From indie game to Bluey: the surprising link between Fruit Ninja and TV’s hottest show

Bluey, one of Australia’s hottest exports, was born from video games and now its creator is partnering with another game, Fruit Ninja, for a family friendly twist on the global phenomenon.

Shainiel Deo, the owner of Halfbrick, says Fruit Ninja and Bluey were born from a similar world.

If it weren’t for video games, there would be no Bluey – the hit Australian children’s TV series that became America’s most watched show on Disney+ last year, amassing more than 55.6 billion minutes of viewing time.

This beat Disney’s own original content. Now its creator, Joe Brumm, is circling back to where it all began, striking a new collaboration with Halfbrick Studios – the maker of Fruit Ninja, a game which has been downloaded more than two billion times.

Mr Brumm partnered with Halfbrick about a decade ago when the studio turned his Dan the Man web series that had aired on YouTube into a hit game. It became so successful that he used the royalties he earned to create Bluey.

What’s more, Mr Brumm and Halfbrick chief executive Shaniel Deo are both based in Brisbane, which is quietly becoming a hotbed for Australia’s tech talent.

Bluey creator Joe Brumm.

“We’ve always kept in touch,” Mr Deo said of his relationship with Mr Brumm.

“We’re both around the same age, share a lot of experiences in life and both have a love for video games.”

Their latest collaboration combines Bluey with Fruit Ninja. Mr Deo said it appeared an unusual partnership, given Bluey was focused on family entertainment and Fruit Ninja slashes fruit with samurai blades.

“There’s always a challenge of taking a game where you’re slicing fruit with your finger – but what represents blades – to something that’s family friendly,” Mr Deo said.

“But we have got a number of people within the company that just love Bluey, so they know the aspects that we need to keep from Bluey and how we can adapt them to work with Fruit Ninja and still honour the Fruit Ninja experience.

“The funny thing is, I think it was the pilot episode of Bluey, Joe was a big fan of Fruit Ninja and he made a spoof of Fruit Ninja in that called salad dodgers. So we can still slice fruit in the game, but you’re doing it with items from the show that are more or less extreme than blades.”

Fruit Ninja has amassed more than two billion downloads.

The Bluey Fruit Ninja collaboration is a limited crossover event only available on Apple Arcade. But Mr Deo said it has the potential to eclipse the original Fruit Ninja.

“I mean, you just have to go to your local Coles of Woolworths to see how many Bluey branded things are on the shelves these days,” he said.

“I’m sure it’s going to push Fruit Ninja higher up in the charts where we have done this integration in particular, like Apple Arcade, and bring more people into that ecosystem.”

Australia's hottest video game and TV show have launched a new collaboration to take on the world.

Mr Deo this month attended Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference at its Cupertino headquarters in California.

He said his highlight of the conference was Apple’s unified look for its operating systems, which is centred on what the company calls “liquid glass”, a deeper integration of Apple Intelligence and updating Vision Pro to 90 hertz hand tracking.

“The better the hand tracking, the more immersive the experiences you can create,” he said.

“Our team’s already looking at Fruit Ninja and how it all sort of works with improved hand tracking. It opens up opportunities for us to bring more content to the platform.”

Originally published as From indie game to Bluey: the surprising link between Fruit Ninja and TV’s hottest show