Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! Trick or treat?

The Poptropica Creators have been releasing updates in full swing this week, and there’s one more just announced: a Halloween costume design contest! (They did recently promise more contests.) Check out the details on this Instagram post:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Official Poptropica (@poptropicacreators)

It’s pretty early for Halloween (the holiday falls on October 31)—and yet, the contest closes Friday, September 21 (in two weeks). The winning design will be made into a costume free for everyone in October.

The Creators wrote in a comment that you can enter this contest “any way you like. You can draw new costumes or mix and match from what’s already in Poptropica!”

To enter, simply post your design(s) on Instagram with the tag #PoptropicaHalloween. They’ll probably take entries from other social media too—just be sure to post where they can see it (such as tagging @Poptropica on Twitter). You can also enter multiple times.

Happy creating! 🎃 Be sure to also check out our other posts from this past week below—there’s been lots going on! Keep on popping on.

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Realms

Realms returns—at long last!

September 7, 2018September 7, 2018 Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! Remember Realms, that magical sandbox universe where you could create any landscape of your imagination with a range of tools, textures, and things?

And remember how it just stopped working over a year ago, and has been down ever since? Well, good news: as promised, it’s finally back, by popular demand!

by Happy Lobster (Seraphim)

You can access it via a fancy new portal on Home Island, above the movie theater. So head on over there, say hello to those furry creatures running rampant, and get creating!

realms02

Here on the PHB, we’ve got a comprehensive Poptropica Realms Guide designed to help you get situated with the massive opportunities that lie ahead. From making sense of the Svadilfari hammer to visiting other players’ Realms, we’ve got you covered!

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Bonus Items, Member Gifts, Store

Light a candle for Poptropica’s 11th birthday 🕯 — and many more

September 6, 2018January 9, 2021 Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! We’re burning with some bright news over here. Read on!

September has arrived, which means… the winning design from our header contest is up on the blog? More member gifts? Another round of Community Creations? All of these wonderful things, yes, but one more: it’s Poptropica’s birthday month!

You like that rainbow afro? That and more are in this month’s member gift pack. Not a member? Lots of cool stuff (many for everyone) recently arrived at the store—with rhinos, robots, and more—and one more, as you’ll see below.

Anyway. Happy birthday, Poptropica! We’re pretty thrilled to see Poptropica make it to its 11th year alive, and we hope for great things to come. In fact, that could very well be the case with some recent developments! But more on that in a bit.

To celebrate the occasion, you can now get a Birthday Candle costume for free in the store! But hurry—this candle will burn out of the store when the month is over.

store candle

A couple of noteworthy insights from the Creators were also revealed in the comments of the Instagram post announcing this update.

One Instagram user, supertalkcam, asked if the Creators were abandoning Poptropica Worlds in favor of Pop Original. The Creators replied, “It’s a myth!”

Another user, chillzaj, asked, “Will Poptropica end up shutting down in 2020 due to Flash ending? So we have one more bday party left…?”

The Creators responded, “Poptropica isn’t shutting down – we’re working on new technology that will keep Poptropica around for a long time! #poptropicaforever”

This sounds like some of the behind-the-scenes work that has been keeping Poptropica quietly busy over the past few months at least. The Creators’ Facebook post from December 2017 explaining Poptropica’s relationship to the downfall of Flash, which we posted on the PHB in March, has even been gone for some time now.

Could it be that Poptropica Original will stick around even after 2020, as it gets moved to a newer technology so that it can survive post-Flash? This seems to be the Creators’ plan now, though one they’re still “working on,” so no solid promises yet.

Once again, happy eleventh birthday to our beloved Poptropica. Share your thoughts and congratulations in the comments, and keep on popping on, Poptropicans. 🎈🎊🎂

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PHB Sneak Peeks

Lost items for inspection

September 1, 2018September 4, 2018 Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! It’s Slanted Fish here with a few fun glimpses into parts of Poptropica typically unseen, with thanks to Sleimok and idk for sharing these images.

First up are a couple of lost items of Poptropica! These items didn’t make it into the game, but the backgrounds clue us in on where they were intended: ~~the Petri Dish for Virus Hunter Island (was actually used in the bonus quest)~~, the X-ray Device for Counterfeit Island (which we do use in-game, just not as its own item), and the Snoozing Crepe, also for Counterfeit.

The crepe can be seen in the guard room (the room between the interrogation room and Black Widow’s art gallery). idk adds, “This room’s code contains unused code for a dog character. If I had to guess, this crepe would’ve been used to incapacitate the dog.”

Curious about other lost items of Poptropica we’ve uncovered? Check out this 2014 post and this 2016 post for more!

Can you guys guess where this next one is from?

geyser guess zoomout

If you thought of the Geyser Guess game from Reality TV Island, you’re absolutely right! This is a zoomed-out view, of course, that includes details out of view in the game, like the bird’s nest, or the fact that this geological feature is floating in air.

And one more, from SOS Island…

whale

Whale, that’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed this peek into the underbelly of Poptropica, and as always, keep on popping!

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Advertisements, Sneak Peeks

Lego Island: not yet completed

August 27, 2018August 27, 2018 Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! Leggo see what’s goin’ on with Pop…

Checking in on my friends, polishing my island medallions—wait, hold up. What’s this? A new medallion?? That I don’t have yet??? Are we getting a… Lego Island????

lego

Thanks to Massive Monster for the tip-off about this!

Well, sort of. Our resident glitcher, idk (who also recently made a tool for the ASG), went poking behind-the-scenes into Poptropica’s files to see what was going on.

lego island

Here’s what he told curious Poptropicans on the PHC (our emphases added):

Poptropica will soon be advertising many different types of Lego products. So instead of creating disconnected ad rooms for each one, they’ve created a separate island to contain them all. And because every product line’s ads probably won’t be released simultaneously, it makes sense to create something which can be updated after its launch.

Lego Island just consists of a Main Street scene containing a door to an ad scene. It currently only contains an ad for Lego City, but there are a couple of unused item cards for Lego Star Wars. It doesn’t have a medallion so [I don’t know] why it showed up in the medallion list. The Main Street scene has an asset from [the canceled] Water Thrill Island though, so that’s neat.

The asset from Water Thrill Island, for the unreleased Lego Island

So, that’s all we know so far about Lego Island: it won’t be a full-fledged official island like we know of them, but just a series of ads lumped together on one (probably temporary) island, to come in the near future. And there might be a water slide.

In other news, don’t forget you have until the end of this week to enter our PHB Header Design Contest and our Community Creations for August! Leggo!

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