"The First After Tetris" - A Few Words About the Success of Cut the Rope [IP]

Post-Soviet game development can be summed up as two extremes. On one side of the scale are Stalin, martians, BigRigs, You Are Empty, and similar lada-racing clubs with extra DVDs included. On the opposite end are Il-2, the recent Apache, Heroes of Might and Magic V, "Perimeter", "Space Rangers" – niche titles that are not very popular globally. Even the barely filling the gap between the poles of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033 – not super hits, PC shooters with eighty percent ratings on gamerankings – are plentiful. We can also recall various Robocalypse or even "Truckers", but from any angle, they (like all the others) will occupy one of the three least appealing places in such a dreary ranking.

Twenty years after its collapse, the former indestructible remains a true terra incognita for most of the Western gaming community. Something is being done with one-sixth of the market, sometimes well, but more often – demanding players to dance, revenge boxers, and scaring with broken physics on an old engine. According to rumors, one Russian made "Tetris", but that was during perestroika, so it doesn't count. Thus, it was all the more surprising when autumn-winter events in the AppStore unfolded, during which a small game from the Moscow studio Zeptolab broke world records of my favorite Angry Birds, earning the title of "Fastest Million Copies Sold". The game showing feathered creatures whoop-their-ass Cut The Rope (we'll shorten it to the SEO-friendly CtR) managed to reach the six-figure mark in just nine days.

Cut, Devour

It captivates players' minds much faster. The components for capturing are simple. A box. A candy. A frog-like creature named Om Nom, sitting in the box and begging for candy. A lollipop dangles on a string, which must be cut so that the sweetness lands in Om Nom's mouth. Along the way, for fun and discovering new boxes (each containing as many as 25 levels), players must collect three stars, freely hanging in space. The string with the lollipop obeys the laws of physics, and this is the base of all the increasingly complex puzzles in the game.

Gradually, various devices are added to the simplest system of string and round candy – soap bubbles that carry the sweetness upwards, sliders that allow moving the tied candy in different directions, rubber balls filled with air stuck to the walls of the box – and even enemies in the form of spiders, also wanting to feast. Somewhere after the first ten levels, CtR inexorably begins to demand meticulous trajectory calculations – and sometimes even the timing for cutting the string or releasing air from a balloon.

"Angry Birds" were equally built on precise trajectories and advanced physics along with charming characters and high-quality visual design. The same episode-format updates, the same social features by Crystal. The publishers, Chillngo, knew whom to take under their wing. One doesn't need to be Captain Obvious to see in this set of elements a universal scheme for producing the perfect puzzle game for a mass audience. But at the same time, one really hopes that within this framework, the development of Zeptolab as, I dare say, the flagship of our game development, does not end.

The Frog Commands to Dance

Because, even though the Great and Mighty EDGE Magazine rightly mentioned CtR among the best mobile games of the year, and although I really want to insert somewhere words about "the triumphant march of Russian Thought across the iPhones of the world" – it is too early to talk about something more than another episodic triumph. But, returning to the beginning of the text – there is always another angle to view it from. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the game about the cosmic frog with candy is the first instance since The Tetris where our, Russian developers have made it to the top without any caveats (yes, again with a puzzle, let's put that down as a mark of colorful soul). Will this make life better and merrier for Russian game developers, will .dat resurrect, will Postal 3 succeed – these are, of course, unresolved questions. But already now we all know one thing – from the land of birch bark, there is a path to Success.

It, like everywhere, opens up for those who do their job well.