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Two years of Free Realms: A retrospective
"It's your world." Those three words sum up Free Realms, and it's no coincidence that it's the title song for the game. It's hard to believe that the game is only two years old -- much has changed since launch, and in many ways, this young MMO has been a pioneer in the market. To celebrate Free Realms' second birthday, we're going to take a look back at some highlights. From pet training, to Chatdy's name change, to its Guinness World Record, the game has experienced many milestones. Read on for a retrospective as well as a peek at the future.
Happy first birthday Free Realms!
As the song goes -- It's Your World -- and one year later, the team at Sony Online Entertainment have shown that to be true by adding requested content like pets, mounts, player housing, and games like soccer and pirate ship battles! Now, one year after initial launch, Free Realms has crossed the 10 million registered player mark, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon as they prepare to head into their second awesome year. By way of thanking their community for incredible growth -- and fun -- in the last year, the team behind Free Realms plans to celebrate by throwing a series of parties all day today! Starting at 9 AM Pacific and going until 5 PM Pacific time, various SOE employees will log in to the game for a series of games of "Ambassador Hide and Seek" wherein one employee will hide, and another will emcee the party and give players hints as to where they can find that particular Ambassador. SOE has also opened up the option to pick up Station Cash through PayPal and SMS (text message), making it even easier than before. In addition, they're adding new items to the store like tints for the beetle pet, and offering other items on sale like the Red Balloon Animal pet. If that's not enough, they've additionally given us 10 codes for Station Cash Cards worth 1000 Station Cash each ($10 USD value each). If you'd like to get your hands on one of these, simply leave a comment (only one per person) to this post before 8am ET April 30th, 2010 telling us your favorite addition to Free Realms in the last year. We'll select 10 random winners from the comments tomorrow morning. Contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older. You find the complete Joystiq network contest rules here. There's also a shiny new "yearbook" video touching on some of the fun events of the last year that we've embedded behind the break for you. It's been one heck of a year, and we here at Massively would like to wish the Free Realms team many more years of fantastic fun! [Edit: Comments are now closed. Winners will be contacted soon.]
Free Realms unveils "It's Your World" video
Free Realms is offering players all sorts of celebratory goodies as part of their first birthday celebration, not the least of which is an official video for the game's theme song, "It's Your World." "It's Your World" tells a story of "two teens who become acquainted in real life after befriending each other as their Free Realms avatars," and the video combines live-action with in-game footage. The video can be viewed on JSYK along with some backstory on "California pop-punk rockers" The Dares, the Southern California trio chosen to perform the song. As a little bonus, Free Realms released a "behind the scenes" video in tandem with the video, showing off some behind-the-scenes fun during the making of the video. Commentary from the band and director is included along with a bit of fun at director Todd's expense. Follow along after the jump to take a look. Happy birthday, Free Realms!
