Avatar Palace
The Avatar Palace Museum
There’s a story behind every room.
A favourite face. A game that kept you up. A name you hoped to see again. Explore the pieces of Avatar Palace we’re keeping—and the community still making memories.
Avatar Palace · community & software
These dated moments give us a way into the story: sharing a look, helping someone use a different client, keeping an address, and bringing the memories together.
Our dated trail starts here in 2013; Avatar Palace’s founding date is still unconfirmed. These are selected records, with gaps between them.
Surviving February records name avatarpalace.net. On 17 February, Avatar Palace sent a bundle of shunis with instructions for importing the props.
A new look to try. A little help getting it into the room.
Dated website & prop-sharing records ↓A September help request asks Avatar Palace how to move animated avatars from Palace32 to PalaceChat. An October message from Avatar Palace announces new shunis and Halloween avatars.
The tools could change. You still wanted to bring your favourite look.
Dated conversion request & avatar announcement ↓A PalaceWorld approval notice identifies Avatar Palace’s server at avatarpalace.net:9998. It records ElitePalaces’ verification of the server owner and invites setup of bots or prop rooms.
Behind a server address: somewhere to go, and people to look for.
Dated PalaceWorld notice ↓Josef organised a petition to bring back the bot quests. Its update dated 7 August 2018 announced their planned return and thanked the community for supporting the effort.
Something worth gathering for was worth asking for.
Read the petition ↗Avatar Palace now has a public museum for its surviving records and remembered rooms. The Time Machine restoration and a new Avatar Palace client are still private work in progress.
Come back for a memory. Stay to help fill in a missing piece.
Current museum & project status ↓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. The preserved image is shown here unchanged. Its creator and original date are not established in the accompanying record. The painted buttons belong to the background; they do not open rooms from this exhibit.
Labels transcribed from the recovered gate.
Tell us the route you remember →Keep this story in your collection →Avatar Palace · games & shared memories
A letter to guess. A picture clue. Somebody keeping score. The games give us another way to remember Avatar Palace, and the friendships that reached across Palace communities.
Try letters. Find the phrase. Josef’s private restoration preview shows Ratbot with letter choices and a solved puzzle. The archived room script preserves the Wheel of Cheese name and room number: 546.
An archived room and a recent restoration preview.
Follow the room record ↓Find words in a grid before the clock runs out. A saved Avatar Palace screenshot shows AVATARPALACE.NET awarding points, rejecting guesses, and counting down while people play.
Screenshot evidence · capture date unconfirmed.
Read what the screenshot shows ↓A picture clue and guesses in chat. One saved Avatar Palace screenshot shows SayMoji’s food-and-drinks category; another shows StormBot announcing a fifteen-second countdown and inviting everyone to guess.
Screenshot evidence · capture dates unconfirmed.
Follow the SayMoji records ↓The quests people missed
“they were the best bots ever. so fun.”
Josef organised a petition for the bot quests to return. Its update dated 7 August 2018 announced a planned return and thanked the community. It records the anticipation; the actual restart date is still unconfirmed.
The screenshots show bot games. They do not establish when the quest events resumed.
A game name, the Palace or room, an approximate year, and what you remember doing can help fill in the story. If you remember a maker or host, tell us how you know.
What changed · what still feels familiar
The dates tell us when. The rooms, props, and people help explain why we keep looking back. Here’s what connects these moments for this museum.
Different clients brought different editing and import tools. The familiar habit is choosing a face or prop that says something about you.
A recovered background can become a museum object. Its room names still give us a way to talk about games, hangouts, and the routes people remember.
Today, the website and Discord sit alongside Palace. What we’re trying to keep is the ease of arriving, recognising a name, and finding a conversation.
A room name, a game, an approximate year, or the client you used can help connect a memory to the timeline. A favourite room is only half the story; the other half is who you found there.
The wider Palace story · background to Avatar Palace
Avatar Palace is one community in a much wider Palace history. The client—the program you open to visit—has its own story, beginning before the Avatar Palace records shown above.
A few stops in an overlapping history. Dates describe the evidence we have; they do not mark a single chain of replacements or Avatar Palace’s adoption dates.
A few smileys. A table. A beginning.
Before Palace had public rooms, Jim Bumgardner pictured people meeting around card tables. This drawing accompanied his July 1994 proposal at Time Warner Interactive.
In his later account, Jim describes turning the idea into an office-network demo, with room backgrounds by Damon Williams. To invite colleagues in, he left floppy disks at reception with smiley-face stickers. One early name was Sparky.
The public beta followed in September–October 1995, with the official release that November. Those little faces were finding a much bigger room.
Read Jim Bumgardner’s 2002 account ↗
A smile. A martini. A little personality.
Jim Bumgardner recalls making the original Palace smiley faces, which were used through at least 1997. He also made some of the earliest props, including the martini and cigarette.
He credits many other early props to Damon and Doyle Moyer, and a few to Elaine Alderette.
Read the creator-attribution note ↓A name of your own.
Guests could choose their own names and join PalacePresents events, according to the version 3.4 readme dated 24 July 1998. It also says registration was free.
The program it names is PALACE32.EXE. That gives us a documented Palace32 stop before the version 3.5 package below.
Read the 1998 archive notes ↓Preserved package: palace35.zip
Program: PALACE32.EXE
Your face. Your prop bag.
Your corner of the room.
Version 3.5’s notes describe support for JPEG room images, improved MIDI music downloads and playback, and fixes for crashes affecting prop editing, whispers, and entering rooms. Small changes to familiar parts of Palace life.
The archive package is called palace35.zip. Inside, its readme says version 3.5 and February 2000, while the program is still named PALACE32.EXE. “Palace35” here is the saved package name; it does not mark a separate client that came before Palace32.
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. The preserved package also contains interface artwork for its prop editor.
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.
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.
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 of these two files remain unconfirmed.
Jim Bumgardner recalls making the original Palace smileys, but is unsure about this later version.
The face picker measures 88 × 110 pixels; a single smiley measures 44 × 44 pixels.
A foundation, not a finished archive
This selection centres Avatar Palace’s dated records, rooms, and remembered experiences, with the preserved entrance background, wider Palace software history, and a permissioned concept illustration for context. The game and filename diagrams are new explanatory graphics, not historical screenshots or recovered artwork. 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.
The dated entries use project records retained in the Avatar Palace collection. These public summaries omit private correspondence and account details. The short reflections describe the museum’s interpretation, not a measured account of everyone’s experience.
The recovered gate remains outside the dated sequence because its original date is unconfirmed. Early project proposals are not treated as released features. Contributions can help establish missing dates and client transitions.
These summaries connect preserved room records, screenshots, and Josef’s recollections. The underlying screenshots and server files remain private; the exhibit does not reproduce them.
Individual evidence records and file hashes are included in the Avatar Palace history records.
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.
