Imangi: creating a gaming phenomenon

It might be a surprise to learn that when husband-and-wife team Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova founded Imangi – the studio behind App Store phenomenon Temple Run – in 2008, they had no prior experience designing games whatsoever. Although the pair had years of software development experience between them, this largely involved producing web applications for the healthcare industry. So what was it that inspired them to take the App Store by storm?

“We were a bit frustrated with our jobs, and decided we wanted to start our own company and control our own destiny,” begins Shepherd. “I’ve always been a big fan of everything that Apple does, and had an iPhone since the very first day it came out. When Apple announced that you could start building iOS apps, we were very excited and decided to build a company around creating iPhone games.”

While Shepherd and Luckyanova were total rookies in the field, he admits that making games was something of a dream ever since childhood: “When I was young, the reason I got into computers and programming in the first place was because I liked to play games and I wanted to make them,” he shrugs. “So even though we didn’t have much experience, it seemed like a dream come true to be able to start a company doing so.”

It all started with the self-titled word puzzle game, Imangi. “It was a simple but unique game that we created, where you slide rows and columns of letters to form words on a grid,” recalls Shepherd. “Imangi launched on the App Store the day it opened, and even though it wasn’t a runaway success like Temple Run, we proved to ourselves that we could make a living making apps. We’ve been a part of this young market since the beginning, and it’s been an amazing journey to get to where we are today. I definitely didn’t imagine when we first started that we’d make something that could reach over 90 million people.”

Introduced to hungry iOS gamers in August 2011, Temple Run eclipsed long-time App Store darling Angry Birds after six months, as both the number one free app and the top-grossing app of January 2012 – sold for 99 cents at that point, before the game was converted to a freemium model based on in-app purchases of coins to use for upgrades. When it was ported across to Android in March, the freemium version received a staggering million downloads in its first three days in the Market alone.

Nevertheless, iOS remains the studio’s primary concern – and the App Store is certainly where the vast majority of the money is to be made. “The only reason we ported Temple Run to other platforms is because it’s been such a huge success on iOS,” Shepherd points out. “We were getting so many emails from people wanting to play on other platforms that we just couldn’t ignore Android any longer. Pretty much all our recent games are Retina enabled and have Game Center integration, and we use other features as they make sense.”

The ethos of Temple Run is a gaming staple, in the tradition of Indiana Jones, Rick Dangerous and Tomb Raider, but the touchscreen controls have allowed for a whole new style of gaming that has touched a nerve with casual gamers

The ethos of Temple Run is a gaming staple, in the tradition of Indiana Jones, Rick Dangerous and Tomb Raider, but the touchscreen controls have allowed for a whole new style of gaming that has touched a nerve with casual gamers

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