Things That Shaped Me: HeadBone Zone

Part of a series on the things that shaped who I am. Starting with the website that made me want to build websites.

If you have any screenshots of Headbonezone please send them my way - I could only find them in the waybackmachine and they are mostly broken links 😭

I don’t remember exactly when I found HeadBone Zone, but I remember the sound of the modem connecting and knowing I had maybe an hour before someone needed the phone line. That hour was precious, and I spent a lot of it on headbone.com.

What Was HeadBone Zone?

HeadBone Zone was a kids website that launched in 1997 ¹ - the sweet spot of “the internet is for everyone now” but before the web got too corporatized and sanitized. It had everything: kid-friendly chat rooms, email (my first email account that wasn’t my parents’), and games. Not flash games, but complex games that held state over days. Stock markets that had minute by minute fluctuations in price.

The site was run by Headbone Interactive, who also made educational CD-ROMs like Iz and Auggie: Escape from Dimension Q and Elroy Goes Bugzerk ². I think they also had a couple of TV shows on kids television, but I never saw them!

Can we talk about these buttons in the footer? Look for us on 100HOT!

The Games

The games were the primary draw for me, and really inspired a lot of what I would make on Subeta. These were games that you could start and come back two days later and it’d still have your game. Knowing they got their start in CD education games makes a ton of sense by how the games online operated.

Toward the end of their time they leaned more heavily into brand deals, I vaguely remember needing to buy GOGURT the summer it was released because there was a headbonezone tie in.

Rags to Riches

This was a band management simulator, and I was obsessed. You managed a band through a 10-week concert tour - choosing venues, setting ticket prices, recording albums, competing against other players for prizes.

How did a kids website in 1998 have real-time multiplayer browser games with economic simulation? I still don’t fully understand. But managing that fake band taught me about supply and demand, about pricing strategy, about the dopamine hit of watching numbers go up because of decisions you made. I was learning game design.

The Celebrity Stock Market

There was a celebrity stock market where prices changed by the minute. You’d buy low on some pop star and hope they had a good week. Looking back, this is absolutely insane to put in front of children, but also: how did they DO it? Real-time price updates? Processing buy/sell orders from what I imagine were thousands of other users?

Mystery On Mars

In the Mars game, you follow the futuristic comic strip adventures of a girl named Iz and a robot named Augie, both of whom are rock superstars on Earth. To get away from their fans, they book a vacation trip to the red planet.

While on their journey, they are called upon to answer certain questions to progress and solve a mystery. The first is: What is the name of the largest canyon on Mars?

Don’t answer all at once.

Obviously, Headbone doesn’t expect many of us to have the answer on the tip of our tongues. Instead, the game suggests the player use his or her skills in surfing the Web to find the answer.

Headbone Zone’s Head and Shoulders Above the Rest

the game suggests the player use his or her skills in surfing the Web to find the answer, how novel!

Camp Champ

They launched a trading card game years before anyone else was making something like this. It had complex rules and it seemed like they kind of game they could keep supporting with content forever 💀. It was summer camp themed, they had a ton of online comic material to go with it.

I wish I could find screenshots from the game itself (if you have any, please send them my way!) but it was a fairly complex game and you could win things like a sony discman.

The Pager

The games were fun. But the pager? The pager was everything.

HeadBone Zone had a “pager” - basically AIM for your friends on the site. You’d have it open in a browser window and it would poll for new messages every few seconds. Looking back, this was probably some poor server getting hammered by thousands of kids hitting an API endpoint constantly. Real-time messaging! On the internet! In 1998!

When I got AIM taken away for… teenager reasons… the pager became my workaround. I made all my friends sign up for this kids game website they couldn’t care less about, just so we could keep talking. They’d have the pager open in a tiny browser window while doing homework, hitting refresh, pretending they cared about Rags to Riches so we could gossip about whatever drama was happening at school.

The games were fun, but having a secret way to talk to my friends that my parents didn’t know about? That’s what I remember the most.

I once won an Iron Giant toy - the kind that came up to my knees - from playing one of the games and having a top score. The movie had just come out in 1999, and I was obsessed with it ³.

An actual physical object showed up at my house because I was good at a free browser game. I don’t think I’d ever gotten mail before that wasn’t a birthday card.

Then It Was Gone

HeadBone Zone shut down after Bonus.com (remember them!?) acquired them ⁴. The website went offline and took years of kids’ memories with it.

When I started Subeta in 2003, I was 13. I built a stock market. I built chat features. I built games where you had to come back every day to see your numbers go up. I didn’t realize until much later that I was just trying to rebuild HeadBone Zone.

This is the first in a series about the things that shaped me. Next up: LiveJournal, and writing in public.