The man who never left Habbo Hotel
For almost 20 years, James has lived on a website many people considered a fad.
The very first time James smoked weed, he went online to tell all of his friends. He didn’t connect with them via Facebook, or Twitter, or Snapchat, or any of the other bright little squares that are never more than two taps of a phone screen away. Instead, he chatted with them inside the highly-pixelated virtual world of Habbo Hotel. If you’re a millennial, it’s likely you’ve spent more than a few hours collecting furniture and decorating rooms in the hotel, which launched in 2000 and boasted six million monthly users by 2007. It’s likely you have fond memories that can be triggered by long-forgotten words: bobba, furni, creds.
Perhaps you spent one long summer holiday on Habbo Hotel, maybe two. Perhaps you are one of the thousands of people who returned to the hotel this year, after lockdown limited our offline lives. In April, the Finnish entertainment company behind the game, Sulake, reported a tripling of traffic, with a 213% growth in users in just two months. Although Habbo disappeared from many of our lives in the mid-noughties, the website never actually went down. Which begs the question: is there anyone out there who never left the hotel?
James has played Habbo Hotel for nearly 17 years. On 9 July 2003, a 13-year-old James (now a 30-year-old local government worker in the North West of England) logged on to Habbo.co.uk and created the digital alter ego that he would maintain for more than half of his life. James played the game consistently from 2003 to 2016, and over the last four years has continued to log on once every other month (though not religiously). In just under two decades, he has spent £1,000 on credits to use in the hotel (Habbo Coins can be exchanged for furniture and exclusive memberships, and many players like to gamble in the game’s virtual casinos). During James’ time on Habbo, he has made and lost friends. He has bought and sold virtual furniture. He has scammed and been scammed.
“For me, Habbo came at a particularly tumultuous time in my life,” James tells me over the phone in early June. He has the clean and crisp voice of a school teacher, and though I don’t know what he looks like, I can tell you his Habbo has a fetching blonde ponytail. When James was a teenager, his parents divorced and he briefly went into care. “I didn’t realise it at the time but in later years I came to understand that Habbo was a constant for me. I could be in a different house, I could be at the other end of a huge change in my life that shook everything that I had – my real world belongings might have been changed and people that I lived with were different – but actually, Habbo was the same.”
James was first drawn to Habbo for the same reasons many of us were – he signed up before the summer holidays to stay in touch with friends and enjoyed the game’s bustling economy, blocky aesthetic, and the opportunity to meet people from across the globe. Though his real-world friends stopped playing after about a year, James would stay up late at night chatting with older teens from Philadelphia, Switzerland, and Singapore. In August 2012, Habbo revealed 90% of its users were aged between 13 and 18, although a 2007 study found a quarter of Finnish children aged between ten and 15 played the game. That year, when James was 17, he first started to enjoy celebrity visits – over the years he has sort-of stood in the same sort-of room as the Gorillaz, McFly, and Ozzy Osbourne.
When James went to university, his gameplay changed. He stopped collecting furniture (such as rare thrones and birdbaths in every colour) and would instead frequent 18+ and 21+ rooms to chat with others about philosophical topics (around this time, he also stopped typing “you” as “u”). James says he suffered from social anxiety at university and found face-to-face interaction and boisterous real-life parties “very intense”.
“More often than not I needed a break from it all and preferred the safer, more controllable, more anonymous halls of the hotel,” he says (he added his Habbo friends on Facebook and sometimes chatted to them on Skype to ensure they were all around the same age as him). Sometimes he would log in after nights out, “pissed out of his face”, to chat with friends – other times, he stayed up playing until 6am when he should’ve been writing his dissertation.
“It’s funny how 2011, 2012 doesn’t seem that far away, but culturally it was, in terms of the acceptance of mental health issues,” James says. “I didn’t even recognise that I had issues that were stopping me from progressing socially or in my course. I just knew that I felt better when I reached out to strangers on Habbo.”
James isn’t the only person who has stayed on Habbo Hotel for nearly two decades, but he was one of the only people willing to talk to me. Although Habbo Forums prove the game has many older players, James hasn’t told many IRL friends about his Habbo habit (though when he was 22, he had a girlfriend who would sometimes play with him). “It’s kind of like having a Barbie collection when you’re in your twenties,” he says. “There might be good psychoanalytical reasons why you have that collection… but to other people it looks a bit strange.”
James’ longest friendship on Habbo has lasted 14 years, and he is currently enjoying a Facebook Habbo Reunion group where people reminisce about Habbo allowing them to express their gender and sexual identity at a time they couldn’t in real life. James stopped logging onto Habbo frequently in 2016 – when new responsibilities came into his life – but he believes the hotel taught him about cultures, languages, and data protection (his computer was once hacked in the middle of the night by another Habbo user who spookily opened his disc drive from afar). During the pandemic, he has begun playing more regularly again and plans to continue until the end of the year.
“For me, it was a second life almost,” James explains of the long-lasting appeal of Habbo Hotel. “It was an anchor in a world where I felt quite powerless really. It was quite a powerful thing to me.”
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