When Luke Muscat pitched an idea for an iPhone game inspired by late-night knife ads he didn't think it would become a global phenom.
It was a relatively simple idea: slicing fruit mid-air with a sharp blade.
Fruit Ninja would become one of the most recognisable games of its era, a perfectly mindless pastime for bus stops, ad breaks and, sadly for a certain generation, classrooms.
For the uninitiated, Fruit Ninja is a highly addictive game where a range of tropical fruits are tossed from the bottom of the screen. The player's finger acts as a sword — slicing and obliterating fruit, splattering juices all over the wooden dojo walls.
Origin story
It was 2009 and the global financial crisis was in full swing. While the Australian dollar was buoyed, it had a negative impact on the gaming industry.
Luke Muscat was a 25-year-old designer at Halfbrick Studios.
"The exchange rate changed a lot, which meant we were no longer an attractive area for work for hire," he said.
Based out of a small space on Brisbane's inner-north, Halfbrick had been focused on making games for larger studios overseas.
Luke and his team figured they had roughly one year to turn things around.
They needed something of their own to top up the coffers, so every second Friday they would pitch ideas to each other hoping to strike gold.
Luke was coming off somewhat of a personal failure, a complicated game called Rocket Racing he had designed had not done well.
"It was a disaster. It was very much not a profitable game," he said.
"I was stumped for what I would pitch. All I knew is I didn't want it to be the same as Rocket Racing. I wanted it to be the exact opposite."
One thing that came to mind was a late-night ad campaign for knives that could cut through anything.
"One of the things they do is they throw a pineapple in the air and cut it mid-air. And I was like, 'Oh s***, this could work as a game'," Luke said.
However, the idea didn't hit home with many of Luke's co-workers.
"It seemed too simple, especially as a studio that had traditionally made complex, hard games. It seemed like a kid's toy."
But the stars would align for the simple idea to succeed.
While most of the team was off helping put together a game for another studio, Luke and fellow designer Joe Gatling turned their attention to making an iPhone game.
"So we just sat down and started brainstorming ideas. We came up with maybe 30 ideas."
"Fruit Ninja felt like the star out of those. It felt like the best one to play."
'Oh, this is the real deal'
The game was finished in six short weeks. It was released in April 2010, along with a budget advertising campaign filmed in a park on the Brisbane River which highlighted ninjas' age-old hatred of five-a-day diets.
Luke said it wasn't an immediate success.
"I think the first day it made like $100 or something," he said.
However, it was destined for greatness. After being featured on the Apple App Store the downloads started picking up steam.
By July the game had cracked 1 million downloads.
For a gaming studio on the ropes, Fruit Ninja was a lifeline.
"Every week that passed, you're like, 'Oh, this is it. This is the real deal'," Luke said.
"It was exciting, but it was also a relief. It's also kind of surreal, because you see these numbers coming in."
He said he still remembers the first time he saw someone playing Fruit Ninja in public.
"It was at a pub, and I heard the really distinctive sound when you start the game … I literally thought I was hearing things from playing the game for work, I had heard that sound like, 10,000 times," he said.
"I remember looking over and seeing someone playing and there was the first time I'd ever seen anyone organically playing something that I'd made. That was more impactful than seeing these big numbers in a spreadsheet."
1 billion downloads later
Fast forward to 2015 and the game had been downloaded 1 billion times. Luke and his team had handed off Fruit Ninja duties to another team.
In 2013 Halfbrick was reportedly worth $284 million.
Despite that, Luke never made "Fruit Ninja Money", and he left Halfbrick without so much as a memento, but he's happy the game that started out as a throwaway idea became a driving force for jobs while the industry was "collapsing".
"Fruit Ninja meant that Halfbrick Studios grew a lot," he said.
"In 2009 something like 70 per cent of game jobs vanished in Australia … huge sections were being wiped out. So when Fruit Ninja came along, we actually started creating jobs, and was one of the very few places that had open job listings in Australia."
Many remember it as the "golden age" for mobile games.
"You could be a small upstart and you could make it," Luke said.
"I remember like, there were just awesome games every week and just the amount of creativity and interesting ideas and novel concepts and great production that was coming out every week. It was just insane."
