Webosaurs

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

~ the goodbye ~

The premise was that the extinction missed some of them. Sixty five million years ago a group of dinosaurs survived on an island nobody found, and in 2009 a child aged five to ten could log in, become one, and start decorating a cave. That is Webosaurs, and the company that built it was not a games studio at all.

Reel FX is an animation house in Dallas with a second studio in Santa Monica, and by 2009 it had worked on Shrek the Third, Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda and Open Season 2. It also had a commercial arm and a live-action arm. Webosaurs was the internal property it decided to take all the way to market itself, which is a specific kind of ambition for a work-for-hire shop and a specific kind of risk.

Beta testing opened on 25 June 2009 and the world launched on 22 October. Free to play, with a subscription and microtransactions on top. You got a customizable 3D dinosaur avatar and a home cave, and the mini-games paid out the coins that furnished it. Chat was watched by trained staff on site who could take reports from players in real time, which in the children's virtual world business of 2009 was the entire product as far as parents were concerned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

Two things separated it from the rest of the shelf. The first was Nigel Marven, the British wildlife presenter from the BBC's Prehistoric Park and Walking with Dinosaurs, who recorded exclusive segments for the site that it called Webosodes and who was announced for a promotional tour of American zoos and museums. Hiring an actual dinosaur broadcaster is what an animation studio does instead of hiring a game designer.

The second was the charity mechanic. Coins earned in mini-games could be donated to a list of pre-selected environmental organizations, and those donations turned into real money paid out by Webosaurs. Kids were being taught that the currency they had ground for had an exchange rate into the world outside, which is a stranger and more interesting idea than anything in the shooting.

None of it reached me and none of it was meant to. I was twenty five in 2009, ten years past the age bracket and on the wrong continent for a Dallas studio's zoo tour. Turkey's version of this was Habbo Otel, which had the middle schoolers, and I was too old for that one too by a decade.

~ when exactly ~

Most of the internet says Webosaurs closed in 2012 and most of the internet is wrong. The social accounts going quiet is where that date comes from: Facebook stopped in 2011, Twitter in 2012. The site kept running.

The real bracket is a year later and it is narrow. The last archived post on the Webosaurs blog is 10 May 2013. A blogger from the rival kids world Pandanda noticed the game was offline and wrote it up on 28 June 2013. The blog subdomain had stopped resolving by 12 July and webosaurs.com itself was down by the 21st. Nobody at Reel FX said anything at any point, and the grave is dated to June on the strength of one stranger checking a link.

Players had noticed the decline before that. The 2011 Rise of Spike update, which introduced a villain and new content, is remembered as rushed, and the population was already thinning. A change.org petition went up in June 2021 asking Reel FX to notice that people still cared. In August 2024 somebody got Dino Surf, the iOS spin-off app, running publicly again, and the remaining community sits in a Discord server for exactly this kind of recovery work. Eleven years after a website quietly stopped answering, people are still trying to get the island back.

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