Big Blue Bubble

Big Blue Bubble
Private
Industry Computer and Video Games
Founded 2004
Headquarters London, Ontario, Canada and San Francisco, California, US
Key people
 Vikas Gupta, CEO
Damir Slogar, President & Founder
Claudette Critchley, COO
Mark Maia, Creative Director
Bryan Davis, Senior Vice President
Dave Kerr, Producer
Hayley Patterson, QA Director
Products My Singing Monsters
Number of employees
 51-200
Slogan Inspiring Worlds of Creativity
Website bigbluebubble.com

Big Blue Bubble, Inc. is Canada's largest independent mobile gaming company, founded in 2004 and headquartered out of London, Ontario, Canada, with its US offices based in San Francisco. With 100+ games in its portfolio to date, the company is best known for its top-grossing iOS and Android game franchise and hit original IP, My Singing Monsters, with a network of hundreds of millions of players worldwide.

History

Big Blue Bubble's logo until the 2015 rebranding

Founded in 2004 by industry veteran Damir Slogar, along with co-founders Claudette Critchley (COO) and Mark Maia (Creative Director), Big Blue Bubble recognized the potential of the burgeoning mobile gaming market at an early stage and began by specializing in casual games. Its first game, Bubble Trouble, quickly sold over 120,000 copies worldwide and was used in marketing campaigns by Nokia. Sony Ericsson also got on board and chose Big Blue Bubble's innovative space thriller, Captain Lunar, as a launch title for the Sony Ericsson T610. Establishing itself as a promising mobile games developer, Big Blue Bubble built upon this early success and exposure by forming strong relationships with some of the most influential international publishers: THQ Wireless, Hands-On Mobile (MForma), Blaze, I-Play and I-Win. Soon after, it began adapting film and television franchises, such as 24 for handheld devices.[1] In the mid to late 2000's, the company started moving towards console development, to include the Wii and PlayStation 2 platforms.[2]

Present

More recently, Big Blue Bubble has returned to its roots in the mobile sphere, and remains wholly focused on mobile technologies and the development of casual titles encompassing the 'freemium' business model. The recent success of several of their original intellectual properties such as Thumpies, Burn the Rope, and My Singing Monsters has secured the company as a major player in the international gaming industry and community.

Awards and Recognition

Notable titles

24, The Mobile Game

24, The Mobile Game, based on the popular TV series of the same name, was an early success for Big Blue Bubble. Developed for mobile devices, players used an array of gadgetry and agents at their disposal to take on a variety of missions. It received significant critical praise, with IGN.com calling it "...the best example of a licensed mobile game based on an entertainment property (film, TV show) that I have seen thus far."[3]

Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home was a home design game that challenged players to listen and learn about their clients' tastes, create fabulous designs, and then direct their build team to assemble it right before their eyes. With simple controls, a fun graphical style and easy to use interface, the original title was highly successful, sparking an interior design genre within the casual market and prompting the release of several sequels and expansions.

Thumpies

Thumpies is a unique rhythm based music game, in which players must tap the screen to match the beat of bouncing Thumpies, creating layers of a song. The quirky art design of Thumpies is accompanied by a unique musical score composed by award winning composer and industry veteran David Kerr. Thumpies was another commercial and critical success for Big Blue Bubble, hailed as a reinvention of the rhythm-based game, because the game uses the mechanics of bouncing in time with the Thumpies rather than a series of notes. "Thumpies truly does reinvent the rhythm based game, and stands above Tap Tap Revenge, Rock Band, Riddim Ribbon, and all others in the category."[4]

Burn the Rope

Originally released in 2010, Burn the Rope involves a mix of strategic planning, thinking ahead, coordination and the ability to stay in deep focus. In the game, users have to feed a fire to burn as much rope as they can in each level of progress. The challenge is that the fire only burns upwards, leaving players to tilt and turn their iPhones to keep the flame alive. Within less than a month after its release Burn the Rope surpassed millions of apps to reach the top of iTunes Paid Apps charts.

My Singing Monsters

Main article: My Singing Monsters

Most recently, Big Blue Bubble has enjoyed commercial and critical acclaim with their original IP My Singing Monsters. Designed in the style of a world builder game, the monster denizens of this lush and exotic world are singularly unique - they dance and sing! Players can create unique havens by landscaping and arranging their creatures, each loaded with personality and a song all to themselves. Regular content updates mean that there's always something new for players to experience. Since launching in fall of 2012, My Singing Monsters is close to breaking 1 million monthly active users and a quarter million daily active users.

The success of this title attracted the attention of Disney, with whom Big Blue Bubble is currently collaborating to develop My Muppets Show, a similarly structured world builder using the beloved Muppet characters and slated for release in summer 2013.

Other Apps

Big Blue Bubble released two games in 2014, My Mammott and Finders Keep, both of which are available on the App Store. My Mammott currently has over l00,000 downloads in Google Play and over a 1,000 downloads in Google Play the day it came out. My Mammott copies the player's voice into a funny tone and allows the character to do tricks with it, throw Thumpies at it and even feed it. The player can use the device's camera to put the character in the real world on screen. Finder's Keep is a game where the player chooses a hero and fights/do quests with it. Completing quests upgrades the player's hero.

References

  1. ↑ Levi Buchanan (2006-03-03). "24: The Interview". IGN.
  2. ↑ "Q&A: Big Blue Bubble's Slogar On Moving From Mobile". Gamasutra. 2007-10-09.
  3. ↑ "IGN.com Review of 24". IGN. 2006-02-10.
  4. ↑ http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/02/review-thumpies-changing-the-rhythm-game-genre

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, April 15, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.