Q&A: Kixeye CEO On Facebook's 'Uphill Battle' To Win Over Core Gamers
WH: Because there were no games that I wanted to play on Facebook. Two years ago Facebook is taking off, Zynga's taking off, and I go and play FarmVille , and it's polished, it's an interesting little social app, but I wouldn't call it a game. But looking at the platform, there's this huge social graph, and Flash is more than capable of delivering good experiences on everybody's browser. And first and foremost, my favorite genre has really been real time strategy -- like Command & Conquer , the original Dune II , StarCraft , Warcraft , etc. -- and nobody had come close to doing anything that was cool on Facebook. But we were also a bit insecure about themes, because nobody was doing games for them on Facebook. When we did Backyard Monsters , it had some core game mechanics to it, but we made the theme more simple to make it gender neutral. And then we realized we made a mistake with that. We slowly over time made Backyard Monsters more hardcore -- with more blood, more monsters. We even introduced at one point decorative items in the game that didn't sell at all. So people want competition and things like that. And Battle Pirates launched about a little while ago, and it's doing super well, it's very sticky in terms the users that are playing. That game was really driven by us wanting to make cool games that we wanted to play that aren't on Facebook. That's the bottom line. WH: Part of it is PR, part of it is just word of mouth. I mean with Backyard Monsters, we saw a ton of people creating Facebook accounts for the first time to play the game, so something is working. I mean they're not coming by the tens of millions, but they're certainly are coming by the hundreds of thousands to play the game. So I think it is a combination of PR, it's a combination of word of mouth, There's always going to be an early adopter who'll play the game and say, "Oh, this is pretty cool, I'm going to tell my gamer buddies and hey you guys should come and play." That's kind of what happened for us. There is some virality going on with the game, I mean it's not runaway virality like you might see with CityVille because the addressable market is much larger and those players all on Facebook and they're very comfortable with playing games there. It's a lot different for us, but I think it's just a matter of time. As long as we continue to deliver kind of quality titles, people will find out about it and check it out.Original Sim City - News
When more of the traditional game guys came into Zynga, you started seeing more original titles. CityVille is a good app, it's a good game! They kind of took like the interesting parts of, say SimCity, combining with the harvesting mechanics of
Of course, there are the sim titles like “Civilization” and (showing my age) “Sim City,” ancestors of “From Dust” in the way they offered control over a growing society, but this title's goals are more nature-driven and even spiritual in tone.
have some slower parts that move forward at a more "easy to manage" pace, then have these real-time emergency/plot developments that make you think quickly… though for old fogies like me, a speed option ala Sim City would be super-keen.
The schedule: July 10, It's My Party, teen singing trio; July 17, The Dady Brothers, July 24, The DixieKats, a concert, show and dance band performing traditional Dixieland and Bayou Gumbo; July 31, Sim Redmond Band, a sunny roots rock with an African
Brian was doing this co-speak with Will Wright, the guy who created Sim City. Anyway, when I was in London we were talking and one thing led to another and he asked me to perform, and I'm like, "Hell yes, I will." Weirdly enough, the next year I
Original SimCity now available for OS X using GPL'ed code | TechDug
Last November SimCity was released under the GPL for the benefit of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The GPL open source code was released under the name “ Micropolis “, which was SimCity’s original working title.
Some bright guys have been working to get the GPL’ed code working on OS X.
@ @ i'm fairly certain you're to blame for my sim game addiction, casey. weren't you the one with original sim city?
Original Sim City 
Original Sim City and Populus! 
Wow Original Sim City looks weird. Sim City 2000 was the bomb though...
How did the background music from the original Sim City get in my head? And, more importantly, why won't it leave?Original Sim City - Bookshelf
Game design, theory & practice
So the idea was to improve on what had worked well in the original SimCity? Roughly. Also, at that point, we had hundreds and hundreds of fan letters saying ...The official SimCity classic planning commission handbook
SimCity 2000, power, politics, and planning
SCURK must be installed in the same directory as SimCity 2000; during installation, it will create a backup of your original SimCity 2000s SC2000. ...SimCity strategies and secrets
Note that you cannot simply insert your original SimCity disks and expect to play. The original SimCity disks can only be used to install SimCity on a ...Electric dreams, computers in American culture
The original SimCity would be considered horribly primitive by contemporary computer game standards. But it's now available on the PalmPilot PDA, ...Day-to-day Guide Directory
SimCity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The original SimCity kicked off a tradition of goal-centered, timed scenarios ... of the game entitled BS Sim City Machizukuri Taikai was broadcast exclusively to ...
SimCity Classic Live
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The original Sim City now free on the Web | TechBlog | Chron ...
The original Sim City now free on the Web. A Digg posting clues us in on something bound ... I spent way too many hours on my Commodore 64 playing the first Sim City. ...
A Closer Look at the Sim City Game Legacy
Sim City is a game series of city simulators, created and developed by Will Wright: who also created the Sims, and numerous other Sim games. The first Sim C
Human Transit: did sim city make us stupid?
Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City: ... Sim City original charged $1 per square of road every year. ...