Pokémon Rumble Rush
~ the obit ~
I have never played a Pokémon game on a phone. By 2019 I was in my mid thirties and working on drone vision, about as far from a free tap-to-battle collector as the industry gets. Rumble Rush is here for what happened to the people who made it rather than for the game.
The Pokémon Company announced it on 15 May 2019 and released it first into the Australian Google Play Store, then globally on Android on 22 May and on iOS on 23 July. It was the fifth Pokémon Rumble game, the series where the creatures are plastic wind-up toys you collect and throw at each other with a single tap. You cleared islands, beat the boss at the end of each one, and earned a Super Boss fight if your collection was strong enough to qualify. Ores dropped at random and refined into random gear.
On 15 April 2020 the company posted the shutdown notice, and the service ended on 22 July, fourteen months after the global release. The reception had been bad enough to be worth recording: Metacritic pulled four iOS reviews together into a 42. The one piece of it that mattered afterward was plumbing. It was the first Pokémon phone game that let you attach a Nintendo Account for cloud saves and My Nintendo rewards, and that plumbing is still in use.
~ the rap sheet ~
| Born | 22 May 2019 on Android globally, after an Australia-first release |
|---|---|
| Peak | first Pokémon phone game to link a Nintendo Account |
| Killed | 22 July 2020, announced 15 April |
| Lifespan | 1 year, 2 months |
| Made by | Ambrella, published by The Pokémon Company |
| Killed by | a shutdown notice, three months before the studio went too |
~ pokéland ~
It had a previous life under another name. In May 2017 The Pokémon Company revealed a smartphone game called Pokéland, built in the Rumble style, and ran an Android-only alpha that closed on 9 June that year. The alpha carried six islands, over fifty stages and more than 130 Pokémon. That is a lot of finished game to put in front of testers.
Then the company said nothing for two years. Rumble Rush turned up in May 2019 as the thing Pokéland had become, with a new name and the island structure mostly intact, and it lasted fourteen months. The silence between the alpha and the launch ran longer than the game did.
~ the studio ~
Ambrella is the reason to write this one down. It built Hey You, Pikachu! for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, the one with the microphone you shouted into, and Pokémon Channel for the GameCube in 2003. Pokémon Dash followed on the DS in 2004, then My Pokémon Ranch on WiiWare in 2008. From 2009 onward it made the Rumble games, roughly one per Nintendo platform, and Rumble U shipped with NFC figurines on the Wii U before amiibo existed.
On 16 October 2020, three months after Rumble Rush went dark, Creatures announced that it had acquired Ambrella. Creatures received all the property rights, the studio was disbanded, and its staff carried on working under the Creatures name. Rumble Rush was the last thing Ambrella shipped. No Pokémon Rumble game has come out since.
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