Habborator Hotel History
First Habbo hotel, in Finland, came online August 2000. Seven years later we’re nearing 20th version of the ‘engine’ that makes Habbo spin. As much fun it is to see which furniture is released elsewhere/around the world, it’s great fun to see what changed over time. Take these:
… only been available in Finland, which hotel had a deal with ‘Mountain Dew’, a soda brand. Deal ended, and as a result we now have the - changed - colamachine and poster (and the sofa that came along now is the HC sofa). In other words, owners of above now see/have the colamachine (and -poster) that have been available in most hotels now.
Following shows some of Habbo Hotels’ history. Used screenshots are mostly not made by us - we weren’t there, much had changed before more international hotels went online. Important sources were Nerokala (Finnish site, saw it all, but now under construction or lost interest ?) and Habbox (English hotel started februari 2001 (history pages currently offline…)).
Habbo hotel is what has become of the experiments of two Finnish guys, Aapo Kyrölä (habbo alias: Kyrpov) -
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and Sampo Karjalainen (habbo alias: Apparatus) -
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One predecessor of the hotel they created was ‘Mobiles Disco’ -
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for the finnish (rap)band ‘Mobiles’, in 1999. You could create a character and chat at the bar. A succes, the originally Finnish rooms were swamped with foreigners, so they had to create a seperate international version. Next was an online game, Lumisota or ‘SnowWar’ -
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and a more expanded online chat, ‘MChat’ -
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This was followed by what is now known as Habbo Hotel Finland, but then was called ‘Hotelli Kultakala’ (Hotel Goldfish) and part of a ‘portal’ page of an internetprovider (Elisa) -
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With the help of investers they founded Sulake.
‘Sulake’ is the Finnish word for FUSE, also the name they gave the technology which drives Habbo Hotel, which was developed by both Fins. Sampo Karjalainen these days is ‘Chief Creative Officer’ at Sulake, Aapo Kyrölä is former Managing Director, now ‘Board Member’, which seems involved at a little more distance.
The name ‘Habbo Hotel’ arose when there was an interest from UK. Dee ‘Daisy’ Edwards founded ‘Habbo Limited’, had Sulake make an English version, earned a lot of money, and later sold the company/concept back to Sulake. Who had their product in their own hands again, and would make much more out of it ;). Some screenshots from this era (UK/FI):
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Economic note #1. All projects this far were assignments, for an internet provider, telecom company and such. Still companies like that invest (much) money in Sulake, get a share of the company (I’m reading 26% is still in hands of both founders and the CEO (chief executive officer), Timo Soininen -
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Having bought back the concept Sulake now had the medium, hotel in itself, as an independent venture. Companies can use that medium. Like in Holland the hotel is co-exploited by TTG (Telegraaf Tijdschriften Groep), publisher of Hitkrant and CosmoGIRL!, same target group, and we see these back in advertising and such.
Sulake has done similar projects for Disney - Magic Kingdom
- and Coca Cola - Coke Music
, but focus now lies completely with Habbo Hotel. There’s gonna be more hotels, profit from current hotels is expected to grow, and the Habbo brand is already expanded to mobile games and will expand more. Talking about mobile games, an attempt to create a virtual world for mobile phones is Mini Friday:
. Sulake: “a small research project on virtual worlds on mobile phones. We are trying to find out if real-time virtual worlds make sense on mobile devices.” You can see it’s done by creators of Habbo.
Economic note #2. In 2007 Sulake majorly re-organized its company. Explosive growth of last years seems stopped, reason for some users to declare the decline of Habbo. But the growth it had is not sustainable forever. If it stops, though, any company needs to re-think things, naturally. There’s been heavily cut to keep the company healthy, less staff, but also offices in Switzerland, Sweden and Norway closing. Chinese hotel closed completely (not necessarily driven by economic reasons (only), though), Canada still in but trimmed, whether Russian hotel survives is a question still and plans for new hotels seem frozen for now. Serious ? Mwah. Finland, UK, Netherlands, Spain (!) and other hotels running like before. A little less users perhaps, but the concept is not dead at all (mostly being said by people being bored, might be aging, time to go play something else, mmm ?). Strengthen succesful branches, cut weak sections seems the motto, and that might just be healthy for the company. It was also the year IRC-Galleria was aquired, btw. But that’s not of interest (yet), how about the pixels ?
Version differences
In general, there’s two types of changes being done to rooms, furniture, etc. First is improvement as is; look below to see how some furniture ranges evolved and got expanded. The second kind you won’t see much anymore, it’s ‘de-branding’ furniture. In the past, furniture was released with brand names on it, and rooms were, and are, too. When the deal ended, things had to be changed. ‘Mountain Dew machine’ became Habbo Cola, the ‘Lego’ logo removed from the basket, ‘Nike tick’ from the football lamp. Advertising screens are way more easy to change, as well as roomnames. And as for rare competition prizes, there’s enough unreleased rare furniture to choose from. Pick a fitting one (like a green fan was deemed properly for a ‘Fructis’ competition). When deal ends, most that has to be done is change the item name. Branding rooms we see done again much more last year, mostly as part of extensive and long campaigns.
These days almost monthly a new version is introduced. In the past it seemed the even versions were mostly safety/maintainence releases, while the odd versions brought new stuff. Like a lot of rare furniture came with v7, v9 brought multiple new public rooms, bigger private rooms, asian furniture. v10 went through unnoticed, then v11 brought another batch of public rooms, major changes and expansion of normal furniture (Area, Iced, Mode) and new rare furniture (moonpatch and more). Nowadays no update is a revolution anymore, but things are being introduced gradually, one change at a time.
Other big changes over time were the introduction of new games, BattleBall (+BB2) and SnowStorm (based on the old ‘Lumisota’), and the introduction of personal pages on the homepage (customizable, and yes, it’s free, but additional things can be purchased), groups and tags. For details check our ‘fact sheets’.
Catalogue
Look at the catalogue icon in your toolbar. It has tabs on top - a relic of an old version of the catalogue: 
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Toolbar
First hotel versions didn’t have the options we’re used to these days. There was a time there were no private rooms. You could walk around, chat and send messages, so the toolbar was simple.
Private rooms came to be, and with that the catalogue to furnish them. Pretty soon this version of the toolbar will have been followed by the next. Financing before will have been done with ads and games, but now we’re talking about virtual - paid for - furniture and with that comes the need to offer support. The ‘Wallet’ and ‘Call for help’ icons are a logical expansion - customer is king.
Meanwhile, the ‘Navigation’ icon was a representation of the English hotel, when more international hotels arrived this was replaced with current icon, though Swiss, Japanese and maybe other hotels had to live with it.
The new icon is somewhat incongruous, not being ‘isometric’ like the others.
Then, with introduction of Trax, also the ‘Mute’ button is introduced. For this the icons needed to be a bit closer to eachother, so there’s little space for new icons. New functions like the ‘Tutorial’ for new users (aborted after a while) are being implemented differently.
Version 21 solved this space problem by making the Mute and Help icons smaller and stacking them, and introduced the ‘Events’ button.
Version 22 has less space problems anymore, as the hotel went widescreen (still, smallscreen option inside for people on lower resolutions). We’re seeing a major update to most of the existing icons, and a new - chat - icon being introduced.
And v24 introduces, with games becoming free, a new ‘joystick’ icon to get you the BB2/Snowstorm dialogs. To make room, purse got integrated into the catalogue, as is its icon.
Furniture I - Changes
Whenever a new version gets installed on your hotel, your furniture can have been changed. No worries, it’s usually for the better. Area (or Silo, as is its original name in Finnish) got some major changes over time (click any chair for an overview):
The ‘Iced’ line of furniture follows a very similar path:
In the past, also the Plasto furniture had a slightly different look. It's unchanged in v11, besides the fact it will now internationally be named ‘Plastic’ instead. Some other items, like Aloë Vera, post christmas tree and mistletoe were updated around v7 too. Besides the noted updates, v11 also will see recolors of the ‘Mode’ furniture, including pink bars, so ‘Candy’ will be just a full pink version.
And while, to conclude, this is a history page, changes are going on all the time. If you’re on a v11 hotel, v12 will change color of dragon screen/corner (now to match Asian furniture ánd marquees/wooden screens). A not even released item before it got changed is the Gothic torch.
Posters
Like some other furniture needed to be de-branded, quite a lot of posters had to be changed over time. Click on the old poster to see its current version:
Furniture II - Removed items
Via Habbox forum (screenshots are bad quality). Why some of the candles and the single mode column are gone is not really clear. The chess and tic tac toe boards were working games, only released in Finland (and scripted in UK). These were buggy, caused errors in games and rooms.
Trivia
…are little facts, fun to know. Did you know:
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In an old version of the cinema, you could dress yourself at stage (?)
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Removed because this could be scripted and people were walking dressed up throughout the whole hotel;
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Also the stickies looked different in the past:
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With former versions of the console you could send an sms, create a profile to make your interests public and messages could be saved:
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