Web retrospective: Mumseby (1999-2003)

What would you say if I told you the biggest social media site in 2002 was owned by a chocolate manufacturer? It wouldn't sound plausible at all, would it? Yet it's true and I was part of it. The name of this blog is even related to it.

Back around y2k, the Flash Player was the big thing. As you can guess from the name of this blog, I was quite into it. I was the owner and editor of Flashmagazine.com and I was the manager of the agency called Netron, specializing in interactive experiences for the web. But for this story to make any sense - I first need to explain to the non-norwegians an important thing!

What is Bamsemums?

According to Wikipedia, “Bamsemums is a bear shaped chocolate-covered marshmallow candy created by the chocolate factory Bouquet d'Or, in Ascq, France”. The Norwegian chocolate maker Nidar started making it in 1975. It is a special candy in that it has a target group that is divided in two:

• kids that are old enough to not make a mess of the chocolate covering. These will eventually think it's a candy for kids, so they'll stop eating it when they grow up.
• When they're old enough to get their own kids, they'll start eating the chocolate again.

I recently got a quite random email from someone that used to be a Mumseby citicen, looking for information. She had found a mention in one of my books on Flash and said I was her last thread. I guess she was lucky? She said that she really missed Mumseby and considered it a sad bit of “lost media” on the internet. Now, you obviously cannot play back Flash properly any more, but using the Wayback Machine, she had found a couple of the old games that were on the site. They do work when using Ruffle, but it's a long shot of the 100+ FPS that the Flash Player would have. And yes. The name of this blog comes from the fact that I've made many hundred small marketing games like this (and a few larger one's as well).

Anyway - she was looking for screenshots as she was gathering information on Mumseby and I told here that I likely had some screenshots on an old backup. I figured that I could publish these screenshots without breaking any rules, so here it is?

The road to Mumseby

My firm Netron was approached by Bennett, an ad agency in Trondheim. Their customer Nidar wanted to use Flash to do inventive marketing and the idea was to find a way to make people want to dive into the (marketing) story of Bamsemums. The coolest thing we had seen at the time was Habbo Hotel (Apparently, Habbo still exists!), so we pitched making an interactive city for Bamsemums. This was back in 1999.

After some back and forth, the agency said yes to the idea and my friend & co-owner Ragnar Haug started sketching out concepts for what was initially called Bamseby. The agency Bennett would do most of the storytelling and the backend work (ASP.NET). Netron would do the interaction and artwork. It was a great collaborative project, but we eventually found out that the agency had taken all the credit with the customer. We still had a blast working on this and our work on the project later garnered us several large clients.

Mumseby tour!

The city was an interactive application hosted on the domain mumseby.no. It popped up as it's own window, so you could keep browsing in the main window with Mumseby on the side. As was common in the days of Flash, some preloading was required. We spent that time showing some initial information about your trip to Mumseby:

Once the preload was finished, you got to a intro screen explaining how the experience would work as either registered or as a tourist:

You then got to a login screen. Over the years the site was active, there was around 400 000 members to the site! 

You then got to the app/experience itself. You would always start at this overview screen (Byporten). Here it's winter:

We added a day and night mode, so the site would reflect the time you logged on.

Here it's autumn:

When hovering above a building, a bubble would pop up with the name of that building. If you clicked, you'd enter that building/feature. In addition, there was a menu on the side that did the same thing. There was also the interactive thingy in the lower right corner. It held your list of friends and the site navigation. Messages would pop up there as well - just like a personal navigator.

But let's get into the features of the site! The core feature was the University. If you enrolled here, you could become a student in Mumseby. You'd be quizzed on fun facts about Bamsemums as well as straight up marketing. For some reason, people loved learning about the lives of these chocolate bears?

If I remember correctly, there was 3 levels to the University. Each block of “knowledge” would unlock new features in the site. The Student apartments were initially quite sparse, but you could customize them as you progressed at the university and earned points. A central spot was the Town Square (Torget). Here you'd find posts about what was new on the site. This is the daytime winter version:

And here is the autumn version at night of the same place:

There was a bakery (Konditori) where competitions were posted:

There was a postal office where you could send postcards to your friends:

That feature helped recruit lots of new visitors to the site. The pub was the (obvious) place to chat with people:

The chat feature was implemented as a serverside file that new posts were appended to. All the Flash app did was to reload that file at intervals as well as sending new lines of text to be appended.

And in the cinema, you could watch Bamsemums movies:

There was even it's own souvenir shop!

Games were swapped out over the seasons, and most of these were simple but fun games. The primary limit for these games were always the budget we were given. Making games was my primary hobby at the time, so very often we'd re-skin a game that I had already made. Here is the Lunar Lander style game called Operasjon Mumsedyp.

The end of Mumseby

I do not know the details of how and why the site was closed. This was around the time the DOT.com bubble burst and as mentioned, we didn't talk to the customer directly. This was all handled by the agency. I have heard that the closing was related to things found in the loaded text files from the chat rooms, but I honestly do not know. With 400k users, you're bound to have some rotten eggs. I don't see it as unlikely that they eventually got afraid of something blowing up in the media and reflecting badly on the brand. One have to remember that Mumseby was just a marketing vehicle for candy, despite also being the most successful social media site of it's time in Norway?

I've seen several reminiscing about their good old times in Mumseby. Would it be possible to bring it back they say.

Would it be possible to bring it back? I could probably dig out the original Adobe Flash source files from backups, but I don't have the server files. Then it's the whole thing with Adobe Flash. It's not working and Ruffle does not cut it. One could of course use the source files to recreate the experience as a HTML web app, but I doubt the files on the server still exist or would even work? Remaking it could have been a fun project, but it certainly would take time and money. Not something you'd do on your spare time.

The agency Bennett is now Norway's oldest advertising agency. They still exist, but they're currently just a handful of people. Netron on the other hand is doing really well. They've spun off several firms while staying true to their creative vision. Among fun things to watch - they've created one of the largest LED screens in Norway for Virtual Productions in film & advertising. Ragnar is still doing art & music and I've switched to making hardware & firmware. It is very true that so much of the web history is lost and I'd love to see others share info from when websites were fun, quirky and didn't all look the same? Ping me and I'll post them below!