SAPARi

~ the last words ~

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and a streaming 3D world with other people's avatars moving in it was not something that connection could have rendered even if I had known it existed. SAPARi was also entirely in Japanese and arrived preinstalled on a laptop that was a luxury import where I lived. Two separate walls, and either one alone would have been enough.

Sony launched it on 6 February 1997, which is two years before Habbo and nine before Second Life went mainstream. The name is a contraction of a Japanese phrase about strolling in a park for relaxation, and that is literally what it was. You made an avatar, walked it around a rendered park, and talked to whoever else happened to be standing there. It was built in Java on top of VRML, the 3D markup standard that everyone in 1997 expected to become the spatial web and that nobody uses today. You reached it through a viewer Sony called the Community Place Browser.

Development started in the Architecture Lab and Workstation Unit and later moved into the VAIO division, which tells you what the project was actually for. SAPARi was there to make a Sony computer feel like it did something a generic PC could not. A SAPARi Millennium beta went up in November 1999 and shipped properly in January 2000.

~ the record ~

~ the machine it came on ~

From 1997 to 2001 SAPARi went out preloaded on VAIO systems as part of a bundle Sony called the Internet 3D Pack. That distribution is the whole reason the numbers were ever large. Nobody went looking for a VRML chat world in 1998; they bought a laptop and found one already on the desktop, and enough of them opened it that the service reached hundreds of thousands of users at its height.

It is a strategy that only works once. The bundling ended in 2001, and with it the only channel SAPARi had ever used to find a new user.

~ three hundred yen ~

Operation passed to So-net, Sony's internet service provider arm, and on 1 September 2001 the free content went behind a 300 yen monthly fee. Three hundred yen was small money even then, roughly the price of a coffee, and it still went badly. The objection was not the amount. It was that people had received this thing in the box with a computer they had already paid a premium for, treated it as part of what they bought, and were now being billed monthly for it by a different Sony subsidiary.

Server costs for a 3D world in 2002 were real and the subscription revenue never came close to covering them. Sony closed the service on 31 January 2003.

~ who rebuilt it ~

In 2020, seventeen years after the shutdown, two independent groups reverse-engineered the protocol and stood the world back up. The servers are known as Kogs and Kitunes. Both came out of the same impulse that produces every private server on this site, which is a small number of people who were there refusing to accept that a place can be deleted by a business decision.

What they recovered is also a working specimen of VRML in production, which almost nothing else preserves. VRML lost, and the successor everyone predicted in 1997 never arrived. The best surviving demonstration of what the spatial web was supposed to feel like is now a Japanese chat park that Sony switched off in 2003.

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