Summary
The introduction of smartphones marked a huge shift in handheld gaming. The humble phone was now a full-blown entertainment device. By the early 2010s, mobiles were a threat to dedicated handhelds. Casual audiences had less reason to buy a 3DS or PS Vita when they could download apps that were simple, intuitiveand ostensibly free.
Mobiles are now the main outlet for handheld play. Games like Genshin Impact offera console-level experience on your phone. Indie titles like Among Us and Vampire Survivors often have a mobile version. Even Nintendo relented with games like Super Mario Run and Pokemon Go. But there’s something special about the earlier days, and the apps that defined our childhoods. Here’s a trip down memory lane with some of them.
10Hay Day
Whether it was you, your siblings or your college roommate who played this, you can probably hear the banjo soundtrack already. Hay Day was a bigger, better equivalent to FarmVille, the Facebook game that had taken the world by storm a few years earlier.
There’s a lot to do in Hay Day. you may grow crops, farm livestock and sell your produce to visitors. It’s a tranquil farming sim, with the dark secrets of the slaughterhouse hidden behind the cutesy graphics. Howdoyou manage to get meat from your pigs just by putting them in a sauna?
Subway Surfers wasn’t the first endless runner game, nor was it particularly innovative. Yet it was the first game to register a billion downloads on Google Play. It’s hard to pinpoint why, except for a combination of luck, word-of-mouth and its bubbly aesthetic.
Regardless, you probably remember playing this game - or watching your friends play it - at some point. Its simplicity made it easy to play while idling, socializing or (if the memes are right) watching Family Guy funny clips. Subway Surfers is a Gen Z classic.
8Where’s My Water?
Disney Mobile’s first foray into an original mobile IP, Where’s My Water? was a success due to its fun puzzle gameplay. The level design and incrementing difficulty made it easy to grasp, while the cute premise made it satisfying when you got Swampy’s shower running.
As with most successful apps of the early 2010s, Where’s My Water? spawned a legion of imitators. It also had a sequel, a web series, and a few spin-offs (some of which almost didn’t shut down immediately), but it’s the first title that everyone remembers.
It didn’t make us any better at cutting fruit in real life, but Fruit Ninja is a childhood staple. Perhaps the most intuitive game ever made, Fruit Ninja was originally introduced as a paid app before getting a free-to-play version.
Unfortunately, in May 2024 Halfbrick switched to a paid subscription model that everyone who owned the classic version was expected to pay for. That includes people who had already bought the game as a premium app. Mobile games aren’t as heavily regulated or curated as their console counterparts, so this instance of corporate greed didn’t spark much of an outcry. All it did was take the fun out of swiping our index fingers across the screen.
The formula for making a successful mobile game was simple in the early 2010s: have a memorable mascot. Whatever freemium features a mobile game may have, all is forgiven as long as there’s an adorable gremlin on the screen.
Cut the Rope followed this formula to great success, accruing billions of downloads as people eagerly fed candy to a cute little critter named Om Nom. The gameplay is simple, the music and sound effects are satisfying, and ZeptoLab had the level progression down to a science.
5Hill Climb Racing
If you’ve played Hill Climb Racing, you’ll know the feeling of nervousness all too well. The pressure of watching your fuel gauge run out as you struggle to get up that hill. This physics-based title isn’t a racing game, whatever the title says. It’s a puzzle game from hell.
Fear not, because we’re going to tell you the correct way to play Hill Climb Racing. Unlock the moon level, unlock the motocross bike, and do endless flips as you watch your coin count go up. It’s immensely gratifying, until your driver decides to land on his head.
4Doodle Jump
An early App Store phenomenon, Doodle Jump used to warn you in its title that you’d form a habit with it. Its simplistic gameplay and use of tilt controls made it a fun - if not easy - way to kill boredom. It inspired imitators, and its gameplay was ported over entirely to other apps like Pocket God as a minigame.
For a short time, this game was the App Store’s undisputed heavyweight champion. Unlike the competitors it eventually lost its crown to, Doodle Jump never became a multimedia franchise. That’s a good thing: this is one game you can revisit and pretend it’s 2009 again.
PopCap is a casual game specialist. The studio had spent nearly a decade making successful puzzle titles like Bejeweled, Zuma, and Peggle when it launched Plants vs. Zombies in 2009. These guys were indie before indie was cool, and the developer’s portfolio is filled with hidden gems such as Mummy Maze.
This game was a departure from PopCap’s usual tile-matching fare, and it was quickly hailed as one of thebest tower defence titles. Its humour, soundtrack, and engaging mechanics made it a huge success. The game made its way to almost every system under the sun, and was fun on all of them. Then EA acquired the studio; the less said about that, the better.
2Temple Run
“Do you have games on your phone?” That was the question every aunt and uncle dreaded hearing in the early 2010s. More often than not, what the kids werereallyasking was, did you have Temple Run? This app was an early 3D success for mobile gaming because it took full advantage of mobile phones' vertical displays. You could see more of the path ahead and prepare yourself to tilt, swipe, and tap your way to a new high score.
We do take umbrage at one thing, though. The game introduces an Indiana Jones clone as ‘the second-greatest explorer ever,’ implying Jonesy is the first. What about Lara Croft? At least she got her own Temple Run imitation with Lara Croft: Relic Run.
Angry Birds is the ultimate casual game. These days, it’s probably better known for its two feature films, but those only got made because the game was such a hit. It was simple: set the angle and send birds catapulting into the mean piggies who stole their eggs. It had rewarding gameplay, great sound effects - the birds clamouring at the start is still funny - and virtually no learning curve.
No mobile game took off quite like Angry Birds did. The series rose to the top of app stores worldwide, had crossover tie-in games with properties like Star Wars, and maintained a stranglehold on pop culture for a couple of years. The hype has long since faded, but the memories haven’t.
