Subway Surfers Creators On Making Its First Game Without Monetization

gamespot.com:

Sybo Games' Subway Surfers is one of the biggest games in the mobile space. Along with having millions of players, Subway Surfers can also be seen in arcades and has received an animated adaptation on YouTube. For Sybo's latest project, however, it eschewed the free-to-play formula that previously led the developer to success, for an Apple Arcade game based on its Subway Surfers intellectual property.

Subway Surfers Tag is not an endless runner like its predecessor, but rather an arena game in which you ride hoverboards around small levels, fighting robots and pulling off tricks to keep your board's battery alive. GameSpot recently spoke with game director Eoin O'Doherty and Sybo CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig about how this project came about, what it's like to make a more traditional video game with an ending, what's going on with the animated show's 12th episode, and what it's like to be part of a studio whose small game turns into a massive success.

GameSpot: Subway Surfers Tag is different than I expected. Why the departure from the core endless runner idea of Subway Surfers?

Nørvig: Very early on, before the original game was in development, the team made a Subway Surfers graduation movie from the animation workshop and they were still animators at heart. They liked the idea of creating compelling characters, deep universes, and trying things out. When they did their graduation movie, they weren't thinking about games. They thought about the story and the universe. Then when the iPhone came out, they thought, «This is our platform. We can actually do something here that looks way nicer than what was available at the time.» And then when Temple Run came out in 2011, they thought, this is a perfect fit for what we created