In theory, TheoTown shouldn’t exist. It was an abandoned university project that found new life in unexpected ways.

At its core, TheoTown is a pixel-art city builder that features all the staples of the genre: you erect buildings, connect them to electricity and water, add roads and avoid disasters.

“I wanted to play the classic SimCity on my phone,” developer Fabian Miltenberger tells us.

So in 2014, while completing his studies in computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Miltenberger picked up a game project that had been abandoned by a fellow student and started building it out.

The process, which included painstakingly creating each individual pixel-art building, took him a year. Miltenberger then shared it with friends in real life and online, and pretty quickly, a small community gathered around it.

What he didn’t expect is that the community wasn’t just playing – they had ideas. Lots of them. Players started creating their own buildings on social platforms such as Discord, but at the time, there wasn’t a way to add them to the game.

This led Miltenberger to create a plug-ins store within TheoTown, where players could upload, download and add fellow players’ creations to their towns. It was a key turning point: through word of mouth, the community grew extremely fast, transforming the game completely.

Having seen the power and effect that the plug-ins store had on the community, Miltenberger realised that TheoTown was no longer just a game – it was a platform for expressing creativity and having fun.

Fast-forward a few years and TheoTown had gone viral in several countries, with its first major international community in Indonesia. Players started adding their local landmarks, which drove even more engagement, snowballing into something that local streamers eventually started picking up.

Miltenberger now develops TheoTown as a platform for the community, planning new features around socialisation and the plug-ins store, rather than adding new content to the game itself. That, he delegated to the community.

His focus has shifted to answering questions such as: “How do I make it easier for people to upload their creations? And how do I do that while also maintaining the quality standards that the community has set and been upholding?” he says.

The community, which stands at more than 130,000 people on Discord – and growing – can’t wait to find out.