setting the scene

it's 2008. the e-machine tower hums, and the low, dull crackle from the modem massages your brain as you wait five million years for the dial-up to connect you to your destination.

after some time, a bright green page lights the screen, and in the reflection, you see the words: Fuzz Academy.

what is fuzz academy?

fuzzacademy.com was a social-media/petsite hybrid website created by college-student-aged Marie Lu in 2008, along with a small team of helpers.

wait, who is marie lu?

marie lu is a prolific chinese-american sci-fi author. i actually did not know this until a few years ago. i only knew her from fuzz academy as the sole webmaster.

her first book was published in 2011, the same year fuzz academy closed its doors.

(her helpers were Alex Shmelev [chief tech officer], Primo Gallanosa [co-founder, art director], Seth Bedell [sr. vp of marketing] , Patricia Pizer [sr. director of design & interface], and Ron Meiners [sr. director, community & interface].)

what about fuzz academy?

right, back to the point. fuzzacademy.com was a social-media/petsite hybrid website. it was flash-based, meaning many of the archives of the website itself are nonfunctional.

the game focused on users and their 'cadets' - their mascots, or self inserts - and the 'college life' of the fictional Fuzz Academy. overall, the game had a cute mix of social media (a la Myspace) and petsite (neopets) elements. it boasted a userbase of around 100k users, many of which were some blend of scene/emo, furry, or both.

site breakdown

concept

from the FAQ itself:

What the heck is the Fuzz Academy?

Pshaw! Every cadet should know that. But we guess you must be new to the campus, which we guess is an acceptable excuse. The Fuzz Academy is an online community where you get to create and customize your own fuzzy animal. Earn accessories for him/her by taking Academy classes--heck, you might even earn a degree while you're at it! It's a fun way for you to interact with information and with other people.....and believe us, this is one crazy campus. You never know what those crazy cadets are going to do next.

.... and that's what it said!

the site's setting and concept was a campus of pudgy animal mascots - 'cadets' - and a list of 'classes' (mostly just flash games) for them to attend. as you play, they gain "braincells" from the games, and they also grow fatter as people stop by your profile and feed them. this was, in fact, the focus of at least one contest!

mascots could also be rated from 1 to 5 stars. why? it was the style of the time. youtube had star ratings, myspace had star ratings, etc.

using ingame currency, 'hairballs', users could purchase accessories, alternate palettes, and pets for their cadets from the in-game shop. there was a dorm room you could visit to apply this, though this was not always the case; before the dorm's introduction, players would apply their cosmetics from their profile page (i believe).

each user could pick one of four houses - optimus, pacifica, rogue, or tempesto - and were able to switch whenever they like. i remember i frequented rogue the most, but switched to optimus and pacifica once in a while.

you could also give your cadet a pet "jelly", which was kind of like the puffles from club penguin. the jellies didn't do anything special. but they were pretty cute, right?

flash games

there were a number of flash games that the user could play in order to earn hairballs, the website's currency, as well as braincells, which your pet would use as a sort of score.

thanks to the internet archive, the flash games are still playable if you use Ruffle (a flash emulator). they are also listed on flashpoint. many of these games, if not all, were created as commissions by sielaomori.

other activities

in addition to flash games and cadet customization, the game had an extensive forum board system. from personal experience, most of these were used for roleplay. for example, my sister owned a particularly prominent wolf roleplay by the name of "akayla wolf pack". the page would consist of a front board (allowing you to 'tag' other users to reply to your thread) and multiple sub-threads within that board.

there was also an 'image gallery' feature. most people would use it to repost photos they found on google, but it would also have worked like an art gallery, for those who were artistically inclined. i believe these even had comments sections!

users would also often decorate their profile using css. the general resource for this was to just get code from those 'free myspace skins' sites and paste them - they generally worked 1:1 for FA. this was complete with sparkly graphics and fire decals.

some footage of the page (poor quality) can be seen here, but i also have this screenshot taken from a user's deviantart page:

fanworks

there were so many creative people on this website. there are even some remnants of these fanworks on places like deviantart and youtube.

i unearthed a youtube channel by name of lydia fong, who made a lot of fanworks and had a friend group from the site that they had a good long run with.

• 2009 Anni Present
• Fuzz Academy 2010 Anni
• OFA Anni '12
• The OFA Song (happy 5th Anni)
• 6th OFA Anniversary
• 7th anni
• 8th anni
• Fuzz Fighters OP
• Fuzz Fighters ED
• Fuzz Fighters All Transformations
• Aussie's Prez

it's really touching how it evolved from fanart to just a celebration of all their friends that they made on the site. i almost didn't include a couple above because they weren't directly fuzz academy, but i think it's worth displaying that this person had a lot of love for the people they met and the game they played.

and here's a small collection of fanart that i found on deviantart, credited to each dA user. (if your art is here and you want it removed, please contact me.)

"fuzzacademy you say" by foofoo1515

"fuzz academy" by slightlyfloopy

"Fuzz Academy Fanart" by sarelipom

"Moss at fuzz academy" by stonekill

"Rapt the cadet" by lilydragon

"Fuzz Academy" by ninjacatwolf

Closing

the site closed in 2010 after a combination of DDOS attacks, college classwork, and unexpected site growth caused marie lu to take the site offline permanently. a lot of users congregated on the fuzz academy forum to swap handles and contacts and express worry about the site's future.

there are still a lot of people i missed out on reconnecting with, but i still speak to my friend Petzfan on occasion, who has the honorable title of longest internet friend, even if we don't talk nearly as often.

archives

here are some things i found when looking around at IA.

"main new test" swf that seems to be a front page that i don't recall seeing before. it is functional if you use ruffle to emulate flash

mysterious pages: "goatridershorde.html","pmstudios/games.html", "heathertrailer.html", getdna.php, a demo create-a-cadet page, academy.html. all the swf files here are broken. getdna.php has a single line that doesn't really seem to be FA related.

"montly statistics" for the site.

buytoys.html lists where you were able to buy the fuzz academy panda plush, when it was still available.

fanmedia.html holds broken links to fanart.

downloads.html has a lot of broken images, but used to host pixels, icons, and wallpapers.

a short, old faq that seems to have been written in 2007. there is only one archive of it on this url (with the :80 appended to the origin url).

the shop page, which included links to the defunct zazzle and cafepress pages

the index, though, as before, the flash file is missing.

the news page, which mostly covered 'in setting' news, like every cadet trying to purchase wiis

the forums before they shut down. they even have a memberlist and there is a page for all the archived forum profiles - which is way more complete than any of the site's userpage archives! (and my friend petz has their profile archived?!

i wasn't aware, but there was also a fuzzacademy oekaki page that i've never seen before that uses paintBBS and Shi-painter.

this file lists some contest results from jul 5, 2008, assumedly how much money(?) was raised by each 'house'.

final words

despite the site's brief presence on the internet and my life, it still left an impression on me. i learned a lot from the site - i learned about roleplay, and not to steal artwork from random people online, and how to edit some html. i hope that this article will help someone find out more about this site..

thank you to littlestar, for welcoming to the site when i first joined.

thank you to twilight vampre, who made me my first fanart.

thank you to petzfan for keeping in touch.

and thank you for reading!