Whirled was a free online virtual world Adobe Flash game by Three Rings Design, Inc. It entered open beta on March 25, 2008 and remained in beta throughout its entire life.
Players could socialize, make friends and groups, and decorate rooms. They could also play games to earn coins and purchase items in the shop. The bulk of the content was made by the players; players could make their own items, such as avatars, pets, objects, pictures, videos, and songs, and code their own games. They could sell their creations in the shop and earn real money off of them.
Whirled was never a financial success. The website shut down on April 8, 2017. Various websites attempted to clone, revive, or continue Whirled by forking the open source code, but some of these websites later shut down as well.
Whirled provided examples of:
- Achievement System: A feature of Whirled was trophies. Trophies were awarded by games for certain actions.
- Anthropomorphic Food: The default character, a walking piece of tofu with a face.
- Character Customization: Players could make their own avatars from scratch and sell them in the shop.
- An Interior Designer Is You: Players had the ability to decorate their own rooms to their liking using the items they made or got from the shop.
- Mascot: A walking piece of tofu with a face was predominantly shown on most promotional material for the game and served as the game's mascot.
- Perpetual Beta: The game was in open beta for all of its life.
- Production Foreshadowing: The official game Underwhirled Drift featured a Devilite and Soul Jelly. This foreshadowed them later appearing in their own game Spiral Knights.
- Real Money Trade: Creators earned bling for selling items for bars and were able to cash out their bling for real money.
