Fruit Ninja and the Mobile Games That Ate Our Recess

Why Fruit Ninja specifically

It is four seconds to explain and zero seconds to hand over. That is the whole reason it beat better games. You could pass a phone to someone who had never seen it, they understood it before the first watermelon, and a round was short enough that nobody felt robbed when the bell went.

The download curve says the same thing. Three million by September 2010, twenty million across all platforms by March 2011, three hundred million by May 2012, a billion by 2015. Games do not grow like that on depth. They grow like that on being passable between hands.

We did a separate list of the ones that lived on a borrowed iPhone 4: six mobile games every Singaporean kid played, with Talking Tom, Plants vs Zombies, Doodle Jump, Beat the Boss, Candy Crush and Growtopia.

The generation before this had a computer

If your version of this was a desktop in the living room rather than a phone, the list is completely different: Papa's, Poptropica, Moshi Monsters, Bartender. Those ran in a browser on Flash and most of them died when Flash did.

We wrote that one up too, including which ones you can still play: the browser games we grew up on. The short version is that Poptropica survived, Papa's moved to paid apps, and Moshi Monsters has been offline since 2019.

FAQs

When did Fruit Ninja come out?

20 April 2010 on iOS, from Halfbrick Studios. It reached Android in September 2010 and Windows Phone that December.

How many downloads does Fruit Ninja have?

It passed 300 million in May 2012, 700 million in August 2013, and a billion in 2015.