/articles/rediscovering_poissonrouge

around 11-13 years ago, i used to love exploring the internet. i was very young and i used to google random things such as "1 + 1 = 2" or "123.com". i remember one day i stumbled upon a website which looked like a playground, you could click on the different objects and they would either make a sound, start a minigame, or take you to a different page. i was fascinated by this website and i used to love playing on it. the one memory of this website that led me to find it again was the fact that there was a webpage with four little people that would sing "frère jacques" if you clicked on them. years passed and i forgot about this website, until one day i was on a nostalgia trip and i remembered it. i tried to find it by searching the phrases i would search back then, but i couldn't find it. i asked my friends if they knew what i was talking about, but they didn't. then, i decided that it would be a good idea to ask on the Flashpoint Archive discord server where one person assured me that i was, in fact, not crazy and that the website i was talking about actually existed. with a new sense of hope, i started searching for websites that were similar to my description and i found poissonrouge.com. in 2024, the website is still up but it's compeltely different, barely resembling the website i used to play on (for some reason, the actual website is hidden until you click the red fish icon in the bottom left corner, instead showing a free version called "minifish"). before giving up, i decided to check the Wayback Machine, speficially the 2012 archive and i realised that poissonrouge.com was actually the website i was looking for.


having found the website, i decided to download the .swf files and try to play them using an old build of Adobe Flash Player. unfortunately, due to the way the game was built, it was impossible to play it without the old website itself. still being very interested in the history of the website, i read the contents of the "our story" page.


poissonrouge.com started in 1998, under the name "Pat's World", as a small Human centered Computer Systems Masters project within COGS, the Cognitive Science department of Sussex University. in 1999, they bought the domain www.poissonrouge.com, even though they would rather have had www.fishcake.com. at a later date, they also purchased www.redfishsoup.com to help non-french speakers find it. poissonrouge.com went on to take part in many different projects, spanning from commissions from Ragdoll to PBS and in 2010, they were getting around 100.000 visits per day.


for April Fool's day, they wanted to make a joke about the website shutting down, but that silly joke turned out to make people believe that the website was actually going dark. they received hundreds emails from their users asking if they were being serious and the prank ended up halving their traffic down to 60.000 visits per day. during this time, poissonrouge.com was also dealing with financial issues, messages asking for donations starting to become more frequent.


in 2013, as their demotivation was at an all-time high, they decided to dissolve the company, but they were hit with a wave of support from their users, parents and teachers actively asking them to keep the website up (around this time, they also published a manifesto, stating their mission in helping children learn through play and exploration). on february 15th, 2014, they decided to let the website live on, but now asking for financial participation from their users. poissonrouge.com was now a yearly subscription service, independent from any advertising or sponsorship.


in 2018, Adobe announced that they would be discontinuing Flash Player by the end of 2020, which meant that poissonrouge.com would have to be rebuilt from the ground up. development started, now using HTML5 as the main technology, which meant that the website would be available on all devices, including tablets and smartphones and that it would keep existing for a long time.


unfortunately for me though, that means that the website i used to love and cherish is now gone, replaced by a new version of itself. unless the developers decide to release the old, complete .swf files, the version of poissonrouge.com that was so dear to my child self will be lost to time, only to be remembered by the people who used to play on it.

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