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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."
Robot Unicorn Attack on Android tomorrow, Adult Swim app in May
Adult Swim plans to release its first magical Android app, Robot Unicorn Attack, tomorrow for $1 on the mobile platform with cross-platform Open Feint support. Jeff Olsen, VP of Adult Swim Digital and Games, told Joystiq that the "Heavy Metal" and "Christmas Edition" versions of Robot Unicorn (currently available for iPhone) may come to Android depending on how the original performs on the Android Market. The company also expects to launch its free Adult Swim app for Android in May. The app allows users to access full episodes and clips from the Cartoon Network programming block's popular shows, including Robot Chicken, The Venture Bros and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The app has surpassed a million downloads on the Apple App Store since its release in mid-February. "We've gotten a lot of requests for our games on Android," Olsen told us, saying that Adult Swim's other top-performing iOS games, Amateur Surgeon and Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself), would likely be next for development. "We're starting with Robot Unicorn because we've seen the most call for it. If it performs well, we'll look at our whole catalog and bring over our other top titles." "We haven't green-lit any projects for the console space," Olsen added, "but we are interested in the downloadable market; experimenting on multiple platforms on a variety of new platforms with Android being just the first." The free, Flash version of Robot Unicorn Attack is available to play on AdultSwim.com.
