Heard of Grow a Garden from Roblox? The game that has shaken the gaming industry with its super high number of active players? Well, what if I told you that a game very similar, from a long time ago, achieved an even higher number of daily players: 50 million.

The game in question is QQ Farm, known as Happy Farm until 2017. You probably have not heard of it because it is from a Chinese app called QQ. Created by Tencent in 2008, the game became a huge success for China. It became so popular that jobs and schools had to restrict access to the game. It even became part of everyday conversations, it would go:

“Yo bro, can I get some apple juice?”

“Yeah, that’ll be 3 yuan (chinese money).”

“Thank you. By the way, how’s your garden?”

People in China would literally ask ‘how’s your garden’ to strangers. This is how famous it became. 

But why?

Due to the game being based in China, there is limited information known about Happy Farm. This could be due to censorship within the country, preventing people from inside or outside from seeing things that the Chinese government deems inappropriate or a security risk (etc. the news). 

But, I believe that it gained massive commercial success for the same reason as Grow a Garden: It is addicting. 

In Happy Farm, crops also grow offline, but they make it so that insects infest your garden and you have to return to the game and get rid of them, increasing the chance of someone returning to the game. It is so addicting that this happened:

At the peak of its popularity, a couple who were from the Zhejiang province nearly divorced because a 66 year old man was too tired to wake up his wife at midnight for her to harvest the crops on Happy Farm. 

Happy Farm did not just make people in China happy, it impacted the whole gaming industry. The game is a social network game (SNG), which means that it is a game in a social media app or network. This game helped popularise SNG’s, helping make many famous games still known today, like Mob Wars, FarmVille, Cow Clicker and Angry Birds Friends (now a normal game after releasing worldwide). Of course, the popularity subsided eventually, but some SNG’s moved into real games and became famous. 

Unfortunately, Happy Farm met the end of the road in 2017, after being shut down due to costs and their strategy adjustments. Many players actually ‘mourned’ for its unfortunate demise, showing its huge player base. It still has left a huge mark on the gaming industry, but as the years go on, it is slowly being forgotten. Hopefully someone on YouTube, X (formerly Twitter) or Reddit mentions it to reignite the memories of Happy Farm and its legacy.

Edit: Unknown if shut down in 2017; there are reports stating its shutdown in 2013 but Wikipedia says 2017.

By Kingsley.