The Sims Carnival

The Sims Carnival was a casual games brand created by the game studio behind the best selling PC game of all-time The Sims. It is an intellectual property of Electronic Arts. The Sims Carnival had two separate product lines. First, it was an online community of crowd-sourced games. Second, it was a line of packaged game titles sold via retail stores and digital download.

An Online Community of Crowd-Sourced Web Games

SimsCarnival.com was an online community centered around playing, creating and sharing games.

It had a massive library of Flash games (rumor: 70K+ games). This online community was supported by a suite of game creation tools, audio & graphic asset packs, a YouTube-style website with leaderboard and other social features, plenty of first-party games, ongoing content releases, community support, and countless user-generated games across many genres (e.g. sports, puzzles, adventure games, racing games, Tower Defense games, Angry Birds games).

Three game creation tools—The Wizard, The Swapper and The Game Creator—were your assistants in game design. The Wizard led you through the process of creating a game step-by-step with intuitive options designed to help you create your own game (e.g. make your own Tower Defense game) with an impressive library of game genres to choose from. The Swapper let you customize existing games – or newly made games from The Wizard - with your own selection of images, so personalizing a game was pretty straightforward. With The Game Creator, and its library of images, animations and sounds, people could create a game from scratch or dove deep into customizing another player's creation.

The mission of SimsCarnival.com was to democratize the art of game creation. It was fully intended to be a game about making games. Because the games were "open source", players could take someone else's creation, give the original creators attributions and customize the games as they see fit (e.g. apply different graphics and story line).

SimsCarnival.com was debuted at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in February 2008 with a keynote speech by the studio head of The Sims. The service was sunset in January 2011.

Highlights in the Press:

A Line of Packaged Game Titles

A screenshot from The Sims Carnival SnapCity

Two packaged game titles were announced around December 2007, and were available for download on the EA Link site.[7]

Outside of the shared brand name, there was no connection between SimsCarnival.com and these two packaged game titles (e.g. no user-generated games in these two titles).

References

  1. ↑ The Sims Carnival Updated Beta Impressions Preview. Don't worry -- this browser-based gamemaker contains no clowns.. 1UP. Retrieved on 2012-02-19
  2. ↑ Sims Carnival is now in open beta. Joystiq. Retrieved on 2012-02-19
  3. ↑ SimsCarnival.com Enters Open Beta.. Kotaku. Retrieved on 2012-02-19
  4. ↑ The Sims Label Announces Games Destinations Website Now in Open Beta. Play, create and share games of all kinds!. IGN. Retrieved on 2012-02-19
  5. ↑ A Look At Sims Carnival Games: Did I Just Get 'Rickrolled' By Electronic Arts?. MTV. Retrieved on 2012-02-19
  6. ↑ SimsCarnival.com in open beta. Gameplanet. Retrieved on 2012-02-19
  7. ↑ The Sims Get More Casual. Kotaku.com. Retrieved on 2007-12-21

External links

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