” Episode also became wildly popular, especially with teenage girls able to play through huge libraries of stories built by their peers. “Who could miss it?” That same year, an app called Episode let players build their own interactive romance stories with characters who could be posed and animated like paper dolls: the company described it as “an interactive animated television show” and a “modern, mobile-first Choose Your Own Adventure. “Like everyone else on earth, we noticed ,” wrote Royal McGraw, a producer at Pixelberry. It flew to the top of app store charts, and for years was the only top ten game on Apple’s store with a 5-star average rating. Within days it had grossed nearly two million dollars, with projections of bringing in as much as 200 million annually. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood launched that summer on app stores with little to no fanfare in the mainstream gaming press, and instantly became an enormous success. Then in 2014, two mobile games served as wake-up calls to the industry. As powerful as a good storyline can be many mobile games have little to no plot.” Pixelberry set out to change this with a new game in the old mode, High School Story but still felt the need to disguise their story-heavy game inside a strange hybrid of city-builder and RPG, which had then been a successful mobile game formula. As late as 2014, a games journalist could still say that mobile storytelling “has been for the most part untapped in today’s app market. Story made titles harder to localize to other languages, and blocks of text were less “juicy” than simple, addictive game mechanics. Despite the team’s earlier hits, story games on mobile were still seen by the industry as a dubious proposition. On the basis of their success the team was acquired and passed around between gaming giants like Vivendi and Electronic Arts, remaking Surviving High School for iPhone in the early 2010s before escaping in 2013 to start over as a new independent company, now dubbed Pixelberry. “Our belief was that with limited information, our players would use their imaginations to fill in the blanks.” Miao “thought a text based game was a perfect fit” for the pre-iPhone mobile market, with processors too underpowered for impressive graphics. Surviving High School became the first successful text-driven and story-centric hit for a mobile phone platform, and remained hugely popular, releasing weekly content updates for nearly a decade. In 2005 they released a subscription-based episodic story game, Surviving High School, which broke the top five on Verizon’s “Get It Now” service, then the biggest mobile app storefront-and filled mostly with Pac-Man, Tetris, and Snake clones. They “lived and worked out of a small apartment next to the railroad tracks,” Miao remembers, “putting business calls on hold whenever a train passed by.” After a few years of fitful success, Centerscore broke into the emerging mobile games market, and realized that high schoolers-in particular, high school girls-were a massively underserved market. Pixelberry had its origins in the early 2000s when Asian American Stanford grad Oliver Miao founded a game company, Centerscore, with a handful of friends. But if we’re taking seriously the project of examining the continuing impact of interactive prose in each decade of its history, it’s impossible to leave out the app in which The Freshman and its sequels were published: Pixelberry’s Choices, and its many competitors. The reasons why have to do with the politics of gender and game genres with cultural baggage around divisions between hardcore and casual players with the ethical concerns of free-to-play monetization models with the definitions of “interactive fiction” and their relationships with visual art and UI design and with the way most fans and scholars have been trained to think about which games “matter,” and why. Even most catalogues of interactive fiction don't include it. Despite this it’s never been reviewed on a mainstream gaming site. It might surprise even readers of this blog to know that an interactive fiction romance called The Freshman, released the same year as Infinite Warfare, has reached a vastly larger audience: it had been played nearly 45 million times as of 2020. Yet media coverage of digital games rarely reflects this. Dozens of mobile games that year had far more downloads, due to cheaper or free price points and more ubiquitous platforms. Biggest gross, though, does not equal most played. The highest-grossing digital game of 2016, according to leading market research firm the NPD Group, was Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which sold 1.8 million copies for PC, Xbox One, and PS4 in its first week of release, and reached lifetime sales figures of 13 million.
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