I don't normally write blog posts about games or entertainment, but this is just too fun to pass up and I have to share it! The Monopoly City Streets is a free, online, worldwide game that went live on Wednesday September 9, 2009 and a mad land rush began to acquire properties. Within a few days all the major streets in major cities around the world were bought up, and clever and unscrupulous real estate tycoons had figured out ways to cheat the system through multiple accounts. It became clear to the developers that they had to clean up some of the issues and close the cheat loopholes or the game would never succeed in the long run.But that didn't stop the hype, or the fun. I found a few smaller streets were still available to buy in Seattle, and discovered I had a much better chance of building my real estate wealth by branching out to lesser known cities and strategizing on maximizing rents.
Since the the whole game is built on Google Maps, you're pretty much unlimited as to where you can become a real estate tycoon! There are even blogs, forums and a Wiki set up to help you figure out how to play.
So the decision to reset the game and have everyone start over. They announced via their official Twitter account and their blog that they would take down the site on September 17th at 15:00 GMT and re-launch it after the reset and testing was completed. For days the developers frantically patched, revamped, and updated the interface of the game getting it ready.But once they relaunched it still took less than a couple of days for most of the streets in the populated cities to be purchased. They did raise the prices of the more valuable streets and that means it will take longer for people to be able to afford them.
If you jump in quick and get some cheaper streets in remote locations you can still have a lot of fun, even if you don't take over the world.