Habbo Hotel Origins brings the original PC game back to life

Finnish developer Sulake has officially launched Habbo Hotel: Origins on Mac today, reviving the 2005 PC game in all its nostalgic glory. If you never played Habbo Hotel 20 years ago, the game is an online community that is very much a pixelated version of Roblox or Club Penguin where your avatar can chat with your friends in the virtual hotel lobby, spend in-game credits on furniture and accessories, decorate your Guest Room with said digital furniture and invite people over to your Guest Room for a chat. You could also message your friends with a little virtual phone. Now you can experience the game as it was originally made in Habbo Hotel: Origins thanks to the game’s creator Macklebee stumbling across the files by sweet serendipity.

“After discovering an old decrepit server with some long-lost files at the beginning of this year, over the past six months or so long-time Habbo developer and player Macklebee has lovingly restored an old version of Habbo Hotel first released in 2005,” the developer said in a blog post.

Sulake said Habbo Hotel: Origins is developed with a “fresh, community-led approach.” This means they have converted Infobus Park from the original game into a “kind of democratic forum” where they’ll answer players’ questions about the game’s development and direction. Infobus Park was a Public Room that served as a waiting area for players to board the bus, which only operated for a few hours a day.

Habbo Hotel: Origins sets the age limit to create a new account for 18 instead of 13. This is because the chat rooms in the original game were filled with pornographic and graphic messages, as a Channel 4 News reporter discovered while playing the game posing as an 11-year-old girl in 2012. There were also phishing scams, one of which resulted in a Dutch teenager getting arrested for stealing €4,000 worth of virutal furniture. If you played Habbo Hotel back then, you’ll probably want to keep your kids away from this revival.