The English Habbo Hotel opened in 2001, "a chill-out space where you can hang out with your friends", as its front page put it, "primarily for teens in the UK". Co-founder Aapo Kyrölä on the opening: "It's a pretty neat feeling, when people start to stream into an empty Hotel."
By July the hotel's own newsletter wrote: "with thousands and thousands of new and existing habbos coming into the hotel every day, we're getting a little overwhelmed. So you may have noticed us rebooting our servers a little more often."
The fix, 3 August 2001: "Seems it is 751. 750 or less is just fine and dandy. Or at least this is what the Habbo Hotel techies reckon - they've put a temporary limit on the number of Habbos allowed in the hotel at a time. This should help keep the hotel running smoothly while we prepare our hulking great new servers." And the advice: "Pop to the loo, make a cuppa ... and try again in a few minutes - there's lots of comings and goings at Habbo Hotel".
Why count heads? Unlike a web page, Habbo used "persistent real-time connections", as the hotel's help page put it: every guest inside held a line open. On 1 August 2001 the page that started the game sent it to one server address.
It was temporary: on 9 December 2001, the hotel's own list of who was online named 1,040 Habbos at once.
The 750 counted the whole hotel at its front door, not one room. The lobby, the guests and the comings and goings in this film are our own simplified version, drawn in code: the arrivals and stays are ours, only the 750 and the address are the hotel's. Its furniture is from the hotel's classic years, a little after 2001.
Which game last kept you waiting outside a full server?
Sources: Habbo Hotel Happenings (the hotel's newsletter), 20 July and 3 August 2001, Habborator archive; the hotel's own pages, Wayback Machine: front page and game page (August 2001), online list and help page (December 2001); Aapo Kyrölä, Habbo Käsikirja (2006, fan translation).
Sounds and music: our own, made in code.
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