Spark City: the mobile training game Gronstedt built for Walmart

Spark City puts the player in charge of departments on a Walmart sales floor. The Gronstedt Group, a digital training agency founded in 1997 in Denver, Colorado, built it for Walmart associates who train to advance their careers. Mark Ibbotson, executive vice president of Central Operations for Walmart U.S., unveiled it in June 2018. It runs as an iOS and Android app on phones and tablets, and at launch it was expected to reach the general public later.

The game compresses months of business routine into hours. Players make decisions on inventory, staffing and customer service and level up through harder tasks that put Walmart Academy lessons into practice, including the company's One Best Way routine. Feedback arrives in real time on customer service, inventory and sales. Its design uses a mission and storyline, hints, level progression and the freedom to fail.

A player first customizes an avatar and goes to the store's backroom, where products are scanned and loaded onto a cart. Mismatches between the inventory system and the shelf have to be resolved. In the Dry Grocery level the cart goes to the sales floor, where products are stocked, and customers who cannot find an item are walked to the shelf. The next level, Lawn and Garden, adds a team of four to manage.

More levels were in development in 2018. Electronics came next, with team members' moods shown as one, two or three sparks. After that came Customer Service, Apparel and Fresh Produce, and finally the roles of assistant store manager and store manager. The developers also planned expansion packs for situations such as the holiday season and new store formats, to show associates a career path toward management.

The Gronstedt Group's website is online and now presents the company as a developer of virtual, augmented and mixed reality training simulators for large employers, naming Walmart among its examples. A page titled Walmart Mobile Management Game still exists there. It describes a webcast about Spark City with Daniel Shepherd, a senior manager at Walmart, and the Gronstedt development team, and it calls the game a Sims-style game for grooming new managers.

That page also links to the game's App Store and Google Play listings. Both links lead to not-found pages in November 2026, and no other page was found that offers the game. The page does not say the game has been retired, so Spark City is recorded as not confirmed instead of discontinued.