Halfbrick Studios - Tumblr Posts

so i've been learning how to draw the dude (who i'll call Mach until his actual name is revealed) from Halfbrick's new prototype game TapKO cause i kinda got fixated on him,,, he's a stoic boxer who works his way up to becoming a true pro by punching the shit out of everything he sees, basically. the game he's from is on Halfbrick+ and it's pretty swell! (i may have also strained my wrist and forearm from all the excessive spamming while playing it.....)

(ignore the pupiless Garfield i forgor to crop the photo) i like drawing him in a sort of "come here" pose with his boxing gloves and giving his head a slight tilt (despite the fact that i can't draw head tilts properly...) i think he looks pretty cool like that :)

i like to imagine he doesn't really smile a lot, mostly out of slight embarrassment as he prefers to always have a permanent stone-faced Kubrick Stare™ and not show much emotion :P

did a little blender test to try to figure out how i should shade him. still figuring out how to shade properly on paper, i think this turned out alright :) i want his scar to be less defined though,, eh i'll fix it later

bonus machfries (barry x mach) crack ship sketches under the cut

man, this game hasn't even been out for a week and i'm already making stupid ship art of Mach and Barry lmao..... imagine if these two did get together though, Barry trying to lighten the mood and telling jokes, while Mach just gives him this absolute poker face,, and Barry just laughs awkwardly about it trying to change the subject. Mach would like him back though, they'd probably do little boxing matches in Barry's backyard or something :) (also sorry barry looks a little off, i keep forgetting how i usually draw him,,)

ok real talk.... this would happen.... probably. maybe Barry said something that pissed Mach off and lead him to punch him in the face, and as Mach gets close to him, Barry suddenly gets caught in his handsome focused eyes, his manly face, his awesome hair.... and then immediately gets pulled out of the moment as Mach punches the shit out of him. Barry's sitting down grimacing and recovering afterwards as Flash offers him bandages and ice packs. he looks pissed, and he is, but the way Mach so effortlessly beat his ass is still fresh in his mind. i think someone's in love :3

ahhh to see a brand new and interesting Halfbrick video about one of their newly released games and wanting to see what others say about it, only to scroll into the comments have have literally all of them just be asking for Dan The Man 2 to release............... beautiful :')

(DISCLAIMER: as of the 17th of August 2024, it was revealed that Craig is directly related to Barry, which obviously makes my Crarry art very awkward. this is here to say this was made before any of that was revealed and obviously wasn't intended to be a ship about... that.)

it's a bit late, but here's the finished art for Jetpack Joyride's 13th anniversary! i can't even begin to tell you about all the memories i've had with this awesome game! here's to another decade of jetpack-related chaos!!

(i gotta clarify that the champagne bottle is referenced from an official JJ artwork for the apple soda jetpack and that the 13 might look a little wonky because i'm not very good at lettering,,,)

+ a few bonus wip screenshots under the cut (only a few though cause i didn't screenshot my progress as much)

(craig was gonna have a beer glass but i decided to just have the red cup instead because it was easier to draw lol)

that's all i screenshat,,, screenshotted before i went into Ultra Autism Focus Mode™ and finished the art,,,

alao did you know that the Legitimate Research laboratory in Jetpack Joyride was originally going to be called "Maxtreme Industries"!? fucking!! Maxtreme Industries!! what a name!!! i literally just found this out today and it is the CHEESIEST THING EVER I LOVE IT

this is the page it's from by the way. it's the early announcement page when Jetpack Joyride was still known as "Machine Gun Jetpack" in its prototype stages. it's got a few other slight changes, such as calling the motorbike the "Badass Hog" instead of the 'Bad As Hog' as it was likely originally intended before it was toned down. and there's a mention of a "double shield" type of item too, which is probably something like the upgradable shield power up that wouldn't be introduced until many years later. it's like looking into a parallel dimension finding early stuff like this! imagine if they actually took this more "Maxtreme" direction and JJ ended up having a teen rating or something. i just cannot get over that name though. Maxtreme Industries. wow, that is something XD

Archiving Every Single One Of Barry's Death Screen Quotes From Monster Dash: Updated!!

so you know when i made that post archiving a bunch of Barry's post-death quotes from Monster Dash a while back? Halfbrick recently updated Monster Dash to be the original* 2010 version for Halfbrick+, and it does in fact include the quotes Barry used to say at the end of a run! so i thought i'd kinda "remaster" my original post with new, high quality screenshots of all the quotes taken straight from me playing the game :)

*it's the OG game, but it's got some slight remastering going on. you'll see in a second.

first image id: "Agghh walls. My only weakness."

second image id: "Note to self: Next time there is a wall, don't jump into it!"

wow, immediately you can tell that Barry art got a massive glow up! he's got all this nifty shading and he looks so much more expressive than before! i like it! i like it a lot! apart from the art, the quotes in this game are pretty much all the same. these are used when Barry bumps into a wall and plummets (quite gracefully) into the void below :3

first image id: "That [Enemy] is just angry because no one will ever love him. Or her. Or whatever it is."

second image id: "You win this round, [Enemy]. Next time we meet, you wont [sic] be so lucky."

(the quotes switch out the enemy based on what you got killed by, like a Zombie, Demon, Vampire, Yeti or Mummy.)

again, Barry going off!! jesus dude, calm down a little! kinda surprised they kept the first quote in to be honest. when they added AOZ to HB+, they changed a lot of the dialogue to have it be more updated, including removing the Barry kissing Runingunin scene completely, likely to make it more PG (and to make Barry less of a creep), but they kept this one in! i like that though, i feel like modern Barry is missing a lot of his meanness he had in the earlier games and i like that they kept it in here :)

first image id: "Damn you spikes hiding cleverly in plain sight!"

second image id: "Who designed this place and thought spikes everywhere would be a good idea?"

these were for when Barry died to the aforementioned "spikes everywhere". not much else to say here, but these quotes are really funny! seeing Barry actually say "damn" is great, i wish he'd use more light swearing like that in newer games,,

first image id: "Dying is as fun as a bag of jellyfish!"

second image id: "Why couldn't I die wearing a cool hat?"

third image id: "That fortune teller sucks! There are no sharks with lasers involved in my demise!"

these are three sorta miscellaneous quotes that appear regardless of what Barry is killed by. they're pretty swell and some of my most favourite quotes, though i still have no idea what the hell he means by death being "as fun as a bag of jellyfish". jellyfish bags sound pretty fun to me, i like jellyfish...

first image id: "I hope I come back as a zombie."

second image id: "At least I died with dignity... And my pants!"

third image id: "When you die can you take your weapons with you?"

finally, high quality screenshots of the dignity quote! again, these are more miscellaneous quotes. not much else to say about them, though i like the thought of purgatory containing a weapon bay :P

first image id: "Why am I the cat with only one life?"

second image id: "I hope Death is ready to rock-off for the top bunk!"

third image id: "It's time to start a re-run!"

are Barry and Death having a sleepover or something? that sounds pretty rad actually, having a night with the Grim Reaper himself, eating marshmallows, summoning hellspawn, whatever else people do at sleepovers...

now this is where my original post would have ended, but after playing for a little bit, i realised that i actually missed a couple of quotes! they must not have appeared in a lot of videos like the original screenshots were from, so here they are now in their full glory to be archived!

first image id: "Note to self: Next time there is a gap, dump it rather than falling and dying."

second image id: "Ahh, Gravity. Such a cold, cruel mistress."

i've never seen these quotes before in all the couple hours total i spent looking for screenshots of the original ones!! i wonder why, they're not rare or anything. these were for when Barry fell into gaps without hitting a wall beforehand. i guess i initally didn't get any screenshots of these because the videos i got them from where about a minute or two long, and gaps don't start getting wider until around 2000 - 3000 metres, which the people recording didn't really get to. plus, falling into gaps cleanly is kinda tricky to do on purpose. anyway, they're archived now and in a super nice quality, and i glad i found them through the game itself! i don't know how much more "low-quality youtube videos from 10 years ago" sifting i could do...

that's pretty much about it for now! if i find anything else that's interesting about this game, i'll reblog this post with my additions. i'm super glad i have higher quality images of these, cause now they're consistent and i can actually read them without having to squint through all the pixels to see!! plus the very handsome glow up they gave my boy Barry ;)

(and finally for shits and giggles and because i don't know how to end posts, here's a screenshot of my best monster kills being at the funny number)

(nice)

i found this piece of promo art for 'Halfbrick Zombies', the a game that would be later reworked into 'Age Of Zombies', on the Halfbrick Network Twitter account. the game in this state looks much more like a survival horror and has a much darker tone than what it ended up becoming. i think i'd really like to see a game featuring Barry with a much more grim life-or-death feel, it'd be super interesting!! it looks super cool and i kinda wish it was released in this form :)

i was archiving a bunch of stuff on ebay and found this Fruit Ninja handheld that's very Tiger Electronics-like and i thought it was interesting because i've never seen it before, so here's some images from the original listing (archive) (screenshot)

i might start a reblog thread with a bunch of obscure-ish Halfbrick products i find on ebay because the documentation of these old products is important to me and they're just really interesting.

old "Trust Me I'm A Ninja" shirt from 2011 (OG listing) (archive) (screenshot). this shirt is no longer for sale.

i was archiving a bunch of stuff on ebay and found this Fruit Ninja handheld that's very Tiger Electronics-like and i thought it was interesting because i've never seen it before, so here's some images from the original listing (archive) (screenshot)

i might start a reblog thread with a bunch of obscure-ish Halfbrick products i find on ebay because the documentation of these old products is important to me and they're just really interesting.

here are images from a listing of the Apptivity Sensei figurine from 2012, produced by Mattel. according to the back of the box found on this listing, this figure would interact with the HD version of the Fruit Ninja app, which, i believe, were exclusive to iPads at the time. there are also other figures that were made for iconic mobile games, such as Angry Birds and Cut The Rope.

(1st listing archive) (2nd listing archive) (2nd listing screenshot)

additionally, there is also a variant of this figure i found on a Verge article (archive) that shows Sensei with an angrier expression, and i believe that this variant is a prototype using an early design because of the different platform, the much shinier finish compared to the final product, the different (and sloppier) paint job, and the fact that i can only find this variant in the form of photos on display, which are always prototypes before the actual toy goes into production. there is also no indication that this is a separately sold variant of the smiling Sensei figure. this is definitely an early concept.

the interesting thing about prototypes is that they can eventually turn up in thrift stores if they are not thrown away or destroyed, so i wonder, where could this figure be now? i hope it still exists, it's a very interesting piece of Fruit Ninja history.

this is also similar to the Fruit Ninja FX figurines which would be sold later, which had a similar element of interactivity to them. the available characters were Sensei, Katsuro and Truffles. i found a listing for the Sensei figure on ebay as well (archive).

(they're kinda similar to Skylanders figures, aren't they?)

finally, i found a musky old photo of a couple of fruit figures from a Spanish website, but unfortunately the listing had already disappeared and wasn't archived. i'll talk more about these if i find another listing for them.

P.S. i realised i forgot to paste the link for the shirt archive in the last reblog lol. here it is.

i was archiving a bunch of stuff on ebay and found this Fruit Ninja handheld that's very Tiger Electronics-like and i thought it was interesting because i've never seen it before, so here's some images from the original listing (archive) (screenshot)

i might start a reblog thread with a bunch of obscure-ish Halfbrick products i find on ebay because the documentation of these old products is important to me and they're just really interesting.

continuing this thread on with some neat Halfbrick plushies i found listings for on ebay! let's start off with Fruit Ninja first, since that one has the most plushies made for it.

first off is this jumbo Strawberry plush i found on this listing (archive) (screenshot). unlike the older plushies that were made by Nanco in 2011, this one was made by Toyfoundry and was from 2012, according to the listing title. it has a considerably better quality than the older ones, and the Fruit Ninja logo on its headband appears to be printed on rather than embroidered like the old ones. it has the app icon on its side.

this listing has some photos of the original tag which i think are interesting. apparently there was a QR code you could scan. obviously this one had apparently already been scanned, so i'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to do. i think it's supposed to open the Fruit Ninja app and redeem something.

here are the cotton tags saying this plush was made by Toyfoundry.

these are photos from a listing of a 2011 Orange and Watermelon plush duo (archive). they appear to be made out of lesser materials, lack a strongly defined shape, they headbands look very shaggy and they all have different expressions in their eyes, which i think is very charming. the Fruit Ninja logo is embroidered on their headbands and they lack the app icon that the jumbo Strawberry has.

here are their tags.

i also have photos from a listing of the 2011 Watermelon by itself, though they are quite blurry. (archive)

next up is this Banana plush, whose listing has photos of the cardboard tag up close. i like how the tag includes a little fruit fact about bananas :) (archive)

there's this green Apple plush made by Jazwares that makes sounds. it has an open mouth, Kanji characters on the back of its headband and makes the sounds of fruit getting sliced from the game. the logo on the front is also different, oddly enough. (archive) (screenshot)

there's also a Strawberry one (archive) (screenshot).

(check notes for next reblog, ran out of images lol)

i was archiving a bunch of stuff on ebay and found this Fruit Ninja handheld that's very Tiger Electronics-like and i thought it was interesting because i've never seen it before, so here's some images from the original listing (archive) (screenshot)

i might start a reblog thread with a bunch of obscure-ish Halfbrick products i find on ebay because the documentation of these old products is important to me and they're just really interesting.

ok continuing on from the last reblog: i realised i forgot to show one of the Nanco plushies, and it's this red Apple one. nothin' special about it from the rest of the Nanco plushies, i just want to put it here to finish off my disorganised list of Fruit Ninja plushies.

there's a few more Jazwares Fruit Ninja plushies i want to show. first off, there's this Pineapple plush from this listing (archive) (screenshot).

jumpscare

i believe this is the last plush that makes sound, and it's this little bomb one. the listing says this specific plush doesn't work, unfortunately. (archive) (screenshot)

the next plushies are these little clip-on plushies Jazwares made that i can't really find many listings for. these two images are from an old Amazon listing and a Walmart listing that are both no longer available for purchase anymore.

(Amazon archive) (Walmart archive)

there is also a bomb one (archive) (screenshot).

finally (and i think this is the last Jazwares one), there's this Watermelon plush that has lights, sounds, presumably comes apart and comes with a plastic blade to smack the shit out of it with. very cool. (archive)

also, not sure where to put this one, but while looking for Jazwares plushies, i found this Worthpoint listing with some grainy photos of a Play By Play Watermelon plush, and it's very....... odd looking.

(archive)

if i made a tierlist on the best and worst Fruit Ninja plushies, the Play By Play ones would be in F tier. they look so janky and weird and funny and i kind of love them.

(to be continued in the next reblog)

i was archiving a bunch of stuff on ebay and found this Fruit Ninja handheld that's very Tiger Electronics-like and i thought it was interesting because i've never seen it before, so here's some images from the original listing (archive) (screenshot)

i might start a reblog thread with a bunch of obscure-ish Halfbrick products i find on ebay because the documentation of these old products is important to me and they're just really interesting.

as i promised in the tags of one of my posts from yesterday, here's a recording of the new Halfbrick+ startup screen!

ATTENTION HALFBRICK FANS!!!

the long-cancelled GBA prototype game developed by Halfbrick in 2003 called "Fuzz & Rocket" was released and put onto the Internet Archive recently!!!

Internet Archive

Fuzz Rocket (Jan 18, 2005) (Unreleased, GBA) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A prototype of the unreleased Fuzz & Rocket for the GameBoy Advance developed by Halfbrick Studios, dated January 18, 2005. This prototy

(and here's the tweet that brought this to my attention!!)

according to this archive, it's a build from January of 2005, a few months before its very last appearance at E3 2005. the amount of cool lost media that's getting found recently is insane and Fuzz & Rocket getting found certainly wasn't on my bingo card for 2024! very cool!!

update to the lost Flash prototype version of Fruit Ninja

so a long time ago, i made a post talking about this version of Fruit Ninja i discovered and later found out to be lost media. it's the original prototype version of the game, and it was available to play on the old Fruit Ninja Anniversary website from 2017 onward. Luke Muscat talked about it in his video 'How I Designed Fruit Ninja', and he shows footage of it at 4:41 seconds. in the original post i made about the site, i found an archive from 2021, tried to fetch the file from the site, got hit with a CORS policy error and found out that the place the network was trying to fetch the file from was turning up with a 404. yesterday and today, i've been trying to work around the CORS policy error by disabling web security on my browser, but i've turned up with absolutely no luck.

for those unaware, a CORS policy (or Cross Origin Resource Sharing policy) is basically a something that allows or disallows a browser to access an asset from a domain that differs from the original domain. there's a website on Mozilla that explains this better than i could, but the way i understand it is that if your browser tries to make a request to fetch something that's hosted on a website but originates from another domain (say, a file sharing website), its regulated by the CORS policy to make sure the site you're fetching this information from is secure. if it's allowed, the content loads normally. if it isn't, the request to fetch that content is ignored (at least i think that's how it works). this, along with the 404, was what was stopping me from being able to fetch the swf from the site.

so, here's the main update: i can't find it. i've tried everything i know how to. disabling web security lead to the discovery that the swf itself was hosted on a separate URL from the main Fruit Ninja Anniversary website that apparently wasn't archived on the IA, and it was also being stopped by the CORS policy. punching that URL into the Wayback Machine turns up with a snapshot from 2022 that's just a 404, and since the Wayback Machine works by fetching every available snapshot of that URL it has in its library to load the content, it's always fetching that specific snapshot, and that's why it can't load the. no matter what archive of the Anniversary page i use, it's gone. it's lost-lost. i've even checked the self-hosted version of the Fruit Ninja Anniversary website on seanockert.com, but it's not there either. the only real options i have are scraping through every single Flash game archive i can find and hoping that someone saved it (which is a very low possibility), or to ask the original developer if they can send a copy my way (and even then, that option is an absolute last resort if nothing else works). i am pretty desperate at this point to find this thing and i'll look through everything i can to try to find it.

also, just to clear some extra stuff up: none of the Fruit Ninja games on Flashpoint are the prototype. none of them were made in Flash and they don't match up with the prototype. it was my first place to look and it unfortunately isn't there. additionally, the name of the swf file hosted on the Fruit Ninja Anniversary site is 'FruitNinjaHBF2010.swf'. searching this on the IA didn't bring up any results, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not on there in some way. i'm really hoping this'll turn up again and that it's stashed away on the internet somewhere.

update 2: made a twitter thread! i hope this catches some more attention on there, i don't use twitter so this topic will be the only thing i post on that account.

fun fact: Halfbrick as a company has been around since at least 2001, and they have some archives of their old website from that year as well! it holds some very obscure and interesting information about the company's history, including some lost media. some of their earliest known games that were made independently of other companies, such as Defiant, Farma Llamma and Turbelence, were either cancelled, seemingly never went past the drawing board or are lost.

something i find very amusing about this site is this blog post from the 22nd of March 2001, where they remark that the orange colour from their site has been banished. this implies that there is a much older version of the website that was coated in orange rather than this dark blue and silver, but that has since been lost to time. imagining a universe where Halfbrick never used their iconic orange colour is really weird...

(here is a link to the archive on the Wayback Machine.)

!!! FUZZ FUCKIN IT UP FRIDAY !!!

GUYS??? i opened up Jetpack Joyride just now and THEY FINALLY ADDED MULTIPLAYER???? THIS IS SO COOL!!!!!

i literally went "WUH??? HUH??????" when i saw that glowing button lmaoooo. there are three modes that you can choose from: Classic Race, Star Dash and Zappy Bird. i got a race on my first go and it was really fun! unfortunately i forgot to record footage of me actually doing the race out of excitement BUT i did get to race against a player with a Star Trek costume which was very cool :D

they've actually had images of multiplayer on their app store page for a while now, such as this screenshot of two Barrys riding on their respective Mr. Cuddles vehicles:

this feature is AWESOME and i'd love to see it developed more in the future!! maybe something like a party mode would be really cool!!

no seriously what are they doing

?????? (this was on a youtube community post about halfbrick+ btw. are subscription services halfbrick's kink or)

what the fuck is going on on halfbrick's twitter

bear pussy????? hello????????

hello dan the man fandom

i was looking through the Jetpack Joyride twitter earlier, and in one of the posts (likely from around 2014) there was a youtube link that lead to a video that is now unavailable. i naturally got curious and punched it into the Wayback Machine and found out that it's an upload of the 'Shirt Sleeves' rock opera uploaded by Machinima's happyhour channel???? i have literally never seen this before and i don't think i've seen anyone else talk about it either.

this upload actually predates Halfbrick's upload by over a year, with this one being uploaded on the 9th of May 2014, the HB upload date being the 6th of October 2015. the video itself isn't really any different from the new upload, apart from some app store logos at the bottom of the screen. if you're also curious about this, you can view the archived video yourself here (it will take a while to load). i wanted to see what the rest of the description said, but it wasn't really loading at all :(

nowadays, pretty much all of the videos on the happyhour youtube channel have been purged, say for two playlists, so finding out that this was even on there was literally just a stroke of luck that the Jetpack Joyride twitter posted the link in the first place. i wonder if 'Robot Bird' or 'The Very Last Minute' were ever on there. another interesting little oddity i've found is this tweet where they link to an image, but the link is broken, and there doesn't seem to be an archive, so we'll likely never know what it was.