![]() Our chief marketing officer at the time was holding the camera!”ĭeo attributes Fruit Ninja’s wildfire success to its slicey little mechanics and some fortuitous timing. ![]() If you look at our original Fruit Ninja trailer, I think it’s got at least two members of our development team. In terms of marketing, the campaign was kept lo-fi, he says. Soon after that it appeared on Mythbusters and the members of One Direction declared they were fans of “real-life Fruit Ninja” (slicing actual fruit in the air) – something Deo seems comically embarrassed by. Launched in April 2010, by July it had hit 1m downloads. “Thankfully there was that one, otherwise that idea would have died on the vine, so to speak.”įruit Ninja grew to epic proportions in a relatively short amount of time. “I guess the goal for this particular Halfbrick Friday was an iPhone game your mum can play – and Fruit Ninja was the fruit of that.” He says when the idea was pitched, only one other person saw any potential in it, meeting the minimum criterion for a project to be kicked off. ![]() They’d go away and work on those prototypes every Friday for about six or seven Fridays. “Guys would get up and pitch an idea and, if someone else liked it, they’d join them and form a prototype. He says the company began pitching sessions for game ideas, called Halfbrick Fridays. So in 2010 Deo set himself an ultimatum: “Get rich or die tryin’”. With Halfbrick at risk of becoming Quarterbrick, and 70-odd employees at its Brisbane headquarters alone, that didn’t feel like a nice way to double down. Then the global financial crisis hit, and all of a sudden Australia was no longer an affordable place to create entertainment products. Founded in 2001, for the company’s first seven years earnings primarily came from working on international projects. The last local AAA studio (industry code for a major production company), 2K Australia shuttered its Canberra digs in April. Fellow Brisbanites THQ Australia closed in 2011, as did the Melbourne crew Blue Tongue. Making video games in Australia is also serious business and not for the faint of heart. ![]() Photograph: Halfbrick StudiosĪ reference to 2007 puzzle game Portal suddenly feels appropriate: was the cake a lie? “You had to do it,” he laughs uproariously, before becoming intensely serious. ![]()
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