Spark City World

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

~ the eulogy ~

The loop was the one the whole genre ran on for about a decade. You got an apartment with a wardrobe to fill and a scooter to drive around a cartoon downtown, and the casual games bolted onto the world paid out the currency that bought the next outfit. Spark City World did it in Flash, for girls roughly between eight and fourteen, out of Fuel Industries in Ottawa.

The name arrived later than the product. It opened as a Fuel property inside allgirlarcade.com, a portal the studio also ran, and the world itself lived at allgirlarcade.com/sparkcity/ for its entire first stretch. A teaser page went up on 8 September 2008 and the beta opened at the end of January 2009. Only in September 2010 did Fuel register sparkcityworld.com and put the name on the front of the thing. That ordering is why the bare domain has almost no archive record at all: the traffic was never pointed there.

October 2010 brought a distribution deal with Miniclip, at that point one of the biggest casual-games audiences on the web, and that is the closest thing to a peak the record preserves. Fuel never published a registration number, and the fan wiki still lists the user count as unknown. An iOS build shipped on 8 April 2014 and has since been pulled from the store.

I was twenty-five when the beta opened, working through a computer engineering degree in Ankara. Spark City World's audience was girls young enough to be the children of people I went to school with. It ran in English and reached Turkey the way most Canadian Flash properties did, which is to say through somebody else's front page or not at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ what fuel actually was ~

Fuel Industries was not a kids-games company. It was an Ottawa interactive agency, founded in 1999 by Mike Burns with three partners, that built advergames and branded work for clients like McDonald's and DreamWorks and used the same pipeline to run a few properties of its own on the side. At its height it had close to 200 people and offices in Los Angeles and Seattle. Spark City World was the largest of the in-house properties, and Burns is credited with conceiving it.

That arrangement explains two things at once. It explains why a free browser world for pre-teens got professional art and sound, and it explains why nobody inside the company was going to fight for it once the billable client work dried up.

~ the last twelve days ~

The last archived capture of a working game page is 9 March 2017 at 05:43 UTC. The first capture of a GoDaddy parking lander on the same host is 21 March 2017 at 16:45. That is the entire death, twelve days wide, with no announcement on either side of it. The paperwork came later: Fuel Industries Inc. and Fuel Technologies Inc. each filed a Notice of Intention to Make a Proposal under Canada's Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act on 26 July 2017, with Richter Advisory Group as trustee. The game had been off for four and a half months by then.

Both the fan wiki and the virtual worlds museum date the closure to late April 2017. They are reading the last capture the crawler took, which by then was a robots.txt on a parked domain rather than a game.

~ what got buried with it ~

None of it was archived in playable form, and Flash itself was switched off in December 2020, which closed the door on any revival. What is gone is ordinary and complete: eight years of apartments and saved currency on a server in Ottawa that stopped answering on a Thursday in March.

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