Space Heroes Universe!

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

~ the eulogy ~

Australia is not a place that exported many virtual worlds, and in 2011 this one came out of a studio there called Bubble Gum Interactive under the name Little Space Heroes. You made a small hero, you got a jetpack, you went out into a cartoon galaxy and did missions for badges. It was free with an optional membership, which is the model every kids world of that decade ran on.

It grew faster than its name. By early 2013 there were close to two million registered players, the game had been retitled Space Heroes Universe, it had been on Australian television through an episode of Good Game: Spawn Point, and there were trading cards and showbags with the characters on them. A mobile spinoff called Jetpack Jinx shipped. For a browser game made a long way from the studios that dominated the category, that is a real run.

Then the audience changed hardware. Kids stopped playing on the family computer and started playing on a tablet, and the tablet did not run Flash, and a Flash world is not a thing you port over a weekend. The player numbers fell through 2014 until the paid memberships were no longer covering what the servers cost.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The interesting part of Space Heroes is how carefully it was aimed. It carried a Seal of Approval from a family-friendly games reviewer in November 2011, it had a parent-facing help desk, and the whole design was built so that an adult looking over a child's shoulder would see nothing alarming. That was the price of entry in the kids category after Club Penguin, and Bubble Gum paid it properly.

The merchandise push in late 2013 and 2014 was the studio trying to turn a Flash game into a character brand before the Flash game ran out of time. Stationery and trading cards outlive servers. They did not outlive them by much here.

~ the day it died ~

The notice was published on 21 December 2014 under the heading "Space Heroes Universe Closing Operations", and the world stayed open for another five weeks so people could say goodbye in it. On 29 January 2015 it stopped. The help-desk page that carried the announcement is itself gone now, and the only copy of it that survives is an archive snapshot taken on 1 February 2015, three days after the lights went out.

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