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An Inspiration For Other Story Games

Inside Choices is a weekly behind-the-scenes blog from the Pixelberry team. Have suggestions for future blog posts? Let us know!

Every once in awhile, while I look around at our studio, I get amazed by how much things have changed for our team.

I remember back to 2004 when our team was the first to create story games for phones. At the time no one had thought about creating stories for phones. In fact, when we first came up with the idea, we didn’t even have a writer on our team yet. We ended up finding a talented student, Max, at Stanford who would write for us at night after class. He’s now our Head of Content and namesake (but not inspiration) for High School Story’s Max.

We launched our first story game, Surviving High School, in 2005. It was the first and only story driven game on cell phones for many years. We thought a text based game was a perfect fit for cell phones that were limited by screen size and power. Our belief was that with limited information, our players would use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. And even though our art has greatly improved from the pixel art of a decade ago, that basic premise continues to today.

Surviving High School grew in popularity and became the #3 game on the biggest “app store” at that time, Verizon’s Get It Now service. It did better than well known brands, like Pac Man and Madden Football. Story had proven its appeal.

Later at EA, our team developed a brand new version of Surviving High School for iPhone and Android. We followed up with Cause of Death. And later, as Pixelberry, we launched High School Story, Hollywood U, and Choices. Even though we’ve been with four different companies - Centerscore, Vivendi Games, EA, and now Pixelberry - it’s always been the same team.

Through the years, our story games have inspired many other companies to follow. But as pioneers of the space, we take great care in making sure that the quality of our current work rises to the expectations of the many fans we’ve delighted over the years.

And together, as a team, we’ll keep on innovating in the space.