Adult Swim Games planning slate of original mobile titles
Adult Swim's initial foray into gaming was not very promising. A 2005 partnership with now defunct Midway produced a by-all-accounts terrible Aqua Teen Hunger Force game in 2007. The following year's Harvey Birdman collaboration with Capcom was only marginally better.
Jeff Olsen, VP of Adult Swim Digital and Games, told Joystiq that the brand's audience is pretty savvy and "license games don't have a great track record." So the company tried something different: publishing original, Flash-based games on its website. From there, the popular originals, like Amateur Surgeon and Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself), were ported to social and iOS platforms with great success. Tomorrow the company will launch its first Android port, Robot Unicorn Attack, which has racked up more than 150 million combined plays online and on Facebook.
"The audience for a casual game based on completely original IP, in my experience, is almost unlimited," Olsen said. "If you're basing it on a show, you're probably shutting more people out than letting them in."
Olsen told us that the "next evolution" for Adult Swim Games is to create truly original titles for iPhone and other mobile platforms; ones that aren't ports of Flash games from its website. He believes that the first of these should launch in the third quarter. Going forward, Olsen said, "We're trying to get to the point where we can release a new mobile game a month."
