Habbo Hotel

Habbo grew out of a 1999 hobby project by two Finns, Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä, and launched in 2000 as "Hotelli Kultakala" (Hotel Goldfish); the international, English-language Habbo Hotel followed in beta by January 2001. Run by the company Sulake, it was a browser-based social world rendered in charming isometric pixel art and aimed squarely at teenagers.

Players wandered public rooms as customizable avatars and built private guest rooms out of "furni" — virtual furniture bought with Habbo Credits, which cost real money. It drew users from more than 150 countries and became notorious for organized griefing raids, most infamously the 2006 "pool's closed" invasions, where crowds of identical avatars swarmed in to block off the pool.

In June 2012, a Channel 4 News investigation exposed explicit chat slipping past the moderators, and Sulake briefly muted chat across the entire service before gradually restoring it. Habbo kept going — by 2025 it counted over 300 million total registered accounts — but for millennials it's frozen in the mid-2000s: the pixel lobby, the credits, and the endless, mysterious drama around the pool.