If you asked me to list exceedingly unlikely but very cool things that could possibly happen today, I’m pretty confident that nowhere on that list would you find “Super-classic old-school ngmoco IP being ressurected by the original developers and suddenly released on the App Store." To back things up a bit, back when ngmoco was still a thing and releasing/maintaining video games on the iPhone, GodFinger hit the App Store back in mid-2010. It was a super fun little god game where you spent time lording over a little planet, demonstrating your power to followers, and growing in overall strength by gaining more followers. If anyone remembers the classic PC game Black & White, it was sort of similar to that, at least in concept, while still being a super approachable casual free to play game.
Sadly, a few years later after DeNA bought ngmoco GodFinger and several other games were shut down and we simply assumed that was it for these games. Weirdly enough, that isn’t where the GodFinger story ends, as GodFinger 2 weirdly soft launched in Canada back in 2014, with a forum thread that died out early last year. We assumed DeNA abandoned the game, particularly as the soft launched version disappeared from the App Store at some point between now and then.
So, imagine my surprise when I got an email from JiggeryPokery today, explaining that they’ve risen from the ashes of Wonderland Software (the original developers of GodFinger) who somehow managed to wrestle control of the game away from DeNA. With the original developers at the helm, GodFinger 2 (Free) just hit the App Store. Since it just launched, we haven’t had much time to fiddle with it yet, but it sounds like it’s pretty similar to the classic game which has been improved in basically every way imaginable. Additionally, and I’m sure some people will be super happy about this, it doesn’t even have any kind of network connectivity requirement, which is becoming exceedingly rare in the world of iOS gaming.
Definitely give this game a download, if for no reason other than as a sign of support that these guys were able to fight the good fight and get their own IP back and re-released what (initially anyway) seems like a super player-friendly game experience. This is the kind of thing I’d love to see more of, so, hey, how about Rolando 3?
