Habbo Hotel: Origins is a delightfully strange and chaotic time capsule from the internet of the early 2000s—and a fresh start for a game marred by controversy

Habbo Hotel occupies a strange place in the mind—the same dusty corner of my brain where Runescape and Miniclip reside. I played it at a time where I was still quite small and, like many memories from my childhood, it's fuzzy beyond belief.

For those unfamiliar Habbo Hotel is, by technical definition, an MMO without the RPG—a MMOG, if you will. It was first released in Finland at the dawn of the millennium, before making its way to English-speaking territories circa 2004-2005.

Architecturally, Habbo Hotel is a chat room—but it became a lot more than that to its players. Spawning from an age of innovation where most kids had to beg their parents to get them a WoW subscription or Runescape membership, Habbo players quickly began using the game as a platform for mazes, minigames, and roleplay. It was a sandbox that was technically an inch deep, but players still built castles in it.

And now it's back, baby. As outlined in a press announcement, «after discovering an old decrepit server with some long-lost files … long-time Habbo developer and player Macklebee has lovingly restored an old version of Habbo Hotel first released in 2005». It's still a project with official backing, just to make things clear—it runs out of the official Habbo launcher, where you can access the games' modern counterpart.

I have such misty memories of bumbling around those hallowed halls and having bizarre interactions with strangers. So when its developer announced earlier this week that it had restored the game to those halcyon days, I had to check it out.

I waited for the servers to open at 3PM BST yesterday—and the moment they did, I tried to sign up. This didn't quite go to plan. See, the game was so very popular that Saluke's email servers tanked, and it took about an hour for mine to come through. I tried to proceed without my email code, but the client told me my email was «not acceptable,» and then asked me to find my parents to see if they'd let me play. I'm old enough to drink with