo.com answers with DreamHost's default message saying the site you are looking for is not here.

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