"Fruit Ninja", "Angry Birds", "Doodle Jump", "Temple Run"... In the era when iOS and Android were just born, there were too many classic mobile games that made us feel the charm of mobile games. Many years later, although most of those "first-generation Internet celebrity mobile games" have faded from our sight, they are irreplaceable and precious memories for countless players. Let us take a time machine together, return to the ancient era of mobile games, and review the rise and fall of those classic mobile games.

In the previous issue of the series of memoirs of the first generation of Internet celebrity mobile games, we reviewed the legend that "Subway Surfers" is still among the top three most popular mobile games of the year ten years later. In this issue, we want to talk about the popularity of "Subway Surfers" including "Subway Surfers". The ancestor of all 3D parkour mobile games - "Temple Run".

Temple Run 2 6.1 Adventure Action Arcade

Although "Temple Run" is not the first endless parkour game in history, it is definitely the first phenomenal game in the category of 3D parkour mobile games. It is no exaggeration to say that during the era when "Temple Run" was the most popular, almost everyone had this game installed on their mobile phones and tablets.

In 2020, Imangi Studio, the developer of “Temple Run”, announced this set of data:

The total number of downloads of the game exceeds 1 billion times (by the way, Chinese players contributed 36% of the downloads). Players in the game have traveled a total of 50 trillion meters, which is equivalent to 150 round trips from the earth to the sun.

However, the success of such a phenomenal mobile game is not as smooth as other popular games of the same era.

Before "Temple Run" was born

The founders of Imangi Studio, Lukyanova and Shepard, are a husband-and-wife team who were both software engineers before starting their own company.

(Left: Lukyanova, right: Shepard)

Shepard had always wanted to start his own company, but hadn't found the right opportunity. In 2008, after quitting his original job, he interviewed several companies and was not particularly satisfied. It happened to be this year that Apple began to allow third-party developers’ applications to be put on the App Store. Although Shepard did not know at the time that it was just How far could the fledgling App Store develop? However, he realized that the iPhone had become a phenomenon-level product that everyone was discussing at the time. Shepard vaguely felt that this would be a rare and good opportunity, and he decisively decided to set up his own company that develops games for Apple phones.

On the first day that the App Store was officially opened, the first game of Imangi Studio was launched, and the name of the game was "Imangi".

This is a word puzzle game that uses iPhone sliding operations. Although it seems a bit crude now, it was quite competitive when there were not many games in the early days of the App Store. Although "Imangi" did not become a hit, the game, which sold for $3.99 at the time, still generated some revenue for the studio, which gave Shepard some hope for the future. At the time, his goals were not ambitious, as long as they eventually As long as you can support yourself by playing games.

Sheppard struck first while the iron was hot and made an upgraded version of "Imangi" called "Imangi Word Squares".

Then he made "Little Red Sled", a skiing game controlled by gravity sensors. This was also the thinking of most developers in the early days of the App Store, who tried to use the iPhone's touch screen, gravity sensing and other features to develop games.

Time came to 2009. Seeing that her husband's company was doing well, his wife Lukyanova also quit her job and focused on developing games with Shepard. Also in this year, a key figure, designer Jan Goff, joined Imangi Studio. With the arrival of Jangov, Imangi Studio finally has a professional designer, and the game's picture quality has made a qualitative leap.

So that summer, "Harbor Master" was launched. It was the most successful work since the establishment of Imangi Studio, and it ranked third on the App Store paid list.

(The improvement in image quality is visible to the naked eye)

They then produced three more games, "geoSpark", "Hippo High Dive" and "Max Adventure". Among them, "Max Adventure" is the game Imangi has invested the most in since its establishment, and it took a full year to develop. This was a twin-stick shooting game that was relatively rare at the time. The player controlled a child to defeat aliens and save the earth. Compared with several previous relatively simple works, this game has a rich plot and a large number of levels. Players and the media also gave this game high praise, but it was not commercially successful and the sales of the game were not ideal. .

However, the failure of "Max Adventure" did not discourage them. The three people began to summarize the lessons of this failure. In the era when smartphones had just begun to become popular, dual-stick operation was still too complicated, and the iPhone screen at that time was only At 3.5 inches, two thumbs on the screen cover nearly half of the screen. So Imangi decided to make a lighter and more casual game. The controls of the new game should be more natural and intuitive.

Founder of 3D Parkour

After determining the direction of the game, they began to prototype a new game based on Max Adventure. In "Max Adventure", the player controls the character to move freely in a fixed scene. Wouldn't it be better if the character can only move forward, but the player can control the scene to rotate around the character? After making an initial prototype based on this idea, they found that this control mode was very interesting, but it also had a big problem. If the player could turn the camera arbitrarily, he would soon become dizzy. So they made an optimization. Players can only control the camera to rotate 90 degrees, and it can only move forward automatically and continuously. This mechanism allows players to complete all operations by just sliding the screen to turn.

(Later this set of operation methods became standard for 3D parkour mobile games)

After the core gameplay was determined, the development team began to think about the theme of the game. The operation of sliding the screen to turn was very consistent with the maze. At first, they tried to draw some sketches of the maze, but the scene was not specific enough, so the team thought of letting players The idea of ​​running on the Great Wall of China or the Aztec temple became the final theme of the game.

After the gameplay and theme are determined, all that's left is to polish the details. They added the setting of collecting gold coins while running into the game, but how to collect gold coins became a problem. If you also use the left and right sliding operation to collect gold coins, it will be confused with the steering operation. In the end, they determined the design of using gravity sensing control to collect gold coins.

As for the design of the gold coins themselves, the production team was also very entangled. The original plan was to let players collect gems of different colors. Only by getting the gems in a certain order can they get rewards. But they soon found that it was too difficult for players to pay attention to the order of gem colors while running fast, so they once completely deleted this mechanism. But in the end they still found this mechanism interesting, so they came up with the current simplified gold coin collecting mechanism.

Then there is the question of "Why should the player run?" There must be a reasonable reason to keep running rather than hitting the wall, so the monkey chasing the player was designed. Jan Goff, who was responsible for the design, always wanted to have this joy again. He added some horror elements to his casual games, so he was very satisfied with the slightly scary monkey design.

There had been a lot of debate within the team about the design of the monkey. Lukyanova felt that the design of the monkey was too scary, but Shepard and Jangov liked it very much. In the end, the scary monkey design was retained. Facts have proved that this decision was correct. Players like these evil monkeys very much.

(There was even a special short film "A Day in the Life of the Devil Monkey")

Paid download or free download?

In August 2011, "Temple Run" was officially launched on the App Store, but the game did not become an instant hit like several other first-generation Internet celebrity mobile games. The game was initially launched as a paid download for $0.99. At the beginning of its launch, the game ranked 50th among paid mobile games, but just a few weeks later, the game's ranking began to decline, even falling out of the top 100. So Imangi had to consider how to change this situation. They made a decision that changed the fate of the game. They changed "Temple Run" to a free download and added more in-app purchases to make up for the revenue.

Just after the game became free, it immediately reached second place on the free application list, and has since stabilized in the top 100. In the previous stage of paid downloads, the game only had a few hundred downloads per day. After it was changed to free, the number of downloads per day exceeded 50,000, and with the revenue from in-app purchases, the game's revenue was 10 times higher than before.

Moreover, the game’s popularity is getting higher and higher, and its ranking on the App Store’s free list has gradually improved. Finally, it ranked first on the free list on December 28. The game’s average daily downloads reached 500,000 times. In January of the following year, In August, the game also ranked first on the best-selling list.

We all know the subsequent story. "Temple Run" became one of the most popular mobile games of that era. Later, countless 3D parkour mobile games also followed the route pioneered by "Temple Run" and made a lot of money. The bowl is full.

The post-Temple Run era

If you have read the first few issues of the first generation Internet celebrity mobile game memoirs, you will definitely be very familiar with the unfolding of the story. After the success of "Temple Run", Imangi Studio put all its energy on the update and maintenance of the game and the development of "Temple Run 2". Since Imangi Studio did not expect it to achieve such amazing results when developing the first generation, the underlying code of the game had many problems that could not be optimized. These problems have been completely solved in the second generation.

In 2013, "Temple Run 2" was launched. With new scenes, new elements and a fully optimized game experience, "Temple Run 2" soon achieved better results than the previous generation.

But where Imangi Studio will go after "Temple Run 2", it seems that none of the three core members of the team have an answer.

As early as 2014, founder Shepard mentioned in an interview that they were expanding the number of people in the studio. They had grown from a small company of three people to a company of more than a dozen people, and had multiple new employees. game project is under development. So was the "new game project" mentioned at that time actually completed?

In fact, after launching a tepid "Temple Run VR" in December 2014, Imangi Studio did not make its next game until 2021, the Apple Arcade platform-exclusive "Temple Run VR" Puzzle Adventure".

(There are only three games on the official website of Imangi Studio so far)

And this "Temple Run Puzzle Adventure" that has been "skilled for seven years" is actually just a match-3 game under the banner of "Temple Run". In addition to the no in-app purchases and no ads that all Apple Arcade games have, One plus point aside, it's really just a mediocre match-3 game.

Imangi Studio is not as creative as Zeptolab, which developed "Cut the Rope", and can continuously create new IP after a hit. It is also not as lucky as SYBO, which developed "Subway Surfers". Parkour games have not changed much over the years. Today, "Subway Surfers" is still among the top three most downloaded mobile games in 2021, while "Temple Run" has long faded from mainstream attention.

It is a beautiful expectation to hope that a company that has created hit products can continue to create works that change the world, but it may also be an unrealistic luxury. As the ancestor of 3D parkour mobile games, "Temple Run" has left a mark in the history of video games, and this is enough.

Ten years from now, twenty years from now, we may suddenly miss the "Temple Escape" that brought us the purest happiness one afternoon, and the childlike nature of ourselves at that time.

References

Temple Run developer shares a behind the scenes look at making a runaway hit iOS game

Temple Run - From Concept To Release

Memoirs Series of the First Generation of Internet Celebrities on Mobile Games

1. Why did “Doodle Jump”, which was once popular around the world, disappear?

2. From "Cut the Rope" to "Cat Wars": The childhood you have forgotten, they still remember

3. Ten years have passed, why is “Subway Surfers” still so popular?

4. How was the ancestor of 3D parkour mobile games “Temple Run” born?

5. "Naughty Crocodile Loves Bathing": Disney's most special star

6. You may have never played a real gold miner

7. From 1 billion downloads to no one paying attention, the fall of "Fruit Ninja"

8. They made a “AAA mobile game” on Nokia

9. The “death” of Gameloft: the legend of stand-alone mobile games destroyed by capital

10. Former 3A mobile game maker: taking stock of Gameloft’s top 10 classic games in history

Text | Snake