Mini Friday

Sulake experimented with games for mobile phones before. Mini Friday was “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.” And for this, they turned to even more basic pixels than Habbo Hotel (but a bit more advanced style than Mobiles Disco had). Online since November 2006 and after running for 2+ years, conclusion, 1 million accounts, it’s a viable project. In 2009 its follow-up, Bobba Bar was made public. September 30, 2010, Mini Friday closed.

The experiment included testing features, user attention, scalability and all that. It did not include checking if people were wanting to donate some micro-payments (the way Habbo nowadays makes profit and their intention for Bobba Bar too) to enrich their stay. Not even possible, would have to keep it online when doing, which was not intention. This seems a not fully ‘done’ assignment yet, more at our Sulake page.

Claims for fame ? We do know, by his own words, coding was done on core of Habbo Islands, hence Jetro Lauha left a mark on it. We also know (übercool) character design, maybe more, was done by Tuukka Savolainen. He left the company somewhere in 2005, so preparations were long.