Avatar Palace
The Avatar Palace Museum
A prop bag full of possibilities. A favourite room. A name you hoped to see again. Follow Avatar Palace’s story through the things we shared, the software we used, and the pieces we’re keeping for the next visitor.
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. Its creator and original date are not established in the accompanying record.
Labels transcribed from the recovered gate.
Tell us the route you remember →Keep this story in your collection →Palace Chat · artwork by Nino
The collection’s owner credits Nino with making a rainbow of glossy smileys for Palace Chat, and kept them as a personal favourite.
That is a later chapter of Palace. The classic Palace32 faces have their own story below.
Artist and intended client are identified by the collection’s owner. The original artwork date is unconfirmed.
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 ↗
Your face. Your prop bag.
Your corner of the room.
The classic Windows client kept rooms, expressions, props, and sounds close at hand. Version 3.5’s notes describe better MIDI playback and fixes for prop editing and private whispers—the small things that help a room feel alive.
Remember “Palace35” and “Palace32”? Our saved 3.5 installer contains a program named Palace32.exe. Those names belong together in this chapter.
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. Nino’s smileys belong to this story too: artwork the collection’s owner loved enough to keep.
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 remain unconfirmed.
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 wider Palace software history and a permissioned concept illustration for context. 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 and Nino’s smileys remain outside the dated sequence because their original dates are unconfirmed. Early project proposals are not treated as released features. Contributions can help establish missing dates and client transitions.
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.
