Avatar Palace
Avatar Palace Museum · faces, rooms & software
A screen name. A favourite game. The friends on the other side of the room. Come back for a look—or discover the places and little faces people remember.
Palace Chat · artwork by Nino
The collection’s owner credits Nino with making a rainbow of glossy smileys for Palace Chat, and kept them as a personal favourite.
That is a later chapter of Palace. The classic Palace32 faces have their own story below.
Artist and intended client are identified by the collection’s owner. The original artwork date is unconfirmed.
A walk through the software
The client is the program you open to visit a Palace. Each chapter brought different ways to make a face your own, carry your favourite props, and find people in the rooms.
A few stops in an overlapping history. Dates describe the evidence we have; they do not mark a single chain of replacements.
Pick a spot. Say hello.
Jim Bumgardner began Palace at Time Warner Interactive in 1994, with early room art by Damon Williams. People could share an illustrated place, with little faces showing where they were.
That office experiment reached a public beta in September–October 1995 and an official release that November. The idea already had room for play: the 1994 proposal pictured smileys gathered around card tables.
Jim Bumgardner’s account ↗
Your face. Your prop bag.
Your corner of the room.
The classic Windows client kept rooms, expressions, props, and sounds close at hand. Version 3.5’s notes describe better MIDI playback and fixes for prop editing and private whispers—the small things that help a room feel alive.
Remember “Palace35” and “Palace32”? Our saved 3.5 installer contains a program named Palace32.exe. Those names belong together in this chapter.
Bring your prop bag along.
Trying another client could mean bringing favourite things with you. Brainhouse Laboratories’ Phalanx included an import tool for Palace prop bags; its 2005 update also added conversion of saved avatars, bookmarks, and media.
There was more to make, too. The client’s change log records 32-bit props and smileys in May 2004, alongside work on image editing, sound, and rooms. This preserved editor artwork shows the tools for working on those little pieces of identity.
Inside the Phalanx archive ↓A tab for every Palace.
Palace Chat’s guide describes keeping several Palaces open in tabs, trading avatars, and saving favourite looks. Its toolbar put the room list, sounds, drawing tools, and prop bag within reach.
Jameson Heesen, known as PaVVn, created the client. Saved copies of versions 3 and 4 carry 2008 file dates; ElitePalaces dates its acquisition to 2010. Nino’s smileys belong to this story too: artwork the collection’s owner loved enough to keep.
Newer clients still invite people to collect props, build rooms, and spend time together. These current project sites describe their own software and the people continuing the work.
pchat.org
Avatars, room creation, painting, and video are part of today’s feature list. The site credits Jameson Heesen as creator, ElitePalaces as owner, and Alexandra as version 5’s maintainer.
Explore PalaceChat v5 ↗thepalace.app
The Palace Restoration Project offers a client for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with prop editing, animation, and games among its room experiences.
Explore The Palace project ↗The exact version history and code relationship between these projects remain open in our collection notes.
The people are part of the history
The other half is who you found there. There is space here for old memories, new visitors, and the details we have yet to recover.
Classic Windows client
A grin, a wink, a very surprised look. The Palace32 face picker brought expressions and colour swatches together in one tiny panel.
Two preserved images match resources inside the Palace32 program in our version 3.5 installer. Its readme is dated February 2000. The individual artist and original artwork date remain unconfirmed.
The face picker measures 88 × 110 pixels; a single smiley measures 44 × 44 pixels.
Avatar Palace · room history
Prop Rooms. Chat Zones. Games. Take Av Rooms. The classic gate made the room itself a map of places to go. A favourite game, a familiar name, a place you knew how to find.
A copy of its background survives in the Avatar Palace Time Machine collection. Its creator and original date are not established in the accompanying record.
Room names and remembered routes are part of the story, too.
A foundation, not a finished archive
This first public selection combines a permissioned concept illustration with stories drawn from the surviving records. Other historical images are not included in this release while display details are reviewed. A recovered file is evidence of a surviving copy, not proof of its original author, date, or reuse rights. Original artwork, recovered material, and reconstructions should each be named for what they are.
This is an independent Avatar Palace collection. No museum affiliation or endorsement is implied. Rights remain with their respective holders.
Names and dates come from the surviving packages, the people who made the software, and the projects’ own sites. Package timestamps describe the copy we have; they do not establish a first release.
