Postmortem: Ngame's Chop Suey Kung Fu

When Ngame moved into the WAP market in early 2000, we initially concentrated on three big, innovative multi-player titles: Alien Fish Exchange, Merchant Princes, and DataClash. However, it was immediately apparent that, successful as these titles were, they were almost too big for a mobile phone. After talking with carriers about what they wanted, we realised that we were going to need a suite of smaller titles to bulk up our portfolio. The design challenge was to think of something that could be written by a single programmer in a couple of weeks.

The entire spec for Chop Suey Kung Fu was written in half an hour, on less than one side of letter paper. It is based on a simple traditional dice game, and here we really must acknowledge Reiner Knizia’s excellent book Dice Games Properly Explained. There were only three things that mattered: First, it was multi-player. Second, it was a popular genre. And lastly, it was really, really easy for the player to understand. This punched every carrier’s buttons. The marketing guys loved it.

Production started in early August, and we spent weeks trying to find a good artist who could work in WAP – using just 96x44 pixels, and monochrome, we needed strong characters, exciting martial arts moves, and a distinctive style. When the samples arrived from Martin Wheeler, we knew we had a winner. We just had to build the game. We gave the job to our rawest recruit, Alice, and we had a prototype inside a week. Just over a month later, we were running live, and notched up over 100,000 users.

	The entire spec for Chop Suey Kung Fu was written in half an hour, on less than one side of letter paper.

Halfway through development, we needed to rethink our digital TV strategy. The ambitious plans we had for really exciting content looked as though they were going to be scuppered by the crippling limitations of the set-top boxes. We needed to develop something that would run on a bottom-end set-top box, using very limited HTML. However, we were determined to create multi-player games for TV. Chop Suey came to the rescue. We realised that with very little effort, we could convert the game from outputting WML to outputting HTML: all we needed was to change the graphics, and add some animation. This would not only be a TV title, but a fully convergent game, which could be played on both TV and WAP simultaneously. The TV version was more or less completed in December, and went live in April 2001 on Ntl in the United Kingdom.

This was a baby project, even by Ngame’s standards, but was very important in showing what can be done with very little. Since then, Chop Suey Kung Fu has become one of Ngame’s biggest successes, frequently outperforming the much bigger games, and is now one of the world’s most popular wireless games.