Post by naradreamland on Mar 8, 2024 3:05:59 GMT
Hello, this is my first post on the LMW forums, so please pardon any mistakes. I am here due to not only a specific reddit post, but my own personal nostalgia and wanting to preserve and find what may be left of it before it is gone to the depths of the internet forever.
In 2009, a website named TinierMe was launched by GCREST in America. It was a browser MMO that was focused on socializing, playing games, and decorating your avatar known as a ‘SELFY’. This was basically an English version of the same game in Japan that was released under ‘atgames’, but TinierMe had a very short lifespan as it was only open for 3 years before closing in 2012 while its Japanese equivalent was open until the death of Flash in 2020.
If you’re familiar with the name, it’s either because you were either a big Vocaloid fan at the time or you used the fanmade site “DreamSelfy”, which was essentially a lone dress up simulator that was free to anyone who either didn’t have a TinierMe account or simply didn’t have the real life money to blow on the various gachas. DreamSelfy relied on the swf files from TinierMe and even after the site’s closure, it was a complete catalog of every item released on the site that stayed up until 2018. While archives of DS exist on the Wayback Machine, the site and images are completely broken and for the longest time the content was considered completely lost.
Sometime during 2020 or 2021, posts about a program known as ‘EMSelfy’ began to crop up along with download links. Its origins come from the Chinese website Tieba Baidu and was released somewhere in 2016. It is more or less a compilation of all the swf files from TinierMe along with files from its Japanese sister site, however is incomplete due to the amount of items missing (most of the American items have been accounted for but many of the Japanese items/gachas have not been added/named properly). I do not know when it was last updated, as I cannot advance in the thread without logging in, however I had read somewhere that the original creator no longer had any interest in updating it. Therefore, this leaves this program the only surviving repository for most of these files that otherwise would’ve been lost to time. My copy of this program was obtained from deviantART, and the google drive link was last updated in December 2022. According to the creator of this journal, it had been difficult to find a working link as previous ones had been erased and taken down twice, so their link is what apparently survives from the Tieba Baidu thread. It still works as of 2024, however if something happens to this archive I will upload my own copy and share it on this post.
On that note, given that EmSelfy is in Chinese, I have taken it upon myself to make screenshots to point out the options on the application (sta.sh/0ovuv3bxej5 / sta.sh/01nnstya185f). EmSelfy can also load old DreamSelfy urls, but as it is incomplete, some items may not appear (but that will help with tracking down what is missing from the US/JPN catalogs).
This same Chinese group also reported that in 2021, GCREST had sold the SELFY related copyrights to cocone connect and it was stated that the artstyle would be updated and changed by cocone. This is important, as previous clothing assets from the browser game have been known to be reused in other SELFY related games such as CocoPPa Play, which was released two years after TinierMe’s closure, and the Nintendo Switch game “SELFY COLLECTION: The Dream Fashion Stylist” which was released in 2020. We cannot be sure if GCREST and cocone connect have backups of the original files, and if they do, there's no way that they will simply hand them over.
This leaves the search for these missing swf files to another site that is still up called attrade. Back when the Japanese site was still up, you could tweet at the site’s twitter account to register and seems to function in the same way as TinierMe Trade (another defunct fanmade site). As a comment points out in the above reddit thread, the site offers a service in which they will take pictures of items at an extremely high resolution and it is likely that they may have access to these remaining swf files. The developer for attrade has a twitter here.
While I am bringing light to this reddit post, as it does a better job at explaining DreamSelfy, I would also like to see other parts of TinierMe be archived and preserved if it's possible. I do not know who all was involved with the site, but one of their sponsors was a musician named Stephanie Yanez who is still active to this very day. She sang both “Sakura Wonderland” and “Ultimate Miku World” for the site, and has openly talked about how much she misses TinierMe and how she’s been “looking into bringing it back” for many years now. I do not believe she’d own any files from her time on the site, but she could be a nice contact to ask about her experiences regarding it. The other two major ones were Mari Watanabe and DJ HEAVYGRINDER, however I am not sure how much they’d remember about their time on TinierMe.
Again, this is my first post on the LMW, so I apologize for any mistakes or how rushed this post may be, but this is extremely important to me as TinierMe was a defining part of my childhood despite its short lifespan. I hope all of the information I gave can be of some use as a starting point, as I’d really love to see TinierMe and DreamSelfy get the preservation they deserve.
In 2009, a website named TinierMe was launched by GCREST in America. It was a browser MMO that was focused on socializing, playing games, and decorating your avatar known as a ‘SELFY’. This was basically an English version of the same game in Japan that was released under ‘atgames’, but TinierMe had a very short lifespan as it was only open for 3 years before closing in 2012 while its Japanese equivalent was open until the death of Flash in 2020.
If you’re familiar with the name, it’s either because you were either a big Vocaloid fan at the time or you used the fanmade site “DreamSelfy”, which was essentially a lone dress up simulator that was free to anyone who either didn’t have a TinierMe account or simply didn’t have the real life money to blow on the various gachas. DreamSelfy relied on the swf files from TinierMe and even after the site’s closure, it was a complete catalog of every item released on the site that stayed up until 2018. While archives of DS exist on the Wayback Machine, the site and images are completely broken and for the longest time the content was considered completely lost.
Sometime during 2020 or 2021, posts about a program known as ‘EMSelfy’ began to crop up along with download links. Its origins come from the Chinese website Tieba Baidu and was released somewhere in 2016. It is more or less a compilation of all the swf files from TinierMe along with files from its Japanese sister site, however is incomplete due to the amount of items missing (most of the American items have been accounted for but many of the Japanese items/gachas have not been added/named properly). I do not know when it was last updated, as I cannot advance in the thread without logging in, however I had read somewhere that the original creator no longer had any interest in updating it. Therefore, this leaves this program the only surviving repository for most of these files that otherwise would’ve been lost to time. My copy of this program was obtained from deviantART, and the google drive link was last updated in December 2022. According to the creator of this journal, it had been difficult to find a working link as previous ones had been erased and taken down twice, so their link is what apparently survives from the Tieba Baidu thread. It still works as of 2024, however if something happens to this archive I will upload my own copy and share it on this post.
On that note, given that EmSelfy is in Chinese, I have taken it upon myself to make screenshots to point out the options on the application (sta.sh/0ovuv3bxej5 / sta.sh/01nnstya185f). EmSelfy can also load old DreamSelfy urls, but as it is incomplete, some items may not appear (but that will help with tracking down what is missing from the US/JPN catalogs).
This same Chinese group also reported that in 2021, GCREST had sold the SELFY related copyrights to cocone connect and it was stated that the artstyle would be updated and changed by cocone. This is important, as previous clothing assets from the browser game have been known to be reused in other SELFY related games such as CocoPPa Play, which was released two years after TinierMe’s closure, and the Nintendo Switch game “SELFY COLLECTION: The Dream Fashion Stylist” which was released in 2020. We cannot be sure if GCREST and cocone connect have backups of the original files, and if they do, there's no way that they will simply hand them over.
This leaves the search for these missing swf files to another site that is still up called attrade. Back when the Japanese site was still up, you could tweet at the site’s twitter account to register and seems to function in the same way as TinierMe Trade (another defunct fanmade site). As a comment points out in the above reddit thread, the site offers a service in which they will take pictures of items at an extremely high resolution and it is likely that they may have access to these remaining swf files. The developer for attrade has a twitter here.
While I am bringing light to this reddit post, as it does a better job at explaining DreamSelfy, I would also like to see other parts of TinierMe be archived and preserved if it's possible. I do not know who all was involved with the site, but one of their sponsors was a musician named Stephanie Yanez who is still active to this very day. She sang both “Sakura Wonderland” and “Ultimate Miku World” for the site, and has openly talked about how much she misses TinierMe and how she’s been “looking into bringing it back” for many years now. I do not believe she’d own any files from her time on the site, but she could be a nice contact to ask about her experiences regarding it. The other two major ones were Mari Watanabe and DJ HEAVYGRINDER, however I am not sure how much they’d remember about their time on TinierMe.
Again, this is my first post on the LMW, so I apologize for any mistakes or how rushed this post may be, but this is extremely important to me as TinierMe was a defining part of my childhood despite its short lifespan. I hope all of the information I gave can be of some use as a starting point, as I’d really love to see TinierMe and DreamSelfy get the preservation they deserve.
