Habbo Hotel occupies a strange place in the mind—the same dusty corner of my brain where Runescape and Miniclip reside. I played it at a time where I was still quite small and, like many memories from my childhood, it's fuzzy beyond belief.
I have such misty memories of bumbling around those hallowed halls and having bizarre interactions with strangers. So when its developer announced earlier this week that it had restored the game to those halcyon days, I had to check it out. Similarly, the Picnic Garden proudly says that the Underage Festival Live will be taking place all day on August 8—the Underage Festival was an outdoor music festival in London, open to the ages of 13-17, that had its last outing in 2011.Heading into the welcome lounge, I see a flood of excited, similarly nostalgia-wracked Habbo-heads busting a move. A person named"CANNABIS" asks everyone how they are. Pretty good, CANNABIS, thank you for asking.
Controllable cites a few things that removed"the novelty and charm" of the original game:"Removing the iconic public rooms during the end of the Shockwave client era in 2009, the merger of all the English-speaking hotels into one flagship hotel on Habbo.com in 2010 … removing"gambling" from the game in 2014, and the end of life of the Flash client in January 2021."