Postopia

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

~ the goodbye ~

Postopia was built for american nine-year-olds and I was seventeen when it opened. The distance is not only age. Its currency was a password printed inside a cereal box sitting on a supermarket shelf in another country, so a turkish kid with a modem and decent english could reach the front page and go no further than whatever was unlocked for everybody.

It opened in february 2001, made by Skyworks Technologies for Post. An agency called Scient had done the first version. The games were tie-ins with the cereal mascots and they were laid out as four themed countries with their own leaders, Futuria and Wet World among them. Nothing about it was subtle. You were playing an advertisement and the advertisement knew it.

The numbers it reached are the reason it belongs here rather than in a footnote about flash. In june 2001 it counted 260,000 unique visitors under the age of twelve. After a redesign, by 2004 it was drawing around two million unique visitors a month, each one staying up to half an hour a day. That is television-scale attention bought at the price of a few dozen swf files.

The flash games that reached me in 2001 came from wherever a link pointed, with no brand behind them and no box to buy first. Postopia was the other model, and for about a decade the other model was winning.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

The trick was the Postoken. Games were free to open and the better levels were not, and the way through was a code printed on the inside of a box of Fruity Pebbles or Golden Crisp. Buy the cereal and the level opened. A loyalty program aimed at people who had no money of their own and could only ask for the box to go in the cart.

Everything else about the site was ordinary for its era. Flash in the browser, with no account needed for most of what was there. What made it work was that the reward loop ran through a grocery aisle instead of through a credit card.

~ the decline ~

By the middle of the decade the practice had a name and the name was being said in hearings. A 2006 Institute of Medicine report requested by Congress laid out how food advertising moved what children asked their parents for, and advergames were exactly the case study. Kraft, which owned Post at the time, started steering its child-facing marketing toward what it could defend.

Then the owner changed. Ralcorp completed its purchase of the Post cereal business from Kraft on 4 august 2008. In 2011 Ralcorp announced it would spin Post back out on its own, which happened the following february, and Postopia was quietly discontinued in january 2011 in the middle of all that. No farewell page anybody kept. A brand portal is only ever as durable as the brand team paying for it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Post replaced it with PebblesPlay.com, a smaller site pushing two cereals instead of the whole shelf. The old games did not come along. Most of Postopia's catalog was never captured by the Wayback Machine in any playable form, so what exists now is a partial pile recovered by preservation communities from old caches and CD-ROMs.

This is the ordinary fate of advergames and it is worse than the fate of ordinary games. Nobody ever sold them, so nobody kept a copy for commercial reasons. The company that made them had no reason to archive an advertisement for a product line it had already stopped promoting. Flash reaching end of life in 2020 finished the job on whatever was left.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »