Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s take a closer look at the new spot on the map: it’s American Girl: Courtney’s Island. This massive ad is just about as ambitious as the first American Girl adventure from earlier this year, Joss’s Island. Let’s go!
You can click on the billboard on Home Island to get to Courtney’s Island.
Or you can find Courtney’s Island directly on the map!
When you land on the island, you’ll find yourself at the Orange Valley Mall, which looks like a cross between the exterior of the convention center on PoptropiCon Island and the interior of the Twin Palms Mall on Night Watch Island. It’s 1986 and you’re in a teen’s wide world.
Courtney will tell you there are video games you can play (two) and 8 free prizes to collect. Like the other American Girl doll characters, she isn’t Poptropican-ized, but there are some Poptropican NPCs to be found here on this island. You can learn more about Courtney the basic ’80s girl™ with a passion for video games through two videos in the Cinema: a “Courtney 1986” music video and a “Meet Courtney” intro.
Heading left of the Cinema, you’ll find Smiley’s Arcade, where you can play a game called Crystal Starshooter (also the name of Courtney’s invented video game hero). It’s basically like the Poptropica single-player arcade game Blaster Attack, where you maneuver through space and press space bar to shoot at spaceships.
Check out the Pac-Man promo and the out-of-order Sky Dive game in the arcade.
Hop to the upper level of the mall and you’ll come across small stores like The Book Shelf, where you can pick up an 80s Comic Book. When holding it, press space bar to have your Poptropican shout out some ’80s slang, complete with bold colors and spiky speech bubbles. Gnarly!
Right of the bookstore, there’s a record store called Tunes, where you can pick up a free 80s Walkman. Tap the space bar and you’ll hear a segment from the “Courtney 1986” bop!
Next to Tunes is Valerie’s, which offers two-in-one 80s Outfits. With frizzy hair, sunglasses, a denim jacket and more, you can mix and match styles. Plus, you can wear Courtney’s pet guinea pig on your head with the Parsley Head Rider just beside the shop!
Jumping past the elevator, check out the pizza at Slices, where you can grab a cootie catcher. If you click the “Make Yours” button on the item card, you can even find Poptropica’s instructions on folding your own cootie catcher IRL. All it takes is a sheet of paper!
Dropping back down to the first floor, look for D’Amico’s Electronics. Inside, you can get a game console to play Bot Breaker! It’s basically a game of Pong, where you move your bot (which you can pick from three styles) left and right to bounce a ball on the screen, with the aim of knocking the other bots and clearing the screen to get to the next stage. You can pick up the occasional drops of green batteries to regain lives.
Fun fact: A sideways version of this game mechanic also appeared in the Web Browser Cafe on Counterfeit Island.
Finally, rounding off the tour, let’s visit the American Girl Place at the center of the island. But first, don’t forget to claim your very own Care Bear Follower! Inside the AG Place, you can learn more about the dolls (including Joss), play with the Colorizer of the Radiance Salon, and fix up your own pink milkshake (handheld) at Super Scoops.
That’s all for this totally tubular terrain throwing it back to four decades ago! What do you think of Courtney’s Island? Do you vibe with the ’80s, or are you ready for Poptropica to get back to the modern age of the 2020’s? Give us your bombdiggity best in the comments!
Welcome to another Ramble Review! This guest post comes from MaryannTheConqueror, who will be rambling about Ghost Story Island.
Now for the first and only island that I remember actually making me teary-eyed! Ghost Story is one of the best examples of Poptropica testing their limits for what kinds of stories their audience will enjoy.
Other than a couple jokes and one of the character’s names being “Henry Flatbottom,” this island has a relatively subdued tone, with a dark and cool color scheme, contrasting to the bright and at times childish other islands.
It’s spooky, with the whole ghost theme and one of the few examples of voice acting in the game, but not desperate in its attempts to scare the player. It uses elements of gothic horror to create a sense of unease without excessive jumpscares or gore.
Ghost Story also shows Pop’s ability to handle more mature themes, without being “edgy” or going too far beyond what its target audience should be able to handle. The characters hang desperately to the past, while avoiding it at the same time, resulting in the ghost’s inability to leave the mortal realm.
While there are many stories within this story, they are all connected to each other, leading to a satisfying conclusion. And they say you should avoid mentions of death in children’s media!
As much as I can rave about Astro-Knights (coming up soon…), this island certainly deserves more attention. While I can talk about the creativity of other islands until I’m blue in the face, Ghost Story is best appreciated for showing the variety in the stories Poptropica can tell.
Sometimes we can have wacky fantasy, or thrilling crime solving, or just plain childlike fun, but we can also have calmer, slightly darker tales that may not be as flashy, but can leave just as deep of an impact. While Ghost Story takes inspiration from comedies such as Ghostbusters, it also has themes of grief, handling past mistakes, as well as the difficulty to not only forgive others, but ourselves.
The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. You can find some tips and guidelines on our page on how to Write for the PHB, and share blog posts on the PHC.
📰 If you have an idea for a PHB post, send it in! ✨
Welcome to a new PHB series called Ramble Reviews! This will be a collection of thoughts and opinions from rambling Poptropicans from our PHC Discord community taking a look back at past islands. We hope these posts (and more are coming!) can be a space for fellow fans to read and discuss.
Please welcome the first writer for the series, Purple Paw.
I’ll start by saying, Twisted Thicket is one of the most important islands Poptropica has ever made. It’s not often you see environmentalism portrayed in a kid’s’ game, especially not in this setting, where the message is clear, and yet it is incredibly fun and enjoyable all the same, without being too harsh. I knew right from the start I had to talk about it!
Twisted Thicket is one of the shorter islands, although most times, it’ll take one longer to complete, due to all of the slightly more challenging puzzles hidden within. Your task appears simple at first: rid the forest of the horrible creatures that are terrorizing the town, and help Burt Diamond and his Lumberjerks destroy the magical terrain and build his casino. But the story of the forest goes deeper than that!
The first time I played this, I hoped very much that the island would not end with the forest being bulldozed and the magic destroyed. And as soon as I reached the Sacred Tree Hollow, I saw how kind and innocent these animals actually were, and that they had only acted hostile in defense of their home. What a twist, right?
Twisted Thicket is simply enchanting in every way possible, from the glowing blue mushrooms to the lit-up flowers to the tangled clusters of dark green leaves. And yes, the Tree Hollow is one of my absolute favorite places in all of Poptropica. The Creators aced the setting, characters, and plot, and I will never tire of replaying this island.
The story highlights the misunderstanding between nature and human settlements, and shines an entirely new light on how to fix it. But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s a solemn island; there’s the perfect amount of tension, action, beauty, and storytelling to keep you engaged and having fun the entire time.
This island is a perfect example of the Creators’ old heart and caring, an island that showed they cared about making a true story, and sending a real message (unlike the nonsensical fetch quests we’ve been seeing more recently…).
Troll, from Twisted Thicket
Because of this, Twisted Thicket has got true potential, a meaningful plot line, and is a real gem on the map. I don’t believe the Creators would let something like this go so easily, and if they’ve got half the heart they used to, they’d be working as hard to preserve the Twisted Thicket like we did all those years ago when we first played.
Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Purple Paw. If you did, be sure to check out the PHB’s own quickie review of Twisted Thicket by Lucky Joker! Stay tuned for more Ramble Reviews from Purple Paw, Incredible Fire, Magic Flipper, MaryannTheConqueror… and maybe more!And of course, join in on the rambling fun on the PHC Discord.
The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. You can find some tips and guidelines on our page on how to Write for the PHB, and share blog posts on the PHC.
📰 If you have an idea for a PHB post, send it in! ✨
Hello, everyone! It’s been an eventful birthday month for Poptropica, and the festivities are still going strong. Now, the Pop Creators have introduced a mini contest on Instagram with a prize of 10,000 credits!
And it gets better: the subject is none other than the iconic Dr. Beev, the Mocktropica pseudo-character turned celebrity who even made a brief appearance in the game earlier this week. The challenge for the contest is to draw Dr. Beev in your style (be sure to post with the tag #drbeev).
Check out that high-res pic of the Beev straight out of the bin! You know what they say, one Creator’s trash is an entire community’s treasure.
The trash bin on Mocktropica Island, featuring “discarded” character parodies like the great Dr. Beev (who’s arguably cooler than Dr. Hare).
Share your Beev tributes from now until September 30 (next next Wednesday) for a chance at those sweet credits!
September has seen a plethora of Poptropica content, from surprise fan art features to the ongoing Poptropica Month video event. Let’s take some time to highlight some of the wonderful stuff that we (and the Creators) are loving.
The fan features don’t stop on Instagram! The Creators’ Blog also shared a YouTube video by happyclonetrooper, who created a 3D model of her Popsona, Maroon Ring. Cool to see Poptropicans in the third dimension!
On the topic of YouTube, let’s take a moment to appreciate a few of the many Poptropica Month videos made so far!
Our first feature is from Theo of Dimension Bros, who posted a video on his personal channel in which he bakes a Poptropica birthday cake. Delicious, and reminiscent of Poptropica’s own 9th birthday cake! 😋
Next, here’s one from TheOrangeHe answering questions from MaryannTheConqueror‘s Poptropica Month tag. Several other creators have joined in on the tag as well, so that could be a good place to start if you’re interested in participating as a creator in Pop Month!
Finally, here’s a short and sweet animated meme by Kid Whom Has A Hat, featuring the song “Weak” by AJR amid a slight spoiler for Octavian in the Poptropica graphic novels (read the first one on our Comics page!).
We’ll leave you with one more thing to contemplate, a question that was also the subject of a recent Instagram story from the Pop Creators: How would you explain Poptropica in a single sentence to a friend?
As always, share your thoughts in the comments and on our PHC Discord server! After all, the Dr. Beev shenanigans certainly showed us the Creators are lurking…
In honor of Poptropica’s birthday month and the #ThanksKinney campaign going on, we thought we’d take a look back at past posts and interviews with some OG Poptropica Creators sharing about the process behind the making of Poptropica. In some ways, this is a bit of an open letter for Jeff Kinney and the Poptropica Creators past and present.
Turns out the words of some of these original Pop Creatorsreveal some interesting ideas worth comparing and contrasting with how the game has been going in the past few years. We’re going be taking a look at our beloved Poptropica from the eyes of earlier masterminds Jeff Kinney, Jess Brallier, James Lema, and Mitch Krpata.
Let’s see what they had to say about how they envisioned Poptropica while they were building it in its earlier years…
Jeff Kinney: no player homes; experiencing different things
In 2014, Poptropica founder Jeff Kinney did a 10-minute interview with the media company BellyFeel, where he discusses some of the thought processes behind Poptropica. Check out the interview below, or read the transcript from BellyFeel, and excerpts below the video.
My first idea for Poptropica was that you would be a person who would live in an apartment and that you could collect things and bring them back to your apartment, and we’ve seen that model in lots of games like Animal Crossing and there are many virtual worlds that follow that model but this was right around the time that kids started to carry around iPods and there was that feeling that a kid carries their content with them. So we took that central mechanic of the game, that your character doesn’t actually have a home. Your character travels and brings everything with them.
That’s very liberating because then you don’t have a geographic challenge. If you had to keep going back to your house or apartment, you would be limited in a way as far as how far you could go. The idea now is that the character just island hops…
I think that each island has its own, its own set of rules, its own universe and by not being overly thematic or by not creating one set of rules for the universe, I think it gives our kids a chance to experience all sorts of different things and that’s fun and freeing.
Some of the stories we’ve told, I can’t believe we’ve gotten away with, I think the most exotic story or esoteric story we’ve told is we have an island called Mystery Train where you’re travelling in the late 1800’s on a train from Washington DC to the Chicago Worlds Fair and you meet Nikola Tesla and Gustave Eiffel and all these luminaries from that time, and I kind of held my breath, I didn’t think kids would like it. But it’s one of our most popular islands because I think it’s authentic and rich.
Jeff Kinney
Interestingly, Poptropica did end up making player homes a feature, which another Creator we’ll mention later in this post says was the most requested feature for the game. However, with the arrival of Paradise Island, Poptropica has recently been criticized by fans for trying to be too much like Animal Crossing. Can they go back to their roots?
Jess Brallier: staying around like Disney; not just another game
In 2013, the learning company Future Think filmed a video of then-president of Poptropica, Jess Brallier, talking about his vision for the game, which resurfaced in 2019 thanks to idk and Osmium. Check it out:
When we shared the video here on the PHB last year, we highlighted the following quote right from this publisher’s mouth that still resonates today with players hoping for new islands more than anything else:
“We’re not doing a virtual world to create a social networking opportunity, not to house games, not to host a virtual economy, but to tell stories… the point of Poptropica is to tell kids stories in the literacy of their choosing.“
Jess Brallier
This sentiment also echoes an interview the PHB hosted in 2015 with Mr. Brallier with questions asked by our readers. Here are a couple highlights about his dreams for Poptropica:
When asked, “Are there certain things that you think that Poptropica should achieve? What are they?” Mr. Brallier talked about expanding the franchise to different media, comparing it to the Disney empire.
Like Disney, we want to stay around for generations. We like to imagine our grandchildren smiling because of something Poptropica. We’d like to have a best-selling book series, a top ten iOS app, a record-breaking film, a wildly popular TV series, and a much-loved YouTube channel… But most of all, we hope that through our storytelling, art, animation, and programming to inspire a next generation of creators.
Jess Brallier
Since then, Poptropica has achieved that best-selling book series with the four graphic novels and briefly made it to #1 on the iOS App Store in August 2020 (while disparaging competitor Animal Jam in a victory post). Maybe more will lie ahead?
To another question, “What kind of skills do you look for when hiring Poptropica Creators?”, Mr. Brallier answered:
A love for storytelling and a desire to do what nobody else is doing. Many can illustrate or program, but do they do what they do because of a love and appreciation for storytelling. And our success is about doing what others don’t do. We’re not a book publisher, we’re not just another game, we’re not just another world with weird penguins or monsters or dolls running around in it. We seek not to copy, but to be the first to show up with something unexpected.
Jess Brallier
That sounds about right. 🙂
James Lema: we are not Facebook for kids
In 2013, Poptropica’s director of product development, James Lema (aka Director D), wrote on the blog of a kids brand agency called Dubit titled “Five things learned from five years of Poptropica,” which the PHB covered soon after. Another 5+ years later, let’s see how it stacks up…
The five points he gives focus on being different in the following ways: 1) focusing on narrative quests; 2) simplifying the start process; 3) using 2D art; 4) pre-scripted chat; and 5) not trying to be “Facebook for kids.” You can read more in the blog post he wrote here.
Here’s a closer look at point #5, last but certainly not least:
Since the magnificent rise of Facebook, there have been numerous companies that have tried to create a social offering for kids that follows the Facebook model. Poptropica actively decided to not go down that path.
As Poptropica grows, we want to engage kids in ways they have never experienced. From that, we created Poptropica Friends – a 100 percent safe, social experience that allows the user to tell the story about themselves.
Everyday, we ask the user a question (ex. What’s your favourite sport? Have you ever tried sushi? Do you like dogs or cats?). The answer is a visual tile that becomes part of their profile. The more questions the user answers, the more visual their personality becomes. It’s a rich tapestry that tells the personality of the user in a way that has never been done.
James Lema
Players certainly appreciate Poptropica’s intentionally different approach to the social experience, with many reports of features to love about the original Friends profiles (the 2019 reboot left some things to be desired). Let’s bring back pop quizzes (the question tiles mentioned earlier), adding friends by username, Multiverse, and more!
Mitch Krpata: world-building; not a superficial experience
Okay, last one! It’s been a long post, but thanks for sticking with it this far. This last one is plentiful, but offers a lot of insight into the inner workings of Poptropica. Here’s Mitch Krpata (aka Captain Crawfish)!
In 2017, this Poptropica senior story developer did two significant interviews about his work: one directly with the PHB about his job and more, and another with a podcast called The Oddball Show. Among the many insights from the latter, here are a few excerpts worth highlighting about the design of the game experience:
Poptropica is quite inspired by Monkey Island, [with Mitch] considering it a children’s version of the older game. He goes on to describe Poptropica as a game with unique stories and puzzles, making up long-form experiences that require time and effort to experience, which players are willing to put in…
Next, the guys compare Poptropica to The Sims games by Electronic Arts, commenting on the world-building aspect of games and how there’s no age limit for wanting some of that. Mitch notes that Poptropica Worlds is a little like that, where you get to build your own house and avatar. For almost ten years, this was the most requested feature for Poptropica: a way to build their own space, which finally came as houses on Worlds. Such a feature, of having a thing that is one’s own, transcends age and gender…
Mitch talks about how his favorite books and movies as a kid all had an edge of darkness in them, recalling the classic storybook Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. This feels true of Poptropica as well, he says: it looks cartoonish, but it’s not a superficial experience – there is depth there for the kids who are paying attention to it.
From the PHB’s summary of Mitch Krpata’s appearance on The Oddball Show podcast
You can also hear the podcast interview in the video below, or read our summary in this PHB post. It’s lengthy, but quite insightful!
It’s interesting to see how Poptropica has evolved in some ways from some of these original Creators’ imaginations, yet has stayed the same in other ways. What resonated with you? What features do you think Poptropica should keep, bring back, or do away with? Share your thoughts in the comments and on our PHC Discord server!
And #ThanksKinney for making this strange yet wonderful adventure for us all. Happy 13th birthday, Poptropica! 🎈🎉
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