Category: Islands

Big Nate Island, Creators, Fan Art Features, Social Media

Coming out with fan art and Fiona’s song 🎻

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! In this post: a TikTok video and fan art features with sweet jams. Plus, a hint at something big to come. Let’s pop right to it!

The Pop Creators finally made their second TikTok video after opening their account back in April. The new clip showcases the Pride costumes released this week in the store, with Diana Ross’s ’80s banger “I’m Coming Out” playing in the background. 🏳️‍🌈✨

Poptropica also shared the video on their Instagram story to promote their TikTok handle @poptropicacreator.

Also on their Instagram story, Poptropica shared tons of fan art! One particularly noteworthy post is happyclonetrooper’s sheet music for Fiona’s violin song from Ghost Story Island. Although she acknowledges it’s been done before, this is one melodious masterpiece that’ll never get old! 🎻 (Click to enlarge the pics below.)

In other news, Jess Brallier’s blog isn’t done with Poptropica just yet! His most recent post shares the story of selling the Big Nate series to book publishers, citing the success of Poptropica’s Big Nate Island.

Opening Nate’s locker on Big Nate Island.

At one point, Big Nate, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Poptropica’s Mystery of the Map held down three of the top five slots on the New York Times bestseller list.  I was the happiest publisher in the world.

Jess Brallier

Hold on for tomorrow’s post from the former Poptropica CEO, which will tackle the big topic on our minds: “What about today’s Poptropica?”

Tomorrow brings one more big event we have to mention before we wrap up: the PHB’s Pride Palooza! Join us Friday, June 18 at 8 pm Eastern in Poptropica’s Arcade and wear the colors of the rainbow. 🌈

We’ll also hang out on the PHC and in the PHB comments. See you there, loud and proud Poptropicans! 💖

~🐠

Advertisements, Big Nate Island, Creators

The biggest kids’ site hosts Big Nate and more greats, as told by Jess Brallier

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, we’re back with more reflections on what made Poptropica successful from longtime publisher Jess Brallier.

Previously, we shared the former Pop CEO’s insights on “storytelling, games, and Poptropica.” This week he released two more blog posts about the subject: “The Internet’s largest kids site!” and “Big Nate!“

So we’re having a blast with Poptropica.  Telling unexpected stories via a gaming literacy, exceeding budget targets, employing good people, having fun. We started our storytelling with Early Poptropica and Shark Tooth Island in 2007.

Jess Brallier

In that first post, Jess recounts how Time magazine listed Poptropica as one of the “50 Websites that Make the Web Great” (this was in 2011).

Jess goes on to share about Poptropica’s carefully planned and well executed business strategy, “conceived to serve both kids and advertisers” before a line of code was ever written for the game.

As I’ve said before—and I’m often the lone voice on this—having the right advertisers fund the delivery of great content to kids is a good thing.  I had zilch interest in a publishing strategy that was purposely confined to kids with parents wealthy enough to afford a subscription.

Jess Brallier

Next, Jess quotes generously from a 2020 article written by Arian Tomar titled “Why Poptropica Mattered,” posted on a site called Voices of Gen-Z. Here’s a snippet from that reflective piece:

Poptropica changed my life. If I’m being honest, I think it influenced many young people more than we acknowledge… To me, Poptropica represents an internet full of stories, exploration, connection, and advertising, a microcosm of the essential parts of the internet.

Arian Tomar

Anyway, on with the main point of Jess’s post: for a time, Poptropica was the largest kids’ site on the internet!

The news was nervously given to him one morning in late 2008 by Poptropica’s marketing director, Kim Regan. They didn’t blast the news right away as they wanted to make sure it was true. But sure enough, Poptropica’s numbers had grown bigger than Disney’s Club Penguin and Nickelodeon’s Nicktropolis, two other hugely popular virtual worlds at the time. (And Poptropica outlived them, too!)

It was all so incredibly satisfying.  This quiet, caring, hard-working, respectful, unknown group of talented and good people went up against Nickelodeon and Disney and kicked their butts. 

And they did it by telling stories—great writing, great art, great design—when all the experts confidently screamed that kids wanted nothing to do with stories on their computer screens.  By 2012, story-based Poptropica had 500+ million registered users from around the world.

A good story, once again, won the day.

Jess Brallier

Now let’s turn to Big Nate, which began as a comic strip and now has a pretty popular narrative-and-art hybrid book series. But before the book series, there was the Poptropica island.

Poptropica’s official tour page for Big Nate Island when it first released in 2009.

Poptropica Creator Jeff Kinney knew Lincoln Peirce, the creator of Big Nate, and figured it would be a good match, as he and Jess were looking for brilliant content outside of Poptropica to add to the game.

One of Jeff’s and my notions was to introduce content on Poptropica that did not first originate on Poptropica.  Why limit all those kids to discovering only what our writers came up with? …Wow, doing that would make Poptropica all the more powerful, inclusive, and all-serving.

Jess Brallier
The first Big Nate comic strip

Jess loved the idea (and the brilliance of comic strip creators), and they met with Lincoln and decided to give it a try.

Two months later, late morning on a Friday, we launched “Big Nate Island.” By midnight, two million different kids had played it.  Seriously!

Jess Brallier

Two million is impressive, but what else stands out is the fact that it took just two months to dream of and create an island! A far cry from the snail’s pace of island releases these days…

Anyway, the success of the island confirms Jess’s hunch that there’s a unique kind of book for all those comics. But that’s another story!

~🐠

Fairy Tale Island, Fanfiction, Guest Posts

Fairytale Fanfic Challenge: Dangerous Dragon

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, this is a guest post by Dangerous Dragon, made before the winners of the Fairytale Fanfic Challenge were announced yesterday. Enjoy!

  • Dangerous Dragon

Hi, DD here! I know everyone is sad about the old islands being gone, and I am too. At least we got a new one this year, Fairytale Island.

I think it rocked! Still, it wasn’t at its full potential. Yeah it got modern and I liked that the creators put cutscenes but it lacked gameplay. They could keep the cutscenes but also add more asking dialogue, like old times, plus add item collecting!

Don’t worry, I’m going to imagine extra stuff for the island. Remember the Fairytale Fanfic Challenge? Here’s what I shared with the creators:

Where did Rumpelstiltskin disappear to? Will he ever return?

So here he has gotten free after troubling every fairy tale. Back on his home planet, he has a secret army! He is training his army to come back and attack every fairy tale further.

What does the prince’s fate hold? Will he have to get a job?!

Since his father has disappeared (for now), he has no choice but to move on from his royal past and become a normal person. You’ll see him working clumsily, as he has never done housework before. Sad sad prince… FOR NOW.

What comes of the new happy endings for Red, Snow, and Cinder?

Red’s got some babies to take care of… pizza-eating babies!

Oh, Snow White? She’s gone to college to study different animals!

And Cinder’s doing a concert at PoptropiCon. She’s famous now!

What friendship blossoms between Little Red Riding Hood and the Seven Dwarves?

They all are happy. Red and the dwarves are working together to make pizza now, since the dwarves love it!

Does Snow White open her veterinary practice?

She’s started practicing on hamsters, dogs, cats, and other small animals, but she’s still studying how to care for the bigger ones!

Do the Huntsman and Cinderella fall in love? Hopefully the Huntsman’s left behind his homicidal hijinx…

The Huntsman goes to Grandma and apologizes for his mistake. He also gives her a wedding card… to celebrate his and Cinderella’s love! It seems like Cinder’s attention is not only on her music, but also her soon-to-be husband!

And what did Rumplestilskin do with the real king?

He is his slave now! Now the king is helping Rumple, sadly, but he wants to escape because he knows what a GREAT DISASTER is coming their way… THE GIRLS ARE HAPPY AND SAFE… FOR NOW.

What happens next is up to your imagination! Now, here are a few other ideas I had for gameplay on Fairytale Island…

🍕 Making pizza with Red: So instead of just starting the mini quest delivering the pizza, what if we would get to first find the ingredients inside a kitchen and then assemble a pizza?

📘 Finding a book for Snow White’s vet dream: Maybe along your adventures, you get a book from someone who was a vet, and later, you can give it to Snow to start her journey.

💄 Getting the lipstick as a real item: You get it in your backpack. Instead of Amelia telling you everything… you get a little suspicious. Then you discover that in the mountains, there lives a wizard who knows the difference between a good spell and a bad one. There’s another side-quest where you find this wizard, and when you find him, you show him the lipstick and he tells you it’s a trick. Then, going back to Snow, you find her “true love” (goat).

👗 Spending more time with Cinder: More parts to the journey with Cinder would be fun. Let’s say something happens to her dress, hair, makeup, and so on… you go through a few stages to get her closer and closer to the ball… and by the end, she becomes the fuming Cinder we know and love!

Thank you for reading! I liked the island, and I hope you like my opinions! If it won the Fairytale Fanfic Challenge, I would have tears in my eyes!

Keep Poppin,
DD 💜

Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Dangerous Dragon. If you did, you might also enjoy getting to know him in his Popular Poptropican interview!

The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. Interested in writing for the PHB? We’d love to hear from you! 📰✨

Contests, Fairy Tale Island, Fanfiction

Fans deliver fantastic Fairytale fanfics 📚 ✨

Purple Paw

A little over two weeks ago, the Creators made a call for the Pop fandom to write and submit their own alternative endings for Fairytale Island—and, unsurprisingly, you knocked this contest out of the park!

Similar to the results of the Dream Island Contest, the Creators had trouble choosing just one entry, and instead ended up featuring four (very deserving) winning submissions.

Congratulations to Speedy Eagle, Mighty Fox, Slippery Sword, and Tall Cactus (from the PHC) on winning the Fairytale Fanfic Challenge! From the origins of Rumplestiltskin’s name, to the reveal of the real king, to an explanation for that mysterious tube of lipstick’s role in the story, your fanfics covered just about all we’d been wondering after Fairytale Island’s strangely abrupt ending. Read the full submissions here!

Between fan creation highlights on Instagram, the Fairytale Fan Art Challenge in April, and now this fanfic challenge, the Creators have been offering a lot of attention to their creative fanbase, and that’s great! It’s awesome to see them connecting with players as regularly as the Creators are, plus welcoming them to submit their own creations for possible features.

But asking players to write a whole new ending for an island, even if it won’t be canonified in the game, is slightly odd. Fairytale’s ending was generally unsatisfactory and left many important questions unanswered, which the Creators acknowledged previously in their blog post announcing the Fanfic Challenge. Where did Rumplestiltskin vanish to? What happened to that poor prince? Did somebody arrest the Huntsman for his attempted homicide?

Leaving these questions to be answered by the fanbase instead of simply including them in the island itself is… a bit weird, to say the least. Did the Creators not have the time to write a full ending for Fairytale? Are they planning on surprising us with a sequel, or are these fanfics the only endings this shorter island will ever see? 🧐

Either way, let us know what you thought of the winning fanfic submissions in the comments. And if you entered your own story, feel free to share it with us in a guest post! See you next time, Poptropicans.

~💜

Fairytale’s various characters may have gotten their happy endings in fan fiction… but what about the island itself?

Nabooti Island, Social Media, YouTubers

Looking back on good times with Jeff Kinney and Dimension Bros 🐦📺

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, we’re throwing in some throwback talk from a few familiar faces: Jeff Kinney, creator of Poptropica; and the Dimension Bros, who make Poptropica and other fandom videos. Let’s pop right in!

The other day, Jeff Kinney (@wimpykid) responded to a Poptropica fan account on Twitter dedicated solely to bringing Nabooti Island back, saying: “Nabooti was a good one.” He also commented on a separate short thread about losing game progress while playing the island when it first released in 2008, calling it a “tragic tale.”

It may not sound unusual for Poptropica’s founder to tweet about the game he created, but Senpai Jeff’s public comments about Poptropica are sadly few and far between these days. Although he served as its creative director since its beginning, he’s not involved with Poptropica these days, and most of his Twitter activity goes to his more popular creation, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. But with #Poptropica tweets recently showing they still have some star power left, maybe it’s worth a little more attention now!

Who remembers The Poptropica Timeline? The Dimension Bros on YouTube recently dropped an updated version of their first ever video, which won Best Fan Video at last year’s Poppies, the PHB’s annual Poptropica fan awards. With the Poppies coming up again in July, catch up on what’s sure to be another contender for the award:

Note for our younger PHB readers: While the Dimension Bros channel does have plenty of Poptropica videos, not all of them are kid-friendly, and generally are for ages 13+. The above video is fine for all ages.

The Dimension Bros also just announced that Poptropica Month will be returning this September—with a twist. While last year’s month-long celebration of fan-made videos honored Poptropica’s 13th birthday, this year’s theme will be “Poptropica Month (In Memoriam),” in recognition of the disappointment of a huge chunk of the game being lost in the Flash-to-Haxe transition.

Although September is a whole season away, it’s never too early to start thinking about what Poptropica videos you’d like to create and share with the world when the time comes. Remember, you can still play the old islands through the mobile app and Flashpoint, and keep petitioning for their return to the main web version of the game.

Let the memory of Poptropica live on!

~🐠