Goodbye and good riddance to FarmVille

Although most of you probably stopped playing the original FarmVille a long time ago, if you want to have one last shot of nostalgia, today is officially the last day you can play the game on Facebook.

Zynga ad the decision earlier in September, warning the seemingly non-zero number of FarmVille fans who still play the original game. It’s a little confusing, considering the original FarmVille debuted 11 years ago in 20090, and has since spawned Farm town 2, FarmVille 2: Country getaway, and FarmVille 3. To be fair, FarmVille probably would have continued if it weren’t for the fact that the game runs on Flash and Adobe finally killed Flash this year.

Yet while the popularity of the original game has since declined, There was a time when FarmVille defined the Facebook experience. You log in and friends you hadn’t spoken in years had left you with a slip of notifications and pokes, asking for help on their virtual farm. The wise among us have ignored the notifications. The rest of us were eventually sucked into a crazy game of planting virtual tomatoes and carrots, which were then harvested and traded for … crappy collectibles and buildings in the game. Some of them we may have even spent real money to speed up the unbearable wait times because who wants to stare at a patch of strawberries for four hours. Some of us-not this writer, no, no sir–may have forgotten to set an alarm and recorded on a little too late, only for find says the strawberry crop had withered and died.

Iif you have already found question your existence, ask yourself why you, an otherwise rational individual, would be tempted to spend Real, hard earned money on a trashy mobile game, you can thank FarmVille for it. Although FarmVille did not invent game mechanics like realtime loops or booty boxes, he played a major role in their popularization for the general public. Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds and all those others Free games with maddening in-app microtransactions have all taken a page out of FarmVille’s playbook. That said, its success also changed the landscape of the game, prompting developers to create mobile and browser games that appealed to a larger population.

At its peak, FarmVille had 32 million daily active users and a total of 85 million players, according to New York Times. In 2013, he had amassed $ 1 billion in total player purchases. His death won’t leave a huge hole in mobile gaming; there is, after all, countless knock-off games that look like him (plus several official FarmVille sequels and expansions). It is, however, an important is part of modern gaming history, as it is the dubious legacy he leaves behind.

Out of curiosity, I tried to log into my old FarmVille farm. I imagined everything would be withered and dead. I’ve been greeted by several notices stating that FarmVille is on the verge of dying, and that to get one last nostalgic ride, I should install a Zynga Flash plugin. I did the thing. I was barred from several notifications of competitions and in-game events that I had missed. Everything loaded so slowly. Somehow my fruit trees weren’t dead despite more than 10 years of neglect. For reasons I can’t explain, I planted 10 strawberry plots that I absolutely will not check or harvest until this game died. I was then hit with several more pop-ups. After closing my browser out of frustration, I remembered why I quit this game in the first place.