Well, shit. I was reading about all the old browser games that have disappeared and I started to remember playing a game called
Ponystars way back in the day. Basically, you bred, raised and decorated colourful cartoon ponies. It was so nice and... soft. Very comfortable to play. The graphics made me all nostalgic for when I was a wee lass watching
My Little Pony, and it was such a pleasant game to play. There were things like auctions and such, and special ponies called glitches that were prized and bred, and all sorts of pretty costumes and backgrounds you could put on your ponies. This was way back around 2008. Then there was a huge site revamp. The interface was redesigned, the graphics were mauled, all the characters and costumes converted and the breeding mechanisms completely rewritten. Crucially for many people, including myself, the glitch ponies disappeared. The glitch breeding had a very devoted fanbase and some of them spent a lot of time working out the mathematical equations. A pony's colour was determined by its RGB values, and some people figured out how to seriously fuck with these values, resulting in a seemingly random colour, that would in turn breed a completely random coloured baby. After breeding your ponies, you had to wait a week for them to be born and another week for them to be adults and have their final colours. The game was cute and completely inoffensive. I think in the two or three years I played it I had maybe two people snap at me, and that was because I'd made some newbie mistake.
After the redesign, the interest just wasn't there anymore. I moved on with my life.
Now, during the heyday of
Ponystars there were persistent allegations that the makers of
Ponystars were stealing character designs from a similar game made by a much smaller company, by name of
Pony Island. These allegations were completely true, and the makers and community of
Pony Island were understandably pissed about this, but because
Ponystars was fucking huge they just didn't have the coin to take them to court.
It's so sad but you couldn't have a game like this in the modern day. There were minimal safeguards for the children playing the game, because the developers thought (not unreasonably) that adults wouldn't want to play at all. It eventually grew a sizable amount of players of all ages, and everyone just chilled together. Today the bronies would be a problem certainly, but the biggest problem by far would be that trannies and paedophiles (is there a difference?) would take over the whole thing and just turn it into groomer central. Funnily enough, that's what eventually killed it. Turns out that
Ponystars was in violation of the US COPPA Act for four years, as it was collecting children's data, allowing children to register on the website and post their personal information without their parents' consent or supervision.
Oh dear.
In 2010,
Ponystars disappeared from the internet apparently with very little notice. The original game that
Ponystars was based on was a French game called
Poneyvallee.
Poneyvallee limped on until 2020, by all accounts increasingly buggy and neglected, until the death of Flash Player in 2020 killed it for good.
Goodbye,
Ponystars.
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Incidentally, it turns out that
Pony Island is still running. Might have to check it out.
Sorry, I didn't mean to write a mini essay on this. It just kind of happened. My source for most of this information is
here on Twitter.
