FarmVille Once Took Over Facebook. Now Everything Is FarmVille. (Published 2020) (2024)

In early 2009, when Facebook was still nascent in its efforts to swallow as much of the internet as possible, online games were not yet the behemoth they would become.

Then, that June, came FarmVille. If you weren’t among the tens of millions of people tending a cartoon patch of land on Facebook each day, piling up an endless stream of cutesy collectibles, you were still getting copious nags and nudges from your friends asking for help. The game either pulled Facebook users into an obsession or persistently reminded them that they were missing out on one.

The Flash-based game created by Zynga, designed to be played within Facebook, shut down on Thursday — yes, there were people still playing it — though its sequels that can be played through mobile apps will survive. (Flash, the software that powered the game, also shut down at the end of the year.)

But the original FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users and the growth-hacking techniques it perfected, now baked into virtually every site, service and app vying for your attention.

At its peak, the game had 32 million daily active users and nearly 85 million players over all. It helped transform Facebook from a place you went to check in on updates — mostly in text form — from friends and family into a time-eating destination itself.

“We thought of it as this new dimension in your social, not just a way to get games to people,” said Mark Pincus, who was chief executive of Zynga at the time and is now chairman of its board of directors. “I thought: ‘People are just hanging out on these social networks like Facebook, and I want to give them something to do together.’”