Army Attack

» see armyattack.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Army Attack arrived in May 2011 out of Digital Chocolate's Helsinki studio, with a premise nobody needed a tutorial for. A group called the Crimson Empire had taken the world, and you were going to take it back one village at a time, building structures and stacking resources while you did it. There was a single-player campaign against the computer, and there was a mode called Versus where you pushed real units at real people on a map and found out how much of your build order was a mistake.

The Versus half is why the game is worth remembering. Facebook in 2011 was saturated with games that asked you to wait for a timer and nudge your friends, and most of the strategy titles were farming with tanks. Army Attack actually let two players fight, with a weekly tournament and rewards attached to it, and App Data had it in the top five player-versus-player games on the platform by the end of that year. In 2012 the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences put it on the Social Networking Game of the Year shortlist.

Digital Chocolate was Trip Hawkins's company, built in 2003 to make phone games in an era before app stores existed, and by 2011 it had moved onto Facebook because the carrier channel it was designed for had been deleted underneath it. Army Attack was one of the better outcomes of that pivot. It was not enough. The company shut down in April 2014.

~ the record ~

~ the numbers ~

What happened next is unusual. RockYou, a company that had spent years pivoting between social apps and advertising, took a licensing deal on four Digital Chocolate games as the studio wound down: Army Attack, Millionaire City, Crazy Penguin Wars and Zombie Lane. It hired the developers along with the code, which is the part most of these deals skip. RockYou's stated strategy at the time was to rescue games other publishers no longer wanted, and for a couple of years it worked.

So Army Attack outlived its studio by two and a half years, running under a company whose actual business had become buying up the abandoned. It closed on 4 November 2016. RockYou itself filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in February 2019 after shutting down games across its portfolio, so the rescue operation turned out to be a holding pattern with a longer lease than the original.

~ the day it died ~

By 2011 I was long out of university and working as an engineer, and Facebook game requests in Turkey had already become a category of notification you cleared without reading. FarmVille had trained everyone in my feed to treat the whole genre as spam with a picture on it, which meant a game like this one, which had a real competitive mode buried inside the invite machinery, had no way to tell anybody. I never played it.

The domain has finished the story off. armyattack.com now serves a sales page that lists the 2011 Facebook game as a selling point for the name, describing it as built-in recognition for whoever buys next. The Crimson Empire is gone and the address is inventory.

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