Code Lyoko
Four boarding-school kids, a supercomputer in an abandoned factory, and a virtual world under attack by a rogue AI. The French import where every episode could end with a 'Return to the Past' — and only the heroes remembered any of it.
#Virtual Worlds
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Gaia Online
An anime-styled forum where your dressed-up chibi avatar appeared next to every post, and where browsing, posting and playing games earned the gold to dress it. In 2007 its members were making more than a million posts a day.
Habbo Hotel
A giant isometric pixel-art hotel you checked into as a blocky avatar — decorating rooms with "furni," chatting in the lobby, and guarding the virtual pool. One of the first massively popular online social worlds built for teenagers.
Millsberry
General Mills' cereal-box virtual town: make a character, earn Millsbucks, furnish a house, and play arcade games named for Reese's Puffs and Lucky Charms. Millsberry ran from 2004 to 2010, the fullest advergame of its era, and signed off by handing every citizen a yearbook.
Second Life
A world with no levels, no quests, and no way to win — just land you could buy and a currency you could cash out for real money. For about two years in the mid-2000s, Second Life was going to be the future, and every news network, embassy and corporation piled in to say so. It is still running, which surprises people.
Toontown Online
Disney's kid-safe MMO let kids become a cartoon dog or duck and fight the Cogs, gray robot businessmen, with cream pies and seltzer bottles. Toontown Online launched June 2, 2003, at $9.95 a month, kept chat to a menu of approved phrases, and closed on September 19, 2013, which is roughly when the fans started rebuilding it themselves.
Zwinky
Dress up a big-headed cartoon version of yourself, paste it on your MySpace, then wander Zwinktopia earning Zbucks for new outfits. Zwinky was the avatar craze of the mid-2000s — and, thanks to the browser toolbar it came bundled with, the thing that got a lot of family computers a stern talking-to.