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Discovering Halfbrick Lost Media
i promise you this is interesting! you might know Halfbrick for making Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja and whatnot, but their history spans over for YEARS all the way to the 90s. and today i discovered something really cool, and that's Halfbrick's long lost unpublished games from the 2000s. let's start from the beginning. this post will be LONG.
so today i was cataloguing every self-published Halfbrick game ever (as you do) and while i was looking through games to list, i remembered a page on Unseen64 i saw a while ago that talks about a game called 'Fuzz and Rocket', which was an announced game that was supposed to be on the Gameboy Advance, set to release in the mid 2000s. It appeared at E3 in 2005 and then was cancelled when Halfbrick couldn't find a publisher. it was pretty interesting to find out about when i first got hyperfixated on Jetpack Joyride and wanted to see if there was any lost media.
i took a closer look and saw that there was a snapshot of Halfbrick's site from like 2003, and there it was: the announcement for Fuzz and Rocket. so of course i go back all the way to 2001 and look at what we have here...
wow! it's old!
so, there's a lot to unpack here. first of all, yes, that is Halfbrick's actual old logo. and yes, that HTML is a bit broken. this isn't the exact page i was on when i first discovered this and the HTML was working properly, but this is Halfbrick's old website from August 2001. take in the pure Y2K broken graphic HTML ugliness.
but what i'm really interested are the games. if you look on this site, you might see mentions of 'Farma Llamma', 'Turbulence' and 'Defiant'. these were three online games Halfbrick worked on around 2001, all of which used JavaScript. out of these games, only one was released, and that one was 'Defiant'. here's the webpage:
Case 1: 'Defiant'
this was the page listing for the game 'Defiant'. according to this page, 'Defiant' was going to be a shoot 'em up, close to something like Touhou in terms of layout. it is 2002 and you have to destroy the enemy base, which probably isn't human. and, according to the game's features page, this game was gonna have "Tons of sprites on screen", "Transparent clouds" and "Funky intro music and tons of sound effects", to name a few. sounds pretty cool, right? you'd like to play it, right?
well, here's the unfortunate thing: you can't. this is where the lost media part comes in.
this game runs on JavaScript, severely outdated JavaScript that was not properly archived by the Wayback Machine. so we know that 'Defiant' was playable at one point in time, but now, it's been lost and is rendered unplayable. nothing much else to say, it's just unfortunate that one of Halfbrick's first only released web browser games isn't playable anymore. there is no information about 'Defiant' online other than this page and i would love to see it resurface one day. we do have screenshots though to get a feel as to what this game was like:
y'know i wish this game was found so i could figure out what on earth that pink thing is. he looks pretty cool yet so, so dated. there's a scoreboard too, which proves 'Defiant' was real and playable:
but yeah, 'Defiant's long gone now, and might probably stay that way. i doubt anyone has the game downloaded or if it even could be downloaded, and i doubt anyone who worked at Halfbrick still has it.
Case 2: 'Farma Llamma'
'Farma Llamma', as you can see from the site's description, is some sort of farming/resource multiplayer game that runs purely on JavaScript, including its servers. it has a neglect system where you farm dies if its not taken care of, so that's pretty neat! according to the features page, it was going to be a 2D game with a realtime world, and was, of course, playable online. there are no concept sketches to go off of despite the page implying there going to be some added. guess it was just never archived. to my knowledge there was never a link to play the game, and i suspect the game was cancelled from reading this post:
and from what i can find, no more updates were made on the game, so it was most likely canned, unfortunately, rendering it lost media. my theory is that workload as well as server costs contributed to the cancellation of 'Farma Llamma', though i obviously don't know for sure. an obscure game that was possibly never made, this is Halfbrick's second online game to remain lost, probably forever.
Case 3: 'Turbulence'
'Turbulence' is the game i am the least sure about. according to August 2001's snapshot of HB's site, 'Turbulence' was probably the one game that was the closest to completion apart from 'Defiant', around the time 'Farma Llamma' was put on hold. it was apparently gonna be something like a platformer/puzzle game that, like the other two games, worked in Java. it also had a 2-player mode. that's... really all we know about it. there is a concept art section which had quite a lot of sketches (including one of Elvis apparently???), but the images were not archived and thus won't load.
that's... it, really. we know it was a 2D platformer with 2 player mode on Java that might have been close to completion, but that's really all we know. an image of 'Turbulence' was shown on August 2001's snapshot, but alas, that too is broken. it was apparently for "next gen consoles", which i'm assuming is stuff like the GBA considering 'Fuzz and Rocket' was being developed for that console in 2003. maybe we might not ever know what 'Turbulence' was supposed to be, and it never ended up being released anyway.
Case 4: 'XGame'
WOAH! now that's a tonal shift, isn't it? on an older version of HB's site it mentions that the site isn't orange anymore, and then here comes THIS baby in 2003! and look at that logo! i think that's my favourite HB logo, it's so cute and bright and pixelly :D
so this is Halfbrick's game section from 2003, the same page where 'Fuzz and Rocket' was once listed up to 2005 along with HB's earlier works. one of the other games listed here was 'XGame', a puzzle racing game which was fast paced and "frantic". curiously, its gameplay and the screenshots available seems a lot like 'Raskulls', a game Halfbrick would later release in 2010 for Xbox. perhaps this concept was lifted from 'XGame', to which 'XGame' should really get some credit for (possibly) being an inspiration for one of Halfbrick's most iconic and beloved games.
'XGame' was going to be for the PC, and was suitable for handhelds and next gen consoles. they were looking for a publisher to publish the game, which i would assume was finished or close to completion by then. interestingly, there's some cover art mockups, both of which being for the PS2 and Gamecube. considering the time of creation for this game, yeah, that checks out. i'm not entirely sure of 'XGame' was its final name considering how HB usually titles its games, but there's a logo so....
the page for 'XGame' also mentions that "A PC based prototype of XGame is available by request.", which i'm assuming would have been for publishers looking to contact Halfbrick to get a hold of the game for consideration. this also proves that a playable prototype of 'XGame' was in existence at one point, but obviously has not been archived. 'XGame' stayed listed on Halfbrick's website until the site changed its theme in 2005, where it was quietly removed and fell into obscurity. weirdly enough though, 'Fuzz and Rocket' stayed on their site way up until 2008, which by then the DS, Wii and PS3 had already come out, making the ill-fated GBA game obselete.
does Halfbrick still have the PC prototype of 'XGame'? no one really knows. i doubt it, though. Halfbrick has changed so much since then, and even the long past of HB developing licensed games is relatively obscure to those only scratching the surface of their mobile games. i doubt they still have any of these games anymore, and i'm afraid that they'll stay lost for the indefinite future.
oh yeah, and i forgot to mention, Halfbrick also worked on another GBA game simply called 'Booze', which is... an odd name, for sure. it was actually being developed in 2001 but to my knowledge, was never mentioned on their website, just this article. nothing else exists of this old game except for this shotty prototype video uploaded to Youtube in 2014, and yes, there is that really old HB logo. this one is from later in 2001 and looks pretty sweet, much better than the older one, haha. so yeah, this is lost too.
Case 5: thats really it tbh
that's about all i can find. i love lost media and i think its really interesting how stuff can just go missing like that. obviously all of these are super obscure. and i of course like Halfbrick too! researching this was really interesting and know one else knows about it, so i thought i'd share it here. i did also find this page from October 2011 that had stuff from the super old Jetpack Joyride pre-release, called 'Machine Gun Jetpack' at the time. it's got some cool screenshots and i also found what i'd describe as a blinkie while looking on there too:
it's pretty swell! anyway that's all. sorry this post was super long but man i love infodumping about this stuff. it's really neat!
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!!!
(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.
!!! FUZZ FUCKIN IT UP FRIDAY !!!
I remember playing the game on mobile
The game had a similar vibe to little big planet
The game was a 3D platform game
The game had some sort of angelic or ominous music playing in the background which sounded like the ps4 menu
I swear the game was real at some point
I really hope i can find out what the game was at least called
I do however think the game is lost
Has anyone seen this game?
I remember this game that was a mobile game around the early 2010s, the game's main character was a pink honey badger with 4 arms and 2 legs, it was anthro aswell and also had guns, the game's opening featured an opening of either a bunch of tasmanian devils or black honey badgers all around the baby pink honey badger, i remember the title having something with the word project or something i can draw some pictures of what the character looked like i might check the lost media wiki incase