Four years ago, a couple in Zhejiang province almost divorced because a 66-year-old man was too tired to wake up his wife at midnight so she could harvest her crops for an online game called 'Happy Farm.'

The addictive social game, which the People's Daily said has attracted more than 100 million Chinese users since 2008, was shut by its earliest platform Renren.com on Tuesday due to ' strategyadjustment and costs.'

The death of the game resulted in more than 500,000 posts on Weibo, Sina Corp.'s popular Twitter-like microblogging service, as users waxed nostalgic over 'stealing crops,' a tactic of the game that became ingrained in the memory of the Chinese Internet generation.

The game itself outlived its inventor, Five Minutes, a Shanghai-based startup that sold the prime right to run the game to Tencent Holdings Ltd. in 2009. The company was seen as a social gaming vanguard--a potential Chinese Zynga. But around the same time that Zynga launched 'FarmVille 2' late last year, Five Minutes fired most of its employees. Though the company has never announced its closure, its website is now unavailable and it hasn't announced any new projects

'Happy Farm,' similar to Zynga's 'FarmVille,' lets users grow crops such as strawberries, carrots and tomatoes on virtual farms. Each crop takes a certain period of time to 'mature' and is worth a set number of 'coins.' For example, eggplants take 16 hours to mature and are worth 500 coins. This variedmaturity left gamers--from 5-year-old boys to 65-year-old grandmas--setting their alarm clocks for all hours to harvest their crops, or steal from others who were too careless to wake up and guard their own farms.

Many of 'Happy Farm's' users were white-collar workers bored in their offices, with little experience on real farms. But that didn't dampen their passion for paying real renminbi to buy chemical fertilizers for virtual tomatoes or keep a guard dog in the game, sniffing and watching out for vegetable thieves--family, friends or colleagues connected to the gamer through social-media platforms.

Even state broadcaster China Central Television got in on the reminiscing. 'You must remember those people who quarreled with their family, those who were fired for stealing crops while in the office,' it said through its official Weibo account. ''Stealing crops' has become a memory. Do you miss those days you forgot sleep or skipped meals to steal crops?'

While many Weibo users said they don't play 'Happy Farm' anymore, they said they feel sad about its demise nonetheless, as they used to spend hours per day on the crops.

'My land lies wasted, I'll check it for the last time,' a number of Weibo users said.

Others saw the game as a marker of their lives four years ago. 'My boyfriend used to steal all the crops for me, but now we are not together anymore,' one user said.

'You stole other people's crops, and the time steals our youth,' said a user on Renren.com.

The social game was first released on renren.com, the Facebook-like real-name social media platform, in late 2008. It was later launched on other platforms, including Tencent's QQ Space in 2009. Tencent, the Chinese Internet giant with a user base of more than 200 million, boosted the user numbers of 'Happy Farm' but changed its name on its platform to QQ Farm.

QQ Farm is still in operation and maintains a stable base of active users, Tencent said Wednesday.

Though many users have switched from virtual farming to other games, Tencent's online gaming business hasn't declined. 'League of Legends,' a role-playing fantasy game Tencent acquired from a U.S. developer, surpassed 'World of Warcraft' as the most popular PC game world-wide in 2011. The technology giant's most recent hit was a mobile game called 'Classic Flights Battle' a shooting game on its WeChat platform. The simple but addictive game sent a female user in Hangzhou to the hospital for tenosynovitis--her thumbs suffered from the high frequency of shooting the flights.

The decline of the platform renren.com also contributed to Happy Farm's death as it struggled to expand its user base and boost revenue. Renren Inc. posted a loss of $9.3 million in the second quarter.

'Revenue growth slowed down primarily due to delays in our game pipeline, ' Renren Chief Executive Joseph Chen said last week. 'Although we face short-term monetization challenges, we are on track in executing our strategic priorities for the year aimed at securing our position in the highly competitive mobile internet sector in China.'