History of Blokus.com

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I first came to play blokus on blokus.com in 2003, after first finding an applet on another French game site.

There was a Java applet where you could find other players to play against. It had 12 tables, numbered 1-12, and there were just a handful of people who visited the site.

It basically worked, but had some serious bugs, and it would even
completely hang my PC, such that only the power switch would reboot it.

In my opinion, this version had the best graphics of the lot, with very clearly defined pieces.

It also had the feature that you could rearrange the unplayed pieces if you wanted, for example, to put some aside for play later in reserved places.

Some time in the second half of 2004, it suddenly shut down,
without a word from Sekkoia, the company which owned the game
and ran the site.

In the spring of 2005, the second version came online.
Also written in Java, It looked like this:

At that time the game had sold more sets and become more popular
so the number of online players grew rather quickly.
There were a few dozen regulars and many more occasional players.

But this version too had plenty of bugs, some of which I helped
eliminate, and in 2007 Sekkoia commissioned a game building company
to make a new version.

They used flash and this is the appearance as it is today (July, 2010).

They added lots of features, like team games, and time limits,
and among their other 'achievements' were:

- failure to solve the biggest problem of all (player disconnections)
- fuzzy letters everywhere (anti-aliasing), except in the chat, thanks to me
- a board with 'squares' which aren't square and aren't all the same size
- consumption of huge amounts of CPU time
- and, of course, new bugs

In early 2009, Sekkoia was bought out by the Mattel Corporation.

Being a kid-oriented toy company they instituted some changes, like restricting chat to over-18's and attempting to censor swear words, but never showing any great interest in the site.

From time to time, the game would be unavailable, sometimes for days at a time, without any explanation or apology.

In March and April of 2012, there was a prolonged outage of about 6 weeks, which prompted lots of protests from players, some of whom harangued the Mattel support team on a daily basis. In part because of that, and in part because of the behavior of a few "bad apples", on May 18, 2012, Mattel simply shut the whole thing down.

Except they proved no better at that than they had been at keeping it up, and with a modification to their HOSTS file, players could still access blokus.fr and the online game for months afterward.