Queensland Business Monthly: Fruit Ninja to become a Hollywood film

BRISBANE-made Fruit Ninja took the world by storm becoming the second-most popular game of all time. Now it’s about to become a movie.

the Fruit Ninja game is about to become a movie.

FROM a hobby project, to a billion downloads and now a feature film in development – the incredible journey of Brisbane gaming company Halfbrick Studios is worthy of its own Hollywood script.

If the company name doesn’t immediately seem familiar, their most famous game will – Fruit Ninja is ranked as the second-most popular game of all time, with more than a billion downloads, and was once believed to be on a third of all iPhones in the US.

But the touch-screen game where users slice and dice falling fruit, is now much more than that. The modern world means a successful game rarely stops there.

Halfbrick founder and chief executive Shainiel Deo confirmed to QBM that a Fruit Ninja movie is in the works.

“It’s in the draft stage at the moment, once that’s all approved it will move to the next stage of production,” he says.

“We also have a cartoon series of Fruit Ninja that we have released on YouTube Red, and we have a guy in LA that’s looking to develop more of our games into those formats.”

A Fruit Ninja comic book has event hit the stands, while the studio has also created hugely popular games such as Jetpack Joyride and Monster Dash.

Like all good technology stories, the birth of the most popular game to ever come out of Australia began life in a dingy basement.

Deo was 26 – owner of said basement – and in 2001 was working alongside a group of his friends who knew their passion lay in game development. What seems like a good career prospect now could barely have been labelled a pipedream then. This was before the iPhone and the iPad, and the iPod was just about to be released. Facebook wouldn’t enter the world for another three years.

Deo and his co-workers had grown up on Atari and Nintendo but recognised that the technology sphere was rapidly evolving.

When he and his co-developers created their company Halfbrick – “I wish we had a good story for why we chose that name, but we don’t” – they were in it for fun.

Fruit Ninja creator and Halfbrick CEO Shainiel Deo. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

“Really when we started it was just about doing something that we loved, doing it well and to the best of our ability,” Deo says.

“It was never about chasing money or anything like that. We never took any external investment because we wanted to retain creative control and have that flexibility to chart our own course.

“So that was the philosophy that drove us. We just wanted to be the best at what we did, and we wanted to create things of value that people would remember for a long time.”

For seven years, the team worked on other people’s projects, creating numerous games for other companies.

Then in 2010 the company’s lead designer Luke Muscat began playing around with the idea of what touch screens, now more popular with the rise of smartphones, could mean for gaming.

Eventually Fruit Ninja was born and began breaking download records all over the world. Deo estimates 98 per cent of their game downloads come from outside of Australia.

By 2014, Deo had landed on the BRW Young Rich List with an estimated worth of $78 million.

Now 42 and a father of four, he is the only remaining member of the original team. But he says either selling, or listing, the company isn’t in his immediate plans.

“Those things are never on my mind,” he says. “For me the next thing is how do we improve on what we've done so far, how do we engage even more people around the world, that’s my focus. I never had an exit strategy. I love getting out of bed every day and knowing that this is what I do.”

Technology changes in the past 16 years have been rapid, and Halfbrick, like other gaming companies, has had to rapidly adapt at times. In-app purchases are increasingly a source of revenue, but remaining a market leader in an ever-changing industry is far from an easy task.

“You really have to be constantly trying to pre-empt things, and then sometimes wrestle with our team to get them to see where things are heading, and then hopefully be able to transition in time. We’ve probably gone through four major changes in our industry and each time a lot of our contemporaries have ended up out of business. But we’ve managed to navigate those changes successfully each time and, touch wood, we will continue to do that.”

Halfbrick Studios is based in an inconspicuous office in Brisbane’s inner north. It has more than 70 staff. Recently the business became one of the youngest companies to be inducted into the QUT Business Hall of Fame, joining the likes of QANTAS, RACQ and The Courier-Mail.

“To be honest I really don’t follow at lot of these things, I tend to keep my head down and focus on what we’re trying to do here,” Deo says.

“So when I was approached and then learnt about some of the companies which had gone in before us and were going in along side us I was surprised, pleasantly, and absolutely honoured that we had been able to make our mark in such a short amount of time.”

It’s difficult not to wonder, given the fact Fruit Ninja continues to be one of the world’s most popular games, whether the company is forever chasing the next giant hit which will irrevocably upturn their lives. Deo says his own perspective on that has changed with time.

“There was a point in our history where I think the point was about creating the next big thing – always working towards that goal,” he says.

“I think it has kind of shifted more towards a consistent output of ideas and projects. It’s more about building fewer products, but them being the right product to meet users needs. It’s a service that’s continuing changing, so we’re constantly updating and evolving.”