Finger Battle
The ultimate simple two-player game
A two-player tapping game for the iPhone, made with Rafaël Rozendaal
Together with Rafaël Rozendaal I developed Finger Battle, a really simple two-player game on the iPhone. The screen is divided in two parts, one red, one blue. Players choose sides. When players start tapping on their side, that side grows, but only if they tap faster than their opponent. The beauty of this gameplay is that it is so simple, we needed almost no text or UI in the app and every user gets it immediately and wants to play more.
Because of Rafaël’s marketing efforts, who is an internationally invited media artist, the app quickly grew in popularity within a few weeks. Still, its breakthrough in the Netherlands was only after it was featured for 15 seconds on a Dutch prime-time television show, when Nalden showed it on “De Wereld Draait Door”.
Its success can also be measured by the number and speed of its copycats. Within four days of the iOS release there was already a copycat version available on Android. And another one quickly after that.
Finger Battle is no longer in the App Store. We retired it once the copies became so common that the idea itself had spread well beyond our initial version.
Gameplay
Success means copycats
Becoming successful means copycats will quickly follow. Within a few weeks of the iPhone release, we already had several on Android and in search results.
