Whirled

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

~ the obit ~

i missed Whirled and the reason is boring. It opened in february 2007, when i was finishing university, and by then the browser virtual world had settled here into being something younger people did. What reached Turkey out of that category was Habbo, which had a Turkish hotel and an audience still in middle school. Whirled never had a Turkish anything.

It was made by Three Rings Design, the studio Daniel James and Michael Bayne had started in 2001 and which was already known for Puzzle Pirates. The open beta was announced at GDC and the site launched on 28 february 2007. Technically it was an Adobe Flash applet sitting inside a web page with an HTML sidebar wrapped around it for friends and browsing, which meant it ran on any machine that could already run a Flash game.

The premise was that the developer would supply the world and nothing inside it. Every avatar and every piece of furniture was uploaded by a user, as were the games you could launch from a room. You could get in with a PNG file or an MP3, and you could go a long way with an SWF, because a Flash file uploaded as an avatar brought its own animation along with it.

The avatar you got for free on signup was an animated block of tofu with two dance moves. That was the developer's entire contribution to the wardrobe, and it was a joke about the design. Everything better than tofu had to come from somebody else who had signed up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the economy ~

There were coins, earned by playing games and by selling things, and there were bars, which you bought with real money. Creators earned a third currency called bling that converted into bars, which is how a person who made a good avatar got paid in something they could take out. A large share of every purchase went to whoever made the item, and the seller set the price themselves.

It worked well enough to produce a real class of creators and nowhere near well enough to produce a business. In march 2010 at the Flash Gaming Summit, Daniel James put the numbers up in public: $300,000 of revenue against $5 million invested, described from the stage as abject failure. He softened it slightly on the Puzzle Pirates forums afterward, saying those were approximate totals and that there were no profits.

~ what happened to the studio ~

Sega bought Three Rings in november 2011, mostly for Spiral Knights. Whirled came along in the deal as the part nobody was buying. In a 2013 update the paid currencies were removed entirely, which took the creator payouts out with them and left an economy running on coins alone. The site stayed up and stopped changing.

In march 2016 Sega closed the studio and laid off the staff. On 6 april a small company called Grey Havens, assembled out of former Three Rings people, took over the active games. Whirled came with them and lasted almost exactly one more year.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shutdown on 8 april 2017 went badly in a specific way. Large parts of the database were corrupted during it, so ten years of user-made items did not come out intact even for the people trying to save them. Grey Havens put the source code on GitHub under a BSD license, which meant the world could be rebuilt but not repopulated.

What survived is what fans had already copied by hand. A mirror called Synced Online had been running since august 2016 and held some of the only remaining content when the original went down, until its own database was destroyed in an attack and the backup turned out to be corrupt as well. Whirled Club, started on 31 august 2018, is the one still standing. After Adobe ended Flash on 1 january 2021 it turned itself into a downloadable client so the thing could keep running without a browser at all.

whirled.com is still registered and it still answers. Asking for it in 2026 returns a 302 and drops you on the Wikipedia article about Whirled, which is somebody's decision and a fairly gentle one. The address works, it just points at the encyclopedia entry for what used to be there.

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