Ty Girlz

» see ty-girlz.ty.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ty Inc. is the Beanie Babies company, and Ty Girlz was the same business model with a browser attached. The dolls went on sale in April 2007, six of them at first, with names like Lovely Lola and Sizzlin' Sue, and they came and went on the deliberate limited-release schedule Ty had spent a decade teaching collectors to panic about. Each one carried a code, and the code unlocked an account in a 3D world at ty-girlz.ty.com.

The marketing was loud for a soft toy. Ty built posters and life-size cut-outs for the toy fairs, and put up a billboard in Atlanta showing Sizzlin' Sue asking "Who's that Girl?", which stuck to the line hard enough to become its tag. By September 2007 the Girlz had a MySpace page and a YouTube channel, and the spring 2008 retailer catalog sold shops clothing made for the dolls specifically.

I was twenty-three in 2007 and at university. The code that opened this world was printed on a cardboard tag inside an American toy aisle, aimed at girls somewhere between six and twelve, and there was no version of my life in Turkey that put me on the other end of it. What interests me is the machinery of it, a slip of card bought at a till serving as the only login credential the website would accept.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the code bought you ~

The world itself was ColdFusion and Flash, which you can read straight off the archived URLs: an index.cfm at the root and a games directory holding small Flash titles with filenames like doorsfordollars. You dressed a doll and decorated a room, earning currency off the games. It was the Webkinz pattern, and the genre was briefly enormous because it gave a plush animal a second act that cost the manufacturer almost nothing per unit.

~ the sasha and malia problem ~

In January 2009 Ty released two new Girlz called Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia. The new president's daughters are named Sasha and Malia. On 21 January a Ty spokesperson told the Chicago Sun-Times that the Obama girls were indeed the inspiration, and on 22 January Ty's senior vice president of sales said the dolls were not built to resemble them and that the names simply "worked very well with the dolls". Ty also said its naming process was proprietary information and declined to explain it.

Michelle Obama's press secretary pointed out that nobody had asked permission, and added that "It is inappropriate to use young private citizens for marketing purposes." By early February the dolls were pulled and renamed Marvelous Mariah and Sweet Sydney, with Ty's chief executive saying plainly that the change was down to the First Lady's disapproval. Profits from the originals were promised to the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation. The units already in shops went on eBay for $3,000.

~ the last capture ~

The world lived at ty-girlz.ty.com, which matters, because tygirlz.com never hosted it and now sits parked with a domain broker. Wikipedia says the virtual world shut down on June 7, 2013, and that sentence carries a citation-needed tag; so does the launch date one clause earlier. Every other page on the internet that gives you the day is a copy of that one unsourced sentence, which makes the count of independent sources for it zero.

The archive gets closer. The front page was still answering normally on 10 May 2013 at just over four kilobytes, and a login SWF was still being served off the same host on 22 July 2013, which tells you the files had not been deleted even after the lights went out. So the grave says 2013 and leaves the day where Ty left it, which is nowhere.

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