Have you heard about Habbinfo? Habbinfo was, for a long time, my second life. After living with my father for 4 years, in 2008 I moved back to live with my mother and until that moment I had never had contact with the internet, not even a computer. I spent many weekends with my uncle who would pick me up at home to spend time with him and go to the beaches, his friend's holiday home, parks, etc., with this habit I ended up going to my uncle's boss's house and there I met Lorena, the daughter of my uncle's boss, she had a very old computer with a tube monitor and a yellowed keyboard, but the important thing was that it worked.
On that computer, in just one day I was introduced to Habbo Hotel, Habbo is a game made by the company Sulake where you create your character, choose the name, clothes and navigate within the game making friends. There is a table with countless “rooms” with names and you can click on the room and enter, if you don't have a password, and look at the furniture that players buy to decorate the rooms, talk to other players and move around with your character in the game. space of the room that you have access to, obviously the only person who can decorate is the owner of the room or who he gave authorization to do the same, you can create your room and do whatever you want. That's where the creativity of the game lives, many transform their rooms into Hospitals, Police Stations, Theaters, Football Stadiums and much more.
Image: Disclosure/Sulake
Lorena taught me the basics and as soon as I came across the game I really enjoyed the opportunity to make friends and put my creativity into practice in decorating the rooms. In addition, players take it seriously and live another life within the game, not only following game and room rules but also making family, friends, enemies and digitized actions. Is the term digitized shares correct? I can't forget the many times I watched countless players practicing sexual intercourse writing at the same time as imagining this act, today it seems strange to see that but in my youth it wasn't so much. Actions such as hugging, kissing and eating also depended on this mechanism.
After playing for a while, I wanted to change my character's clothes and start decorating my room to make it a success for visitors to the hotel, but I came across the game's limitation for such a thing, it was necessary to pay, with money from the real world, to be able to fulfill my desires and I would never ask my mother for money all the time to spend on the game, that's when Lorena introduced me to Habblet.
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Habblet Hotel was practically identical to Habbo Hotel, the difference was that the game was not made by Sulake, it did not have its trademark, that is, it was a Habbo Pirata, as it was called at the time by players. The good thing about all this was that now I could have all the clothes and furniture at my disposal, it was on Habblet that I started to understand a little more about what this second life was like, today much is said about Metaverso, at that time this type of game was my Metaverse.
Image: Disclosure/Habblet
It was still at the time when I got to know Habblet that I had the opportunity to play it at my house and in my little corner, my mother's work friend made his credit card available for my mother to buy and pay for a laptop/notebook for me. When I saw that box in the middle of the living room at home I ran and quickly opened it, it was a Positivo notebook. If it were today, I'd throw it in the trash. Anyway, I loved that wonderful laptop from Positivo as a gift, and I remember that it had 3D technology and came with glasses with one red lens and the other blue, I never used this thing in my life during the 10 years that the device managed to survive with me. A little card game over there and a minefield game over here, finally the Internet was installed in my house and I managed to get on Habblet.
At the time, players knew that Habbo, despite being paid to have access to everything, was the hotel that had the most players while pirate hotels could not reach it, however, a buzz emerged on Habblet and many started talking about a such Habbinfo Hotel.
Habbinfo Hotel had nothing special, its highlight was being the pirate habbo with more players than the others. This fact ended up making me go to the hotel and there I was making friends and entering different rooms, I was looking for what the game would really give me as rewarding for me to access it every day, which was football and friendships .
At the time I must have been 9 or 10 years old, I was in the first part of elementary school, my period of playing was when I woke up and after I got home from school, I studied in the afternoon. As I said, Habblet served as an apprenticeship to get to know the game, to have an idea of how to have fun through it and I ended up coming across football. In the real world, as Habbo players say, I played football as a goalkeeper and that made me enter this segment at Habbinfo Hotel, I started to enter rooms in stadiums or CT (Training Center) of clubs of players from the hotel and watched until I got the curiosity to practice the sport in the game. I won't remember the first team I played for but among the first was Flamengo, which is the team I support in the real world, the team belonged to the nickname (player's name) rikelmy-gato, what a horrible name, it was a very amateur team and with many noobs (name given to people who don't know how to play).
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
To start with the new hotel and with the focus on football I would need to choose a name for my character related to football from the same position I was willing to play, it was then that the first name that came to my mind was Petr Cech, and yes I was one of those who used the Equestrian helmet to imitate Petr Cech's helmet, but that didn't last long. From then on I created the nickname cech1, many ask me what happened to change it to cech11 afterwards, it was quite simple, I ended up falling into a silly gold bullion scam, I entered the link with my account and the scammer was making fun of me while I, now with the nick cech11, was cursing him in a club room asking him to return my account.
Playing for Flamengo, I made friends with the owner of the team, but right after that I remember having a test at Bayern Munich, with Cristian, it was a very recent team with little appreciation, but there were many good players among them. lHernanBarcos, pedromor222, Messi0, xxxneymar7golxx (player who played with me later at Manchester City), lPastore and me. By the way, pedromor222 opened a selection on Habbinfo, the Great Britain Selection, and invited me to be the main goalkeeper and lHernanBarcos created a team with me on Habb.biz years later.
Bayern ended up not lasting as long due to their lack of leadership and I took advantage of the fact that I was without a team and decided to start a team, Brasiliense. This team is not even in Habbinfo's football history, but what I remember is having lRafael Saldanha on my team and few people know about it. lRafaelSaldanha was a player from the List of Legends, it didn't make sense for a legend to play in such a newly created team and without any authority. However, he played with the l.rivelino account, the only person who knew was me and his practice was not wrong, he could play for another team with another account without a problem. The team didn't last long, I didn't have enough experience to manage the team.
I started to get into the field of football and meet important figures in that field, to start in a club it was necessary to take a test and that's how I did it until I got my first club. Each hotel had its main teams and Habbinfo was no different, the biggest and best were: Ilusion FC, Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund, Real Brasil, Real Madrid and Allianz.
Among the important figures in the field, one of them was the Collector, the president of UEFA. Basically everyone was drooling over their balls to have their name on the "List of Legends", each update of the Hotel can affect the soccer ball and it moves differently, so each hotel had a ball that could be different in another hotel and, as a result, the ball had a name for each style of movement it performed. To summarize, there were Bug, Desbug, Rebug and so on. For each ball there was a list of the best players for it, the period that the ball would exist no one knew, as we had no control over the hotel update, that is, the ball had a life expectancy of 1, 2, 3 or at most 4 years for each hotel.
The Collector was the “Godfather”, something very strange compared to the real world, FIFA is the boss in international football, while in Habbinfo it was UEFA. He was the Collector who ruled the confederations, no one could create one without his endorsement, he was the one who opened the voting for the best players of the year, managed the entire structure for competitions between pirate habbos teams and the Habbinfo Selection was owned by UEFA , in one period the Collector went to the coach of the national team. Something pretty dictatorial, right? I had frequent contact with him until a few years ago, but I don't see myself talking to him anymore.
In addition to the Collector, there were other important figures from the Desbug period, the ball I played at Habbinfo. Elias552266, the owner and manager of Manchester City, was the most relaxed and friendly of all, he was always testing and giving opportunities to many players. I was playing soccer in some room when I noticed him outside the field watching, after the end of the match he called the staff and said he would perform a test and I quickly accepted the invitation. The test was basic and I got the Manchester City goalkeeper vacancy, reserve goalkeeper.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of the Manchester City squad at the entrance to the stadium to face Allianz, I am number 2.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of the Manchester City squad celebrating winning a trophy, I'm the “ninja” in the photo.
To make it clear, it wasn't that easy to play Habbinfo, let alone football! My Internet was not very good, and Habbinfo crashed during the football match and all the players were frozen, it was a funny but terrifying scene for the football player, as any failure was crucial. The game could freeze for you and be normal for others, when frozen the player would immediately shout “LEEEEEEEGGG” and try to redeem himself with that. Anyway, I suffered a lot with that and it was difficult to get to the position of main goalkeeper, well, on the one hand it was difficult and on the other hand it was easy, you know? Manchester City's first choice goalkeeper was Boiei12, remember I said Habbinfo was like a second life? Well, the championships had punctual times for each match, that is, we needed to be at the stadium at the exact time to be able to play, because of that the games, for the most part, took place at night so that there was no conflict with school hours in the real world, but goalkeeper Boiei already proves worthy of his nickname, he often didn't show up for games and I was always there to take his place, becoming Manchester City's first team was easier because of him too. I floated wherever you are, thank you very much!
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image used at the top of Manchester City's website, I'm first in line.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of Eagles Blue, Manchester City's stadium.
Elias552266 was a great friend of mine at the time, he always gave me space and the recognition I had in football, without a doubt, I owe Manchester City. It was from then on that I won awards for Best Goalkeeper and started to be requested by other teams, but Elias always had a good chat with all the players and managed to hold them for a long time. At the time there were gold bars, when you clicked on them they became currency in the game and to buy a large amount of bars required many coins, clubs at the time transferred players for gold bars, of course, there were players who left clubs without giving a statement, but that was highly disrespectful at the time.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of Manchester City buying Real Brasil's lRisk for 200 Barras, I'm the suit with the brown blazer.
In the midst of this whole process of getting into the hotel's football environment, I came across some rooms of television stations, the two biggest ones at the Habbinfo Hotel were Rede Globo from ::math:: and Tv Habbinfo from Edurdo.Martins, both broadcasters I enjoyed the experience of “working” on them. Rede Globo was one of the main attractions of the hotel and had a very busy headquarters room, including the son of ::math:: was Neuer, goalkeeper of a hotel team and it was very common to see ::math:: : in some football rooms. To be honest, I don't even remember how I got into Globo, I just remember participating in a soap opera that you can check out below. (Jesus, shame on you…)
Tv Habbinfo was a different process to start working there, Eduardo.Martins was looking for someone from the football world to present the sports program, Bola na Rede, he did several tests and most of the players behaved inappropriately and that irritated Eduardo.Martins, I got the job for behaving better. The station had a kind of main trio, it was Eduardo.Martins, AvrilLaving.sk8 and Vinicius-Turn, both had the projects in mind and put them into practice. Despite later becoming Vice-President of the station, the three of them were always closer and I was kind of on the sidelines.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of the headquarters of Tv Habbinfo.
The trio went to the Habbo Hotel and created ABC and I stayed on Habbinfo, after the end of Habbinfo I tried to contact Eduardo.Martins and he simply blocked me on Facebook, but he still had his two friends on Facebook. Did he not like my posts criticizing Dilma? He was a staunch PT supporter, anyway, how far have we come.
In the midst of all this, I decided to undertake, I created Lacoste but it was a failure, my business was to play football. I found this article below on the Internet, unfortunately I don't remember what happened but I found this text very funny.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Article image: http://globotvhabbinfo.weebly.com/
I confess that I was far from being the best goalkeeper at Habbinfo, I never was. I was never called up for the Habbinfo national team, but that never affected me and I always accompanied the national team to games to support the hotel where I was welcomed. I believe that my highlight was not also because I did not use software to perform better, in fact it took me a long time to know that this existed. Well, the software I'm talking about were double-click software or exchanging the ball for a black square to reduce the game's LEG, I've never used that and I didn't even know who used it, I only realized that when the comments for some players started saying : “He wears such a thing!”. The fact is that the Real Brasil club became well known for being a very successful team and everyone used software to play, I believe that most who arrived at the Habbinfo Selection also used it and, because of that, always had an advantage against the selections of the other hotels.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of the Habbinfo team in training with coach Colecção (blue shirt).
Even in the last moments of football life on Habbinfo I joined Tawendison's Barcelona, Manchester City was already closed, we were very successful with Barcelona and won many titles, we became one of the best teams in the hotel already with the new version of the ball , the Rebug. I made a lot of friends on Habbinfo and I remember the nick of many from the time, sometimes I wonder where they must be, what they are doing or if they remember me. Until a while ago I had contact with more people and attended Facebook groups, but I ended up getting a boring mind and not taking any more nonsense from the “new generation” of players, I got disappointed with some people and distanced myself from others. The Desbug ball, if I'm not mistaken, lasted between 2010 and 2013, after that I was called to play in other hotels, since football on Habbinfo had died, but it didn't work out so well, I even played with the nick Higuita on Habb. biz and getting recognition, but it wasn't the same anymore.
Image: Disclosure/Habb.biz
Image of my character on Habb.biz.
Today, as I write this article, I speak with two friends from the Habbinfo era, totaling a little over 12 years of friendship. One is Meki- (Eduardo Gabiato) and the other is Van-Der-Sar (Matheus Santos). Van-Der-Sar was Ilusion's goalkeeper, he was an excellent goalkeeper and he was the team's absolute starter. At the beginning, we faced each other a lot with countless matches, it took a long time for us to become true friends. By the way, I had a very close friend at the time who was Playng (Gustavo), he was from the same state as me, he was a fanatical Flamengo fan and watched Flamengo games in the real world with me. Playng was terribly jealous of Van-Der-Sar, they even exchanged barbs and everything. Unfortunately, the last contact I had with Playng was through his cousin's Facebook, he just said “Hi” and after I replied and asked for a better contact to keep in touch with him, he never responded and disappeared.
Image: Disclosure/Habbinfo
Image of me and Playng together on Habbinfo rooting for Flamengo in the “real world”.
Meki- I met after seeing his character, it was something very exotic for the football world, he wore Mohawk style hair, shirtless, underwear and socks. That was all it took to get my attention and go, “This guy is different!” With Meki- I didn't have an immediate bond, to be honest I don't remember the teams he played for, I remember that I helped him with some projects at the time, but he stopped playing Habbinfo earlier and our friendship consolidated after Habbinfo. Meki- and Van-Der-Sar are still my friends at Habbinfo, of all the players I've met, they were the ones who welcomed me and were always by my side to listen to my outbursts, my jokes, my stories, my nonsense and everything else. Unfortunately, I still haven't met the two in person but I hope that day comes.
The game style ceases to be more addictive as you get older, I believe I will no longer play Habbo, Habbinfo or any other Habbo Pirate in the same way as I used to, today leisure time is shorter and the options are multiple.
Well, this summary of 'Habbinfo: My second life' was gigantic, but I believe that I managed to convey all my feelings from the moments I spent playing Habbinfo Hotel, they were unforgettable moments that never came back, it was through this game, for a period of my life, that I felt very fulfilled with the friendships, the opportunity to be a goalkeeper in football in this world and in so many other events. Lonely days and nights passed unnoticed after entering this world, but the butterflies in my stomach after withdrawing and lying in bed ended up dominating me knowing that the real world does not have the same magic.
Thank you Habbinfo Hotel, Thank you all.
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