The Rise and The Fall - Fruit Ninja 🍉

2023-09-23 11:51

Hello Guys This is Sourav, hope you are doing extremely well and we are back again with a fresh new series - The Rise and The Fall , where we are going to see how a game become so popular that it was installed on almost every device and how it became obselete. This is EP 1

and we are going to start with FRUIT NINJA 🍉

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About Fruit Ninja

Since the arrival of the mobile games one game that became an instant hit was none other than Fruit Ninja. The game uses simple mechanics of cutting the fruits popping out on the screen with just simple swipes but hey! Doge that bomb 💣. Due to this simple gameplay it had achieved massive success and gain 500 Million+ downloads on the Play Store. But as the every great thing comes to an end it looses 99% of its popularity in the present time.

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History

Fruit Ninja is developed by HalfBrick Studios, an Australian studio who is responsible for some evergreen games like Jetpack Joyride. They were developing games since 2001 for other game studios and made some popular games like Marvel Super Hero Squad. Everything was going fine for them but then in 2008 a financial crisis hit in Australia where it became difficult to develop games and other studios withdraw their projects from HalfBrick, they were on the verge of extinction 📉.

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Isn't it sounding a movie? Well hold on it will get interesting, so go grab some tea or coffee ☕.

Back to the topic, so in 2010 they took the decision to develop their own games which includes Fruit Ninja also.

How Fruit Ninja Come into Existence

So, it all started with an idea, actually HalfBrick used to host an idea session on every Friday where atleast one person every week comes up with a game idea and if only one of the member agrees on the idea, they start the development of the game. Their main aim was to target the mobile gamers as iPhone became popular that time and they were planning to take advantage of that touch screen. So, they got the idea of Fruit Ninja from a TV commercial where a person was seen cutting fruits - Ninja style.

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But the idea doesn't seems appealing to the other team members and they move on to the next projects. So Luke, who was the man behind the idea and his teammate started to look for the games which can be developed at lower costs and they developed almost 30 prototypes, which Ofcourse includes Fruit Ninja and Everone seems to like the Prototype of the game. They feel something special about it and the entire team developed the game in just a span of 6 weeks 🤯.

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The Release of Fruit Ninja

The game got released on 21st April, 2010 for iPhones and iPods but as a paid game 💵. Developers were super confident about the game as during the internal testing it received awesome response from the people who tested it. After the release, people started to discover the game and started playing it. The game started to picking up and almost reached 2 lakh downloads in the span of 1 month. This is where apple noticed this and featured Fruit Ninja on the top Charts 📈 on the App Store and it exploded from this thing.

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The Rise Of Fruit Ninja 📈

The game exploded exponentially and it reaches 1 Million downloads alone on the iPhone and iPods.

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Then comes the entry of Android, for free 😌and this turns out to be the Game changing moment for HalfBrick. The game achieved a whooping 300 Million+ downloads by May 2012.

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In 2015, it reaches to a new heights by achieving 1Billion+ downloads 🤯.

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It become a cult classic and started to catch the main stream media through the simple gameplay. But developers knew from the very begining that sooner or later it will die because of its simplicity which made it super popular in the first place. So they introduced various updates and new modes to make sure that the game remains relevant among the players.

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The Dominance 💪🏻

The developers started to add leaderboard, multiplayer support and almost covering every aspect to make it take over the world 🌍. That's not it, it was ported for each and every device out there, be it - iPhone, iPod, Android, Windows phones, kindle, even for xbox 360 by the name of Fruit Ninja Kinect 🤯. The game made it's entry into the Pc world and achieved massive 1 Million+ downloads in 10 days 💪🏻.

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They were keen to go massy and release several versions like Fruit Ninja Hd, Fruit Ninja THD, Fx, Frenzy,kinect 2. In 2016, Fruit Ninja VR comes where you can play the game in virtual reality 🤯.

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They now took over the mainstream culture, MythBusters the popular show featured real life Fruit Ninja 🍉.

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An animated series was released by collaborating with Youtube named Fruit Ninja Frenzy Force.

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The ipad app used to treat health of Stroke patients 😲.

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THE DECLINE Of Fruit Ninja 📉

Again, the same problem become one of the reasons for its decline the simple gameplay which made it popular worked as a double axed sword ⚔️. You can enjoy different modes, different versions but the core gameplay is same which is one of the main reasons for its decline. It remained relevant between 2011-2015 that's when I am sure we had played it for hours,but today almost none of us play Fruit Ninja right 😞.

Another reason that Luke shared that the entire team shifted their focus on another games and they burn out developing the game for almost 2 years continuously. They handed over the game to a new team, who change the game alot and changed it's core qualties and shift it towards business aspect.

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And finally Luke, the man behind Fruit Ninja leaves the Studio. This marks the end of Fruit Ninja's immense popularity and the game which was once installed on everyone's phone is not known by today's generation.