Tap Tap Revenge

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

~ the last words ~

the app store opened on 10 july 2008 and tap tap revenge was already inside it. that is the whole reason the game matters. everyone else was learning what an app was, and the first thing millions of people did with a phone that could install software was download a free rhythm game where colored balls fell down four lanes toward a line at the bottom of the screen.

it had existed before that under another name. nate true released tap tap revolution on 11 september 2007 through his own blog, for jailbroken iphones, months before apple gave anybody an official way to write software for the device. on 8 july 2008 he announced that the game was going into the store at launch under the name tap tap revenge and that a startup called tapulous had bought it. he was working there now. two days later it shipped.

by 31 july, twenty days in, it was approaching a million downloads against a total installed base of five or six million phones running iphone os 2.0. one in six. it finished the year as the most downloaded free game in the store and apple put it in the print and television advertising for the second-generation ipod touch, under the line about the funnest ipod ever. a game made by one person for a hacked phone became the demonstration of what apple's new hardware was for.

none of that reached me on time. the app store's first hit needed an iphone, and in the summer of 2008 that was not something you walked into a shop in ankara and bought. turkcell began selling the iphone 3g here on 26 september 2008, two and a half months after the store opened, and the country had no 3g network to run it on until 30 july 2009. so the device arrived late and then ran on edge for another ten months. i was twenty-four and on a ttnet line at home, and the phone in my pocket was not the one this game was written for.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

the game was a copy and never pretended otherwise. it took dance dance revolution's falling-arrow idea and turned it ninety degrees onto a phone screen, feet swapped for thumbs, right down to the name it launched under. what it added was the accelerometer: on certain notes you had to physically shake the handset left or right, which meant the room could tell who was playing. in 2008 that was the argument for owning a phone with sensors in it, made in a way anybody could understand in four seconds.

tapulous turned it into a catalog. tap tap dance came in december 2008 with daft punk and the chemical brothers on it, and brought the opengl engine that ran everything afterward. tap tap revenge 2 followed on 3 march 2009, with a third and a fourth behind it and then a run of artist editions built around single musicians. an android version arrived on 30 march 2011. the series is recorded at more than fifteen million downloads across all of it, and the free game with the paid song packs behind it is the business model the whole mobile industry copied.

~ what got buried with it ~

disney bought tapulous in july 2010 and folded it into its mobile division. that is normally where the story stops being interesting, and for three and a half years it was: the games stayed up and the song packs kept selling. then on 9 january 2014 a post went up on the tap tap revenge facebook page saying it no longer made sense to maintain the franchise, given where the mobile and music markets had gone.

the servers went off on 5 february 2014 and the games came out of the app store. what died with them was every song anyone had paid for, because the tracks were licensed and delivered from tapulous servers rather than stored as files you owned. there was no way to restore a purchase after that date and no offline mode worth having. people who had spent real money on individual songs in 2009 got a facebook post in 2014 and a dead icon on a phone they had probably already replaced.

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