Infinity Blade

» see infinitybladegame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In December 2010 the barrier here was not the six dollars. It was the phone. An iPhone bought in Turkey carried taxes that put it well above what the same handset cost in the United States, which made the device a considered purchase rather than a carrier throw-in, and everything that ran only on it sat behind that decision. Infinity Blade was a demonstration of what expensive hardware could do, aimed at people who already owned the expensive hardware.

What it demonstrated was real. Chair Entertainment built it with twelve people, taking two months to get something playable and three more to finish it. It was the first iOS game running Unreal Engine 3. In 2010 a phone game meant flat art and a physics gimmick, where this thing had a properly lit castle in it with armor that caught the light, running at a frame rate nobody expected from a device in a pocket.

The design was built around the hardware rather than fighting it. You could not walk. You stood in front of one enemy at a time, swiping to swing and tapping to block, and you learned the timing of a single opponent until you could beat it. When you lost, the game restarted a generation later with your gear and your levels intact, so dying was progress. Somebody worked out what a touchscreen is actually good at and built the whole game out of that one answer.

It made over $1.6 million in its first four days and more than $23 million by the end of 2011, which at the time was the fastest an app had ever taken money. Two sequels followed, in December 2011 and September 2013, and Brandon Sanderson wrote novellas filling in a story the games mostly gestured at.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Apple used it. The game showed up in keynote demonstrations as the answer to whether the phone was a serious gaming device, and the answer was worth a lot to a company selling a new one every year. Epic got something more valuable back: proof that its engine ran on mobile, delivered by a game people paid for rather than a tech demo nobody plays.

The trilogy never got a fourth entry. Infinity Blade Dungeons was announced and then handed to another studio, and it died when Epic closed that studio in 2013. By then Epic's mobile business had turned into engine licensing and the games were a shop window rather than a product line.

~ the day it was delisted ~

On 10 December 2018 Epic removed all three games from the App Store, along with every in-app purchase in them. The stated reason was that with Spyjinx and other projects underway it had become increasingly difficult to support the series at the standard the team wanted. That is a real reason. iOS breaks old binaries on a schedule, and keeping an eight-year-old game running means paying someone to maintain it forever.

Anyone who had already bought them could re-download them, in Epic's words, for the foreseeable future. Which is the interesting part. Nothing was switched off and no server went dark. The game on your phone kept working. What ended was the ability to obtain it. A purchase became a row in an account record, and the game exists exactly as long as that row does and the operating system still runs it.

~ the funny part ~

The day after the removal, Epic put the Infinity Blade itself into Fortnite as a mythic weapon. One player per match could carry it and it destroyed structures instantly. It also arrived hours before a competitive tournament final, and players were furious inside a day.

Epic vaulted it on 14 December with a note saying it had messed up. So the sword outlived its own games by four days in a different product, then got taken out of that too. The franchise's last public act was a cameo that had to be withdrawn, in a game whose success is the reason nobody had time to maintain the original.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »