Today Jeff Kinney shared with us some very insightful early ideas for Poptropica on the Creator's Blog (click here for that post). And it was quite a bit different from what Poptropica is today. First of all, that color:
 |  |  |
(Click to zoom). Jeff said, "We envisioned an enormous map of single-scene rooms, and missions that you could go on every day." Presumably the rooms on the huge map above were not linked by bigger rooms, you had to manually pass through sections of the grid. Also, I find it cool how the Common Room was one of Poptropica's original concepts. It seems that rather than a story, each room was not very closely linked to others in the same area. And indeed, Jeff says "This was before we had the idea of islands or even the name Poptropica." I feel like in this old version, the game would have really gotten in the way of the story. I mean, just look at all those buttons and categories (Missions, Magazines, etc.) I'm glad with the direction they ended up taking. And... *chuckle*... that MP3 player, huh? No smartphones back in 2006.
The name
Poptropica was originally supposed to be called "Poptropolis" (no relation to Poptropolis Games). However, because of an undisclosed naming clash with a competitor, they changed the suffix to -tropica. Hence more island-y, less city-y in the modern game we now know and love. Ah, destiny.
