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Daniel Johnston fans rejoice: ‘Hi, How Are You?’ app is live
Maybe it’s good timing, or just the kind of unlikely success story you’d associate with musician and artist Daniel Johnston, but an iPhone/iPod Touch app based on him seems on track for success.
Crowded amid the more than 85,000 applications in Apple’s iTunes App Store, the game, titled, “Hi, How Are You?” features the iconic stalk-eyed familiar to Austinites and music by Johnston. In just the week since it was added to the store, it already received a glowing write-up in the New York Times (“… a kind of psycho-religious version of ‘Frogger,’ the classic arcade game”) and good user reviews on the store which have given the 99-cent game a four-and-a-half star rating as of this writing.
Johnston performs this weekend at the Austin City Limits Festival; what better time to introduce a cell phone app based on his drawings and music? (Best time to play it: while standing in line for a portable toilet at the fest.)
The game comes from Peter Franco and Steve Broumley of the local game companies Dr. Fun Fun and Smashing Studios. Both men were veterans of Acclaim and Midway Austin, focusing on console games like “BlackSite: Area 51,” “Turok: Dinosaur Hunter” and “Tribes: Aerial Assault.”
For this game, they took a more old-school approach, looking to games like “Q*Bert,” “Marble Madness” and “Crystal Castles” for inspiration.
“It’s a mishmash of those games, put together with some cool music and artwork,” Franco said, “it’s a very refreshing change to work on this project.”
Both were fans of Johnston and have been pleasantly surprised by the reaction so far to the game, which is a trippy, colorful game of platforms, strange creatures and Johnston’s idiosyncratic tunes. “Tons of people love Daniel Johnston and we’re finding that out fiirst-hand,” Franco said.
The core technology for the game, which includes a physics engine, was begun about a year and a half ago, but the creative work on it was done this year. The approval process for the app took over a month as the developers fretted on whether the artwork in the game might be too intense for approval.
“When you unlock an achievement, you unlock some of Daniel’s artwork. It can be provocative, depending on the viewer,” Franco said, “we suspected some of that might have thrown Apple for a loop.”
They withdrew the app at one point, made some tweaks, and resubmitted it, finally winning approval for the Apple Store.
The first day the game was available, last Friday, it sold about four copies. Since then, sales have increased dramatically, though the developers say it’s too early to gauge how well the game will do.
Broumley said there’s a bigger potential for a game like this one to spread among mobile phones than a console game might. “Almost by their nature, they’re viral,” he said, “It’s a quick download. So much media can be seen right on the phone instead of having to see the product in a store.”
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By potted meat
October 2, 2009 11:57 AM | Link to this
P.T. Barnum was right.