iPhonetastic

11 February 2009

I’ve been looking to do something like this for ages now, which will come as no surprise to anyone that reads this blog, but after a couple of false starts and a whole bunch of waiting it’s finally done.

We’ve made an iPhone app:

Titus Andronicus: Loadin’ (iTunes Link)

It’s for the rather lovely band Titus Andronicus and the concept was all their idea – the conversation pretty much went like this:

Them: Oh yeah, one more thing – we’ve got this crazy idea: we seemingly spend half our time loading up our van after shows, wouldn’t it be cool to do a game about that, a bit like Tetris?
Me: That sounds pretty cool!

They were thinking of it as a extra bit of their website (which we also put together) but I had a hunch that it would work best as an iPhone app. I’m not really a big fan of flash games on bands websites as they always feel so disconnected – why would you come to a bands site to play games? They always reek of tick-box marketing of 5 years ago, when everything seemingly needed to be flashy and slick.

On an iPhone, however, pretty much the reverse is true. The music-based iPhone apps that have been put out so far have been pretty rubbish. Pink, Snow Patrol and Death Cab For Cutie have all churned out utterly pointless pieces of marketing fodder that do nothing that the bands websites don’t do (actually less) – forgetting that iPhones have a great web browser – and I wanted to make sure that we didn’t go down the same route. The only two successful ones so far are the Brian Eno one and the skinned versions of Tap Tap Revenege for NIN and Weezer, and it’s pretty obvious why these are successful – they were conceived as apps first, with a reason to use them, not ‘we need an iPhone app for this campaign’.

That’s exactly what we did here – the concept very much came first – and I hope that it’s fun to play and earns its place on your iPhone; if you like the music (which oddly seems to perfectly fit the game) more the better.

From a technical point of view luckily – for everyone involved, I think – I didn’t try to brush off my rather dusty Cocoa coding skills and got Chris (one of the developers of EventBox) to do the hard work, with me just doing artwork duties. The whole App Store process was slightly more complicated then it really needed to be, especially when you consider that we had insider access (due to our relationship with iTunes selling all those records…). Everything just took a lot longer then it really should but at least we got there in the end…

From: Articles

11 February 2009