Snapshot of AJ from 9 Years Ago

Hey Jammers! Today I woke up, saw the date, and realized that nine years ago today, I logged into Animal Jam for the first time!

Yup. I'm an ancient Jammer :') 

To celebrate, here's an old screenshot I dug up out of the abyss:

This was from a couple of months after I joined. At the time, AJHQ was doing something for the first time: they made an animal unavailable. 

From April 12th to August 30th 2012, you could not become a monkey. Instead, on the screen where you would create a new animal, there was big red ENDANGERED banner over the monkey icon. 

This was to raise awareness about how humans abusing the natural world make endangered species vanish every single day. 

Much like the efforts to raise money for real-life conservation/species rescue efforts, there was a big push to donate gems at the Conservation Museum to save the monkeys. Over the course of four months, Jammers donated over 1 Million gems to the Conservation Museum, and thus monkeys returned in August!

Because wildlife conservation is honestly even more urgent today than it was nine years ago, I really wish AJHQ would do something like this again. Maybe the gems donated could get translated into actual money donated by AJHQ to real-life conservation efforts for that animal! 

Moving on, another thing about this screenshot is that the location where I took it looks different now. As you can see now, the Zios passageway to the Adventure Base Camp was originally a simple boarded up doorway. 

And one more thing...

The Glove my panda was wearing used to be ridiculously rare. Seriously– you might not think much of them now, but Gloves were the items that everybody wanted during 2011 and 2012. 

When Jammers would try to break the ice in Mt Shiveer or the bridge in Coral Canyons, there would always be someone yelling "IF IT BREAKS YOU GET A GLOVE" to encourage people. Of course, outside of urban legend, that never actually happened... or did it? X)

There were a few unique gloves given as monthly member's gifts (yes– that was a thing in 2012!) that were particularly high-demand: the Lava Glove, the Mummy Glove, the Dragon Glove, and the Legendary Glove. 

Nowadays, you can easily buy them or trade for them, but I remember my friend and I used to literally pray to the Mira statue to somehow give us a Lava Glove xD

But don't get me wrong, the situation with Gloves was nowhere near what we have with Spikes today. Gloves were super rare, yeah, but the trading system was less messed up so it was much easier to get the items you wanted. You didn't need to spend months amassing 25+ "lesser" Gloves to work your way up.

For now, that's all I'll say about that. The topic of our messed up Spike economy will be a post for another day...

I hope you enjoyed this mini history lesson! Before the end of the month, I'll try to stick to my goal and make at least three more posts :)

See you in Jamaa!