Posted by Jim Fri 16 Oct

Mediatonic on TV!

It was a tense night on Monday - but for all the best reasons! About a month ago, Channel 5's "The Gadget Show" came to our offices to film us - and Monday was the night that the show finally aired!

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The reason they were filming us was because they had set up a challenge for two of the presenters on the show to create an app for the iPhone. Jason Bradbury would make a social application, and Suzi Perry would be making a game.

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The aim of the challenge was to see if the iPhone really is the great leveller that it's often claimed to be - in other words, could a one-man developer compete with an application that was designed and created by a professional company?

We were the company that helped Suzi Perry make her game, "Biker Blast-Off!"

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The filming was an amazing experience. We go to meet Suzi Perry (who was completely, completely lovely), and once we'd established the kind of game she wanted to make (she's really into bikes, so it pretty much had to be a biking game) we were left with the task of designing and creating the game.

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It was all done at break-neck speed so that it would be ready to launch in the app store at least a month before the show aired, which would allow enough time for a fair number of people to download it.? The two apps would then be compared, and whichever got the most downloads would win...

Although we had heard the rough numbers before the show, it was still amazing to hear just how well our game had done! In the end, Jason's application got around 4,000 downloads - but at the time the show aired, we'd clocked up over 1.4 million!

It was incredible (but nerve-wracking) to be sat watching ourselves on television. The film crew had been pretty thorough, so everyone who worked on the title got some air-time, but the part that was maybe the most special was when everyone's phones started going off at the same time as we watched, with texts and calls from friends and family who'd seen us on TV and wanted to say congratulations.

It was pretty surreal, but an amazing experience for the whole team - and we're just delighted that all the work paid off so well!

Thanks so much to all our supporters and followers on Twitter and Facebook, and to all those who downloaded the game! (Especially the 14 users in Kazakhstan!)

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