Moshi Monsters was an online virtual pet game that was absolutely massive in the UK during the early 2010s. Every kid at school used it. You could find the Moshi name on literally everything, from trading cards to yoghurt and even a theatrical film. The game eventually shut down in 2019. This was probably due to the phasing out of Flash. Because the site almost entirely ran on Flash, not even the home page can work on modern browsers.
Today, the Moshi name lives on in the form of a storytime app for kids. A fan made project called Moshi Monsters Rewritten allows you to replay the game, with the help of some extra software.
When signing up for the site, players would be allowed to pick from one of six monsters, a Poppet, Furi, Katsuma, Zommer, Luvli, or Diavlo. To keep the monster happy, you had to feed it, play with it, and decorate its rooms. The monsters couldn't die, but if they were starving they would constantly give you dirty looks and angry dialogue.
The player and their monster could play games, dress up, shop, make friends, and much more. When you added friends, they would be part of your "Friends Tree". The more friends you had, the more the tree would grow. Unlike other games, there was no chatting feature. You couldn't chat to other monsters you met in the world. The only way to communicate was through the "pinboard" in each monster's room. It functioned a bit like an old fashioned website guestbook. Later on, a sort of party room area was added where you could chat in real time with others, but only preselected phrases were allowed.
A big part of the Moshi Monsters experience were "Moshlings". They were tiny little pets for your monster to have. You could obtain them through various means, like combining seeds in the Moshling Garden, or by completing Super Moshi missions (this required a paid membership). Free members could only keep two Moshlings at once, but paid Moshi Members had unlimited space to catch them all.
One particular Moshling, "Lady Goo Goo" received a lot of media attention when the design offended Lady Gaga. The developers were forced to change her design. They had to remove Lady Goo Goo's extremely catchy song off of YouTube. Luckily, you can still see a third party upload of the song today.
Moshlings were also released as little plastic figures that came in blind bags. These were extremely popular. They used to be traded on the playground in my school. Many different variations of Moshling figures were released. When they ran out of Moshlings, they started to make figures of other side characters in the Moshi universe.
Another feature of Moshi Monsters were the Flash games. Some of these came from other sites. My personal favourites were "Moshi Cupcakes" and "Skywire 2". There was also a separate site called Moshi Games, this didn't require an account. It had even more Flash games than the main site, and even allowed you to download some of them to use on your own webpage. This site shut down a few years before the main Moshi Monsters page did.
While Moshi Monsters unceremoniously shut down in 2019, the site lives on in the boat loads of merchandise it produced. You can still play the DS games, music CDs and DVDs that were based off of it. The site isn't as well known as others such as Club Penguin, but it still has a dedicated and active fanbase.
I personally was mad for Moshi Monsters as a kid. I begged my parents to get all of the merchandise (most of it I still have to this day), and even had the paid membership. I even had six monsters at one point. It was my favourite out of all the online games I played at the time. Today, I still think the art and the lore is quite decent for just a kids game. Even though Flash ended things for the main site, I still feel like Mind Candy (the developers behind it) could've kept things alive through a mobile app or something. But perhaps it just wasn't profitable enough, since the Moshi fad had long died. For me, I stopped playing it regularly not long after the movie came out in 2013. By that point, I was more into Stardoll. Sometimes I would visit my main monster from time to time, but that was it. Luckily I managed to screenshot all of my pinboard messages before everything got shut down!
