FarmVille
| FarmVille | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Zynga |
| Publisher(s) | Zynga |
| Platform(s) | Facebook (Adobe Flash), MSN Games |
| Release | June 19, 2009 |
| Genre(s) | Farming simulation, social network game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, with visiting neighbors |
FarmVille is a farming game that Zynga released on Facebook on June 19, 2009. Players grew crops and raised animals on a plot of virtual land and visited the farms of their Facebook friends, whom the game called neighbors. It was the most popular game on Facebook for more than two years, with a peak of 83.76 million monthly users in March 2010, and it was one of the first large games to be free to play and paid for by small purchases.[1] The original game closed on December 31, 2020, when Facebook ended its support for Adobe Flash.
FarmVille is one of the two influences listed for Raindrop Planet, a game about microbes that Molecular Reality Corporation planned for its console.
Gameplay
Each crop took a fixed time to ripen, and the clock ran whether or not the player was logged in. A crop left unharvested for two and a half times its growing time withered. The player could save it with Farm Cash, the premium currency bought with real money, which paid for an "unwither" or for a biplane whose "instant grow" ripened a field at once. Trees and livestock could not wither or die, and paid out at set intervals.[1] Farm Coins, earned in play, bought seed and decorations.
Neighbors could take up to five actions a day on a friend's farm, such as completing tasks, and could send gifts, and groups of friends could join cooperative harvests called co-ops. Friends who did not play Facebook games could be neighbors too.[1]
History
The game was pitched to Zynga by four developers from the University of Illinois, who had built an earlier browser game in the manner of The Sims. Zynga paired them with its own staff, and the first version went out about five weeks later. It had one million daily players four days after launch and reached 34.5 million daily players at its peak.[1] Reviewers compared it with two farming games that preceded it, Happy Farm and Farm Town.
Time put it on a 2010 list of the 50 worst inventions. When it won the award for best new social or online game at the Game Developers Conference in March 2010, part of the audience booed the Zynga executive who accepted it. The designer Ian Bogost wrote Cow Clicker, a Facebook game in which the player clicks a cow every six hours, to mock the genre.[1] The game declined after 2011, and by April 2016 it ranked 110th on Facebook by daily players. Sequels followed: FarmVille 2 in September 2012 and FarmVille 3, for phones, on November 4, 2021.
Molecular Reality Corporation
The memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest" gives each of eight planned games an "Inspired by" line. For Raindrop Planet, a game of environmental science and microbial ecology, the line reads "Inspired by: coconuts, farmville".[2] Every other video game the memo names came out between 1977 and 1985, most of them for arcades or the Atari 2600; FarmVille and, in a separate overview of the same year, Fortnite are the only later titles the company cites.[3] By the time the memo was written, the original FarmVille had been closed for more than a year.
FarmVille'''s crops withered when ignored. Raindrop Planet'' was to measure real samples, among them "microbial communities within a 'raindrop planet' micro-incubator accessory", a small chamber that keeps a community of microbes alive and growing, with the organisms counted as they passed through the nanopore of the company's instrument.[2] Its other samples were soil, water and air from the player's surroundings, tagged with GPS coordinates, which makes it a game about the microbiome of a backyard. Neither the memo nor any later company document explains the coconuts.