As a self-proclaimed Disney kid, movies like “Tinker Bell” were an integral part of my childhood. I remember being allowed to stay up late to watch the self-titled first installment of the Tinker Bell series in 2008, and my family owned several of the sequels. As a Gen Z kid who grew up in the online age, I also spent a good chunk of my free time playing online games with my friends on the desktop computer in my den. These two parts of my life intersected in “Pixie Hollow,” a massively multiplayer online role-playing game created by Disney, that ran from 2008 to 2013. Here, I could create my own fairy, explore different meadows, collect ingredients, play minigames and more.
After learning in 2013 that the site was being shut down, I remember feeling sad, even though I hadn’t played in years. A part of my childhood was disappearing; how could I not be upset? I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, because several years later, some “Pixie Hollow” fans took matters into their own hands. Enter: “We the Pixies,” a restoration project that has been rebuilding the original “Pixie Hollow” site since 2018. I discovered the project while deep in quarantine and was hit with a huge wave of nostalgia the minute I began playing. Everything, from the music to the avatar designs to the minigames, was exactly how I remembered it. At the time of writing, “We the Pixies” is in its alpha build. Players can create a fairy, play two of the original minigames (Bubble Bounce and Butterfly Painter) and fly through three different meadows (the in-game locations).
Curious to get more information, I joined the rebuild team’s Discord server. The care for the project was evident immediately — the standard onboarding questions when joining the server were an immersive experience, as I was greeted with a welcome quote from Pixie Hollow matriarch Queen Clarion and asked to identify my “talent” alongside my pronouns. It was here that I ended up getting in touch with one of the project’s founding members. Nora, who asked to be referred to by her screen name in an interview with The Michigan Daily, is a game developer and artist for the project as well.
“‘Pixie Hollow’ shut down in 2013, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to bring my favorite game back,” Nora said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. “This eventually culminated into ‘We the Pixies’ in 2017, and official work began on the project in 2018.”
Rebuilding a game that previously existed seems fascinating, especially when the team working on it has no ties to the original creators. Since “We the Pixies” is not affiliated with The Walt Disney Company in any way, the team is essentially rebuilding the game from scratch. “The demographic for ‘Pixie Hollow’ was, like, eight to 13, (I believe),” Nora said, “and a lot of us were not tech-savvy enough to know how to record things and want to preserve them.” But even though the team doesn’t have access to any of the old code, they have plenty of talent to bring the game back to life. Videos of gameplay do exist, and developers will try to copy the functionality displayed in those videos as the first step in the rebuilding process. The team then has to go off of memory to fill in any remaining gaps.
As far as how the rebuild looks identical to the original game, Nora explained “we have artists, very good artists, (who) actually patch some of the backgrounds and will redraw pieces that are missing based off of what we think should have been there.” Parts of Butterfly Painter, one of the few minigames currently up and running on the alpha version, were redrawn and reprogrammed by Nora herself.
The team currently working on “We the Pixies” consists of a few dozen people, each with different lifestyles and fulfilling different roles. “A lot of us are students, some of us are people with full-time jobs, some are developers and sound techs, too,” Nora said. As a college student studying computer science, communications and geoscience, Nora’s educational background has played a major part in her roles on the project. “I’ve always been pretty interested in computers. Then I decided to put two of my passions together to bring back the game I loved so much as a child,” she said.
The development of “We the Pixies” hit major strides during quarantine, not only because of the abundance of free time but also because the game went viral on social media. “We refer to (it) as the ‘TikTokkening’,” Nora said. “We got a lot of developer and artist and sound designer applications when that happened, and that definitely helped.” That progress has slowed a bit now that the world is returning to normal, but there are still about two or three people working on a certain feature at a time. If you’re interested in helping out with the project, join the Discord server for more details.
I would be remiss to not discuss copyright because it might seem questionable that “We the Pixies” functions without having ties to Disney. But they aren’t technically breaking any laws by rebuilding their property.
“Legal disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice,” Nora said. “But in 2018, there was an addendum to the Copyright Act that specifically included MMORPGs (in the laws pertaining to game preservations).” This addendum made it easier for online games to be legally restored in the name of preserving video game history. “It’s possible that Disney still DMCA’s us,” Nora said, referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which deals specifically with copyright infringement on the internet. But so long as game preservationist projects like “We the Pixies” don’t make any money off of the rebuilt site and they try to keep the spirit of the original website, then they have a legal right to exist.
Along with the preservation of previously existing features, “We the Pixies” may someday add original content to the site. “What we’ve been kind of mulling over is new fashions, hairstyles, events, games, things like that,” Nora said. While these additions are very up in the air and wouldn’t happen until the original site’s rebuild is complete, Nora added that part of preserving MMORPGs is preserving the game’s community as well. “When we finish leveling out the original game, the way to keep the game alive is to keep making things in the spirit of ‘Pixie Hollow,’ ” she said.
Bringing a beloved childhood game back to life is no small feat. To see this happen to a website that had such a chokehold on my younger self is so comforting, especially when the people behind the project are around my age now. I can’t wait to see what else the “We the Pixies” team comes up with, and I look forward to the day when the full site is up and running.
Nora said that she gets hit with a similar wave of nostalgia every time she works on a new aspect of the rebuild, and she loves seeing people rediscover the world of Pixie Hollow. “It fuels my motivation to work on the game,” she explained. “It always fills me with so much joy to see so many people so excited for this project. It’s a lot of work, but it’s rewarding.”
Daily Arts Writer Hannah Carapellotti can be reached at hmcarp@umich.edu.