6 Mobile Games Every Singaporean Kid Played

The six

1. Talking Tom. Outfit7 put it out in 2010 and every kid in Singapore had the same conversation about whether the camera was watching you. It was not. We all thought it was.

2. Plants vs Zombies. Released in 2009 and on iOS the year after. Still genuinely good, which is why people still play it as adults and pretend they are being ironic.

3. Doodle Jump. 2009. A game so simple they put it in a Timezone cabinet, which remains the highest honour Singapore can give a mobile game.

4. Beat the boss. Exactly what the title says. It was on every phone and never once discussed with an adult.

5. Candy Crush. Hit mobile in late 2012 and immediately became the reason your mother needed lives from you. The candy always looked better than it had any right to.

6. Growtopia. 2013, and the one where actual money changed hands. Plenty of Singaporean kids ran a small economy in there and learned more about supply and demand than any Social Studies lesson delivered.

Why these ones specifically

Because they ran on a phone you were not supposed to be holding. All six are small downloads, work without wifi once loaded, and can be played in the ten minutes between tuition and dinner. That was the whole design constraint of a Singaporean childhood in the early 2010s.

The ones that survived are the ones that never needed a story. You could hand the phone to someone mid-round and they would understand it in four seconds.

If this is your era, our things you only know if you grew up in Jurong covers the physical version of the same nostalgia.