It is natural that there is some pride felt by some players when we start talking about Habbo. We from Habbox after all… we defend this feeling more than anything. Firstly, because it is a game that has survived in the gaming world as we saw a crazy evolution where everything is changing a in very crazy way: realistic, three-dimensional graphics and voice acting to name a few new features. Plus, Habbo has its history and an incredible evolution trajectory, but without having to abandon that simple, but so detailed style… go figure! We made a little search of these interesting facts about the early years of Habbo Hotel, and a few things more, that maybe you do not know yet, but worth knowing if you have an explorer’s soul!

1- Mobiles Disco: The Habbo’s dad! (1999-2002)

Aapo Kyrölä and Sampo Karjalainen are two Finnish dudes who met each other whilst working in the same IT company. In addition to the friendship that materialized over the time, they had the idea of developing, in 1999, a simple free-time project called Mobiles Disco: you could create a character, give him/her a cool nickname, wear clothes, change the colour of the skin in a, so far, limited interface and chill at an isometric virtual world.  You could dance, talk to all the people and – the main purpose of the game – enjoy a virtual show of Mobiles rap band who were friends of Aapo and Sampo! It was a great success – they didn’t expect that people from all the world would play this game and that’s what has happened – they were simply forced to create international rooms to support all the players! Mobiles Disco surely was the main inspiration for the making of Habbo, which was officially launched in 2000 in Finland!

2 – An Acid Hotel

 The game developers took some time to find an interesting name for their brand new online game: Habbo, which in its early months was simply called “Project Goldfish”. Two reasons led them to choose Habbo: First, it was a word that did not have many results if it were searched at Google. Secondly, because it is a pun on the Habbo word  – “Acid” in Finnish.

3 – BETA Archaeology

In the transition from BETA version to the final version, many furnitures and accessories have been left out, unused. An example is the mysterious female hair (picture), found in some screenshots of the BETA and, interestingly, it also appeared in some images of Furnimatic (as a super specific Easter Egg), but it was only illustrative! Plus, there’s a super old bed furni from the BETA that we can only found in the Finnish Habbo, for historical issues!

4 – Peek-a-boo…. Peek-a-boo…

There’s lots of “Monitorimatti” users in the Brazilian Habbo. “Monitorimatti-02” is one of them, but she has a peculiar programming effect: at every, more or less, five minutes, she’s online for only one second (is she shy?). It happens continuously, since 2009, for unknown reasons, even though some people say that it’s just a tool that the Staff members turn on to avoid the so-often lags.

5 – To infinity and beyond

The first international Habbo Hotel was launched in February 2001 in UK. Curiously, the private rooms were created in the same date. We still can find “ghosts” of the old users searching for their nicknames ending with a $ (example: lucas$ , whatwasit$)!

6 – BR and World’s first “huones”

A great number of the international Hotels have, as its very first room, (with a room ID of ‘1’) an interesting place filled with little palm trees, a duck and a plasma television, among others. For some reason, they used this same design for almost every single hotel, and his owner’s a mysterious user called “Whatwasit” (in some hotels he may be banned so you can find him by searching “Whatwasit$”), most of the times older than the hotel’s launch date itself. The Brazilian hotel’s an exception. During an exploring event in 2013, the user Utplutih (from Sulake) opened again the gates of the Hotel’s “first” room (a small place without painted walls/floors) and filled it with a bot of herself, some of the very firsts furni’s of the Brazilian hotel (the Rabbit-penguin, the small red TV, a plastic HC table) with lots of stickies to explain every single furni’s origin. After all, this room has turned into a little museum called “Huone” which means “room” in Finnish. Even though they consider it as the first room of the Brazilian hotel, it’s the room with the “2” ID, and we can’t enter the room with the “1” ID. Plus, we can find Utplutih in the English Habbo as well, even more active and dressed comparing to her style in the BR server, with a room called Huone too, but we can’t access it. I wonder what’s inside it!

• SOURCE (and Special Thanks) •

So guys, that’s what we’ve got for today! The Hotel’s a huge thing to be explored and we’ll find out more of its mysteries soon. End of the Episode 1. See you next time. \o

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