Minions Paradise

» see ea.com/games/minions-paradise as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Minions film opened in July 2015 and took over a billion dollars. Three months later Electronic Arts shipped the game version, and the premise of the game was that a Minion called Phil sinks the cruise ship everybody is vacationing on. The survivors wash up on an empty island. You spend the next several hundred taps turning the island into a resort.

Minions Paradise was built by EA Salt Lake, published by EA Mobile and made with Illumination and Universal Partnerships & Licensing. It soft-launched on 21 April 2015 and went worldwide on 13 October, free on iOS and Android, with the standard freemium arrangement of timers everywhere and a currency that shortens them. Reviews landed mixed. Gamezebo found the familiar structure "honestly kind of refreshing" while Forbes called it "familiar and formulaic" and objected to what it described as insidious invitations to skip forward.

On 23 March 2017 EA announced that the game would retire on 22 May. Purchases were switched off immediately and the listing came down for anybody who did not already own it, but existing players were left alone for the two months in between. On 22 May the servers went off and the app stopped working, because a city builder that keeps your city on somebody else's machine is not something you get to keep after they turn the machine off.

~ the record ~

~ nineteen months ~

Worldwide release to shutdown is one year and seven months, which is short for a license this size. EA never gave a reason and the record still carries that gap. The context around it is that the company spent the back half of the 2010s trimming mobile titles built on other people's characters, since a licensed freemium game pays a royalty on every dollar it takes and then still has to out-earn one the publisher owns outright.

I was thirty-one when this shipped and the Minions were as inescapable in Turkey as anywhere else, on school bags and on the side of buses. The game was a different proposition entirely. A free builder with timers is aimed at a phone somebody hands to a child, or at an adult who has made peace with opening an app four times a day to collect things, and I was in neither of those rooms.

~ two months of notice ~

The 23 March announcement is the part worth writing down. EA cut off purchasing first and let people keep playing for two months afterward, which is more than the minimum a publisher can do. The minimum is what happened to plenty of other mobile games in that same window, where buying and playing end on the same morning and whatever sat in your account goes with them.

Two months also meant nobody spent money on an island that was already scheduled to sink a second time. That is a small courtesy and it is worth crediting, given how much of the freemium business in 2017 ran on not telling you what was about to happen.

~ the license kept going ~

Despicable Me 3 opened on 30 June 2017, five and a half weeks after the game went dark. The franchise has since passed four billion dollars at the box office, and the Minions themselves turned into a permanent internet object that outlived the relevance of their own films by a decade.

The game is the part that did not make it. There is no offline build and no legal way to see it now. Whatever EA Salt Lake put on that island survives as screenshots and as a fandom wiki page kept up by people who were young enough at the time to still care about it.

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