From “Put a MiniClip on your site”
to “We are Miniclip”

The June 15, 2001 capture has an italic white-and-blue MiniClip logo and three columns. MINICLIPS on the left are the house jokes. Doggy Dating says Check out some of these lonely dogs looking for love. Hillary asks you to Spot Hillary on the Senate floor. On the right, under MINICLIP INDEPENDENTS, are small games: Nimian Flyer, Alpine Escape, Sushi Fishing, Water Balloon Drop4 and SheepGame.

The middle column sells the idea twice. First the white link offering a MiniClip for your own site, then a mailing list: you'll receive the newest FREE Miniclip emails with funny movies, games etc. At the bottom: © 2001 MiniClip Ltd.

Co-founder Rob Small tells the start this way. He and Tihan Presbie made Dancing Bush in Presbie’s apartment in a week, with Presbie as the dancing body double, and sent it to 30 friends and family. Nobody replied. About two weeks later their IT team called: the servers had gone into meltdown.^[1] Everything was free from the start, Small says, although they had no clear revenue model.^[1]

By June 2002 the logo is an orange-and-red MINICLIP wordmark and the page is a long blue catalogue of games. The Top 10 runs from Bomb Jack to United We Dance. Lower down the same game is spelled Untied We Dance, right after Dancing Bush, which struts his stuff on the dance floor. A war game is billed as (Special Bonus Game), and one title carries a warning from the dial-up years: Park-a-lot (High Bandwidth!).

In June 2003 the browser title gains Free Online Games, and the page’s description changes from Short movies, cartoons and Clips to Free Online Games and Shows. The code of a closed dropdown called Full Games List lists 138 titles, from 3 Foot Ninja to Zed. The politics stayed: the list has Bush Aerobics, Dancing Blair and Blair The Motivator. Among the categories on the page is one called UK games.

The June 2004 page keeps Free Games and Shows under the wordmark, as in 2003, and adds a notice that starts with PSST!: We have noticed that your browser does not have a newish version of the Flash Player installed. Miniclip.com requires Flash Player version 5 or later to work best. We see it because the browser that made our screenshot has no Flash at all. An election box sells Bush Shootout: Defend the White House from Terrorists. The copyright line in the code still says ©2003.

The dropdown keeps growing in the code. It lists 188 games in 2004, 245 in 2005 under a new name, List All Games, and 305 in June 2006. That year the category grid grows from two columns to three, and its Top Ten Games list starts with Club Penguin and RuneScape. Club Penguin is still first in the Top Ten of 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In our June 2007 capture the blue is gone. The homepage is white with cyan frames, a Latest Games panel, a Hot Games grid and three colored tabs, Games, Toons and Ecards. A red strip says Get the Miniclip Toolbar with Free New Games Alerts! Under the Action Games box a link reads View all 146 games. The same link says 207 in 2008, 292 in 2009 and 311 in 2010.

The category menu, closed in the screenshot, is the best small print here. Its code lists 5 Minute (In a hurry), E-Rated (Everyone), Political and Nintendo Wii. In June 2008 it adds US Election 2008, and the June 2009 menu still has China 2008 a year after those Olympics. The 2008 wordmark gets a new tagline, Play Free Games.

The June 2010 header says Play Online Games, with Facebook and Twitter buttons next to the search box. The category menu’s code now lists iPhone and iPod Touch and Android, and the copyright line in the code has changed from Miniclip Ltd to Miniclip SA. The Top Ten has 8 Ball Pool at number four, but that link goes to 8 Ball Quick Fire Pool, a single-player game.

The pool game from this story is the multiplayer one. Small says 8 Ball Pool started as a Flash game on Miniclip.com in 2010 and quickly went on to become the biggest game on the website.^[1] The oldest capture we found of its game page is from October 2010: an empty blue box where Flash ran, and one line of rules. POT the 8 BALL LAST, after you’ve potted your other balls to win. In our selected homepages it first appears in June 2011, as 8 Ball Multiplayer.

For its tenth anniversary in May 2011, Miniclip said the site had 65 million monthly unique users playing over 650 games.^[2] The phones were already there. The same release says its mobile titles, among them Fragger, Gravity Guy and iStunt 2, had reached more than 32 million downloads.^[2]

Scroll to the bottom of the June 2012 homepage and the page turns into an A–Z list of games in tiny type. Its code links 792 different game pages.

In June 2013 the A–Z list is gone, and the code links 44 game addresses instead of 792. The homepage is a compact white column inside a full-screen ad for Rail Rush, NEW WORLDS! TONS OF FUN!, with Commando Rush in the big feature box. In the menu bar, between Action and Sports, there is now a tab called Pool. Small says Miniclip adapted 8 Ball Pool for phones that year.^[1]

By June 2014 Pool is the first tab. A Soccer Stars takeover wraps the page, and the tile next to the feature says 8 Ball Pool and FREE ON MOBILE! The list below, Top Web Games, starts with 8 Ball Pool. It starts the same way in each of our yearly captures until 2021.

The June 2015 header has lost its tagline. Around it, an Agar.io takeover fills the screen with colored cells: IT’S CELL EAT CELL OUT THERE! The menu bar now reads Pool, Tanki, Action, Sports and so on, and a closed language menu in the code offers 16 languages, from Español to 中文.

The list on the left is called Top 10 Web Games. Number one is 8 Ball Pool. Tencent bought a majority stake in Miniclip that year.^[5]

The game page tells a different story. The January 2016 capture has an orange banner, Install 8 Ball Pool on mobile and get 1000 FREE Coins, above a game box that is blank in our replay, taken with scripts off. The page’s code carries a Flash notice: You need to install Adobe Flash Player to play 8 Ball Pool. By January 2019 the same code says Flash Player needs to be enabled to play 8 Ball Pool and offers a way out: We have a brand NEW version of 8 Ball Pool. Try it out!

Miniclip.com’s game grid hardly moves from 2017 to 2019. The wrapper around it changes every time.

June 2017 is a burgundy Ocopoco ad with WIN! SHIRTS! and WIN! HATS! around Color Switch Challenges. June 2018 is green, with Football Strike and a WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP GROUP PHASE IS LIVE! banner. In June 2019 there is no takeover at all, and the feature is a red dragon.

The small print fills up instead. A thin green strip about a privacy policy update sits above the 2018 and 2019 headers. The number one stays put: 8 Ball Pool tops the Top 10 Web Games list in all three captures, ahead of Tanki Online in 2017, Agar.io in 2018 and Soccer Stars Mobile in 2019.

The June 2020 page opens with a Privacy Notice about cookies in its code, and the screenshot shows a blue sports backdrop with an enlarged MINICLIP logo between balls. Below the game panel is a big 8 Ball Pool tile. In June 2021 a Head Ball 2 takeover frames the grid, and the feature box says JOIN US FOR OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION next to an 8 Ball Pool 10 YEARS badge.

Miniclip’s FAQ, updated in July 2022, names its most recent release on Miniclip.com: Super Trucks Offroad, in May 2021.^[3] In July 2021 Guinness World Records verified 8 Ball Pool as the most downloaded mobile pool game.^[4]

The game page changed too. In our January 2021 capture the game box finally shows something: a loading screen with a pool table, the game’s logo and BY MINICLIP. A year later, in January 2022, the box is black and says ADVERTISING and THE GAME WILL START SHORTLY, under the same coins banner.

The July 7, 2022 capture is a different website. A red square with an M sits next to MINICLIP and PLAY GAMES. The menu reads Our Story, Games, Web Games, M-Careers and Support. The first slide says Play our most popular games now! over two games, 8 Ball Pool and Agar.io. Then comes We are Miniclip: Currently, we reach an incredible 250 million players each month.

The news below announces that SYBO and Subway Surfers have joined, that Miniclip has passed four billion downloads, and, in one headline, From flash game to the world's most downloaded pool title.

2012 · Play Games2012 · Portal2022 · We are Miniclip2022 · Company

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Miniclip’s FAQ, updated the same day, says the change was announced in March 2022. On the web only 8 Ball Pool and Agar.io stayed. Could fans host the old site? No: the technology was a proprietary solution to Miniclip.^[3]

Looking back that month, Small called the move from games website to mobile publisher an extremely painful transition, which almost put us out of business.^[1]

From 2023 the slide in our captures is a giant 3D MINICLIP over a recruitment line: Be part of our family! We have new open positions. The menu item M-Careers becomes plain Careers, and in 2025 a new first item appears, Publishing. The players line now says We reach over 400 million players each month. The news is about other studios joining: FuturLab, the studio behind PowerWash, in 2024, then Lessmore, and Easybrain with Sudoku.com and Blockudoku.

The 2001 homepage asked you to put a MiniClip on your own site. The 2026 one asks you to work for Miniclip. Miniclip moved its focus to mobile games, and the pool game that started in a browser box went with it.