Trivia / Fruit Ninja

• Breakthrough Hit: Fruit Ninja became a major success for Halfbrick Studios, the one to establish them on the gaming market and save them for possible bankruptcy.^note This was the time when they were transitioning from making Licensed Games to the original IPs, which was not going well. One of their first such games, Rocket Racing, was a huge flop that lost them a lot of money and Global Financial Crisis was at it's peak. Halfbrick needed to make 300,000 dollars within 12 months, and Fruit Ninja delivered just that.
• Follow the Leader: The success of Fruit Ninja has inspired various clones of it, such as Veggie Samurai.
• Inspiration for the Work:
  • Luke Muscat cited two inspirations for the concept: an infomercial for a set of kitchen knives, which had a shot of a pineapple being sliced in the air, and the satisfaction of fragging in Quake III: Arena.
  • Arcade mode was inspired by Bejeweled Blitz, with its 60-second limit and Rare Gems power-ups.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Received token sets at Arby's.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • To celebrate the fifth anniversary, the game received a huge update that added a "Festival" mode, where players could win new Golden Ember blade. Similar special in-game events were also added to many of the games supported by Halfbrick Studios at the time.
  • Fruit Ninja 2 had its worldwide release on the original game's 10th anniversary. Additionally, Fruit Ninja itself was overhauled and ported over to Unity engine with new graphics.
• Referenced by...:
  • ANNO: Mutationem: The "Combo Experience" achievement artwork depicts several fruit being sliced apart.
  • Dishonored: Rat Assassin is a free mobile game released to promote the first game featuring gameplay similar to Fruit Ninja but slicing rats rather than fruit.
  • Rick and Morty: In "Ricktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation", Morty plays with his new lightsaber while cutting various fruit.
• Sleeper Hit: Nobody at Halfbrick was expecting this game to become such a huge success, let alone being downloaded more than 1 billion times in 5 years.

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