Monopoly City Streets

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

~ the last words ~

On 9 September 2009 Hasbro turned Google Maps into a Monopoly board. Not forty squares painted to look like a city, but the actual map: every street Google had a name for, anywhere on earth, available to buy. You signed up and were handed three million in play money, then went looking for something to own. Rent landed at midnight UTC on any day you logged in, so the game rewarded showing up more than it rewarded strategy.

On top of a street you owned you could build, from houses up through skyscrapers, and the buildings came out of Chance cards that the game dealt when you bought. Some of them were gifts, a stadium or a school dropped onto your own holdings. Others were weapons, and you aimed them at somebody else's street: a prison, or a bulldozer card that simply removed whatever was standing there.

The clever part was the tax. Owning more than five streets cost you three percent per street per day, scaling up, and by thirty-eight streets the rate hit one hundred percent and your empire paid for itself in reverse. A Monopoly game with a hard cap on monopoly was an odd thing for Hasbro to ship, and it was the mechanic that kept the whole planet from belonging to nine people by October.

~ the record ~

~ eight days in ~

The launch did not survive contact with the public. So many people tried to create accounts at once that the servers slowed to a crawl and the game state started coming apart underneath them, with players losing money and losing access to streets they had already bought. Campaign ran the story under a headline putting the number of people who failed to get into the game at 1.7 million.

Their fix was total. On Thursday 17 September, eight days after launch, Tribal DDB deleted the world and started it again. The holding page from that week is still in the archive and it is strikingly calm about it: "the initial rush led to slower servers, which in turn resulted in compromised data," followed by the line that everybody was starting over with three million dollars and a world to discover. Whatever you had built in the first week was gone, and that turned out to be the only announcement most players needed to hear.

~ how it reached you ~

The game was global in the only sense that mattered to its database. Every street in Ankara was on the board, priced and buyable, because Google Maps knew the street names and the game did not care which country they were in. The interface was a different matter. That same holding page offers four languages beside English: German, Spanish, French and Dutch. The product it was advertising, the Monopoly City board game, was being pushed into exactly those markets, and Turkey was not one of them.

So the streets were here and the campaign was not, which is a shape that repeats across most of this decade on the Turkish internet. You could play, in English, if you found out it existed.

~ the funny part ~

It ended on schedule and completely. By mid December monopolycitystreets.com no longer served a game, it served a redirect, and the address it pointed at was a page on hasbro.com with a filename that read Monopoly-City-Streets-Has-Ended.cfm. A world of nine million streets and 175 million buildings resolved into a .cfm file.

The awards arrived afterward. D&AD gave it a Wood Pencil for digital experience design in 2010, and Tribal DDB took golds at the IAB MIXX awards the same year, all of it for a thing that by then did not exist anywhere except in the press clippings of the agency that had already turned it off.

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