It's all Paris Hilton's fault. Honest.
Back in June our company released a flash game themed around freeing Paris Hilton from jail. You would catapult her from a cart from prison to Rodeo Drive. The idea was to promote MyNuMo and have some fun doing it.
Some background on us. MyNuMo is a online community that enables artists to create and publish their own mobile content. We also develop and publish mobile games. I've been in the game industry since the Apple II and TRS-80 days (some history on this). Like many industry vets, I was attracted to mobile gaming because the challenges faced are similar to the challenges we faced in the early years of the industry. My partner, Sherri Cuono, is an expert in online casino gaming. We've worked together at other mobile game companies and have built some award winning mobile games.
Well Paris was a decent success (the game that is). So we started looking at other fun ideas we could build a game around.
We were interested in the iPhone from the first rumors we heard. Mobile gaming has been mainly centered around "Java 2, Micro Edition" (J2ME) and it isn't a pretty picture. J2ME is different on every handset you run on and always seems to have bugs that are difficult to deal with. Don't get me wrong, after five years of this we know how to build J2ME titles, its just that the porting costs are always a major factor. So a few years ago, working on a multiplayer game system for phones, we created a mobile-web version of the game we were building. This was done in a primitive technology known as WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) but the game worked just fine. In game chat, invites, the entire works.
The nice thing about all the above is that we had some years of experience in building browser-based games. We weren't starting from scratch.
So what subject would we choose for the first iPhone game? Luckily the web provided us a willing subject:
I happen to be a fan of Mr. Ballmer. He has a real passion for his company and I admire anyone who's willing to get up on stage and jump up and down like a crazy guy. This was too much fun to pass up.
Looking at the iPhone we realized that this was going to be a very different device for gaming. Unlike a 'normal' mobile phone, you had a big screen. Unlike a hand-held game device (like a Sony PSP) the iPhone has a touch screen. Unlike a web game, you don't have a mouse or cursor.
Taking the classic Whack-a-Mole game and using Mr. Ballmer as a subject seemed to be a clever idea. So the game was built in advance of the iPhone's release and during the weekend after the release tested and touched up on the actual iPhone.
The surprise to all of us was just how well received the game was. At one point there were over 40,000 links to the game on the web. We would see thousands of players every day.
We also really liked the iPhone as a development platform. Honestly. The Safari browser was more stable than J2ME and we could test on our computers as well as the iPhone. We also wanted to build social games, games were players could play against their friends. Since we have the technology we could rebuild it for the iPhone. Make it stronger, faster, better than before ... with the Web 2.0 tech of the iPhone.
So that's how Paris got us into the iPhone game business. Enjoy the games and send me your comments.
Bill
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