Pocket Mortys

» see adultswim.com/games as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I was thirty-two when Pocket Mortys came out, which is a perfectly fine age to play a phone game and not the age at which you start. The thing it was parodying reached my generation as a cartridge, and a cartridge did not care whether the company that made it was still trading a decade later. That difference is the entire story of how this one ended.

Big Pixel Studios built it with Tag Games and Pocket Sized Hands, and Adult Swim Games published it worldwide on 13 January 2016. You played Rick C-123. You caught wild Mortys with Manipulation Chips and fused duplicates of a type into stronger ones, grinding through rival trainers toward the Council of Ricks. There were over a hundred Mortys by the end.

Reviews split hard. Kotaku called it brilliant and PC Magazine gave it three and a half out of five, while IGN scored it 5.5 and wrote it off as a diluted Pokemon imitator. The commercial verdict was less ambiguous. On 21 May 2018 Adult Swim bought Big Pixel Studios outright, which is not what a publisher does with a game that is not working.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the parody ~

The interesting thing is that it was allowed to exist at all. Fan-made Pokemon projects get legal letters as a matter of routine, and Pocket Mortys copied the mechanics openly enough that every review wrote the same opening line. What protected it is that the parody was the product rather than a shortcut to one, sitting inside a show whose whole register is aggressive reference to other people's work. Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon voiced it until 2023, when Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden took over after Roiland left the franchise.

It generated its own tie-ins too, which is unusual for a licensed mobile title. Oni Press published two comic series by Tini Howard off the back of it starting in September 2016. The game kept getting yearly content drops adding characters from across the show, and that is why it lasted ten years when most licensed mobile games get eighteen months and a quiet delisting.

~ the funny part ~

The shutdown was announced on 13 January 2026, the game's tenth birthday, with the servers scheduled to stop exactly three months later. Downloads had already been pulled months before that, so the warning circulating among players was to not delete the app under any circumstances. Nobody at Adult Swim gave a reason. The developers marked the anniversary with free items and special spawns on the way out.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Almost everything people did in Pocket Mortys was single player. Catching Mortys and grinding toward the Council of Ricks never required another person to be online at the same time. It died anyway, on 13 April 2026, because the progress it stored under your account lived somewhere else and nobody was paying for that somewhere else any more. No refunds, and no offline version was ever made.

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