Habbo
Finnish online community
Habbo (formerly called Habbo Hotel) is a virtual world and massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It is owned and operated by Sulake. Founded in 2000, Habbo has expanded to nine online communities (or "hotels"), with users from more than 150 countries. As of October 2020, 316 million avatars have been registered in the game.
The website is divided into three clients, Habbo, Habbo X, and Habbo Hotel: Origins. The Habbo client is aimed at teenagers and young adults, while Habbo X and Habbo Hotel: Origins cater for adult players.
Users on the game can create a virtual avatar (called a "Habbo"), converse and interact with other users, play games, build and design virtual rooms, take care of virtual pets, and complete quests.
History
Habbo stemmed from a 1999 hobby project by creative designer Sampo Karjalainen and technologist Aapo Kyrölä entitled Mobiles Disco, for a Finnish band. It was a virtual chat room running on Kyrölä's Fuse technology. After having been contracted to design a virtual game and chat called Lumisota (Snow Wars) for a Finnish internet service provider, they were contracted for another project.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Habbo” is finnish online community. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Habbo, Finnish and online, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “finnish online community” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q743920. None of the 22 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2020 and 1999.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Habbo”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Habbo primary sources, Habbo archive and Habbo research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Habbo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.