Twinity

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

~ the obit ~

twinity never reached turkey at any meaningful scale. it was a german-coded product, built in berlin, marketed in english and german first. the open beta opened on 5 september 2008. i was 24 then, a master's student in ankara, mostly using the laptop for matlab and msn. virtual worlds were not on my radar in 2008. second life was still the one people argued about in english-language tech press, and second life had not really landed in turkey either.

the pitch was specific. twinity would not be a fantasy world. it would be a true-to-scale 3d replica of real cities, starting with berlin. you put on a photofit avatar, walked into a virtual mitte, paid in a currency called globals. the underlying tech was bigworld engine, the same middleware several mmos of the era ran on. tele atlas data fed the city geometry. blender and sketchup were both supported for user content.

berlin came first in september 2008. singapore followed, then london in 2009, then miami and new york in 2010. for a while metaversum gmbh ran near the front of the post-second-life pack, the small group of european virtual-world startups everybody thought might be the next thing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

the first sign came in january 2012. metaversum took most of the cities offline in a single week, citing low activity in everything except berlin. the company never recovered momentum after that retraction. by mid 2012 the cash had run out. exitreality, an australian browser-3d outfit, bought metaversum's assets in june 2012 for an undisclosed price and inherited the user base along with the maintenance debt.

exitreality kept twinity running for nine more years on a much smaller team. the city focus drifted toward fantasy zones and party islands. by 2018 the population was a few hundred regulars who knew each other's avatars by walk cycle. it had become a private club running on infrastructure designed for a public one.

~ the postmortem ~

in early november 2021 twinity went offline for what the operators described as a server migration. the legacy stack (thirteen years of bigworld builds and patches) did not transfer cleanly to the new hardware. for a few weeks the official line was that the world would come back. on 10 december 2021 exitreality posted that the migration had hit incompatibilities they could not work around in any reasonable timeframe.

the login servers stayed dark from november 2021 forward. blog updates trailed off. the domain still resolves in 2026 to a static page. nothing on the other side of the login is reachable.

~ what got buried with it ~

people had been logging into twinity for over a decade by the end. that is more than enough time to build the small attachments these worlds run on. the apartment in the virtual prenzlauer berg you decorated in 2010. the avatar walking with the same gait you set up in 2009. all of that is gone, and there was no export tool at the end. exitreality went quiet on the project after december 2021 and has not spoken about a revival.

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