Adam Searle » Blog

I was asked recently what the latest stats were on Ninjaman, and had to respond that honestly we haven’t checked in a long time. Thought it would be a fun thing to do! The game continues to receive a fairly steady flow of plays - the hype dropoff is long over, and if anything recently the number of plays has been increasing.

Here’s the summary since we launched it:
-Ninjaman plays: 24.36 million plays
-Samurai sam plays: 10 million recorded at Miniclip.com until their tracking system went down (long time ago). We estimate a further 10 million plays
-Ninjaman has been recorded to have virally spread to 4353 websites. Hot damn!

I’ve always been thrilled with the success we received with Ninjaman online, but at least now I can update the ‘how many plays figure’ to 34 million known, 44 million estimated! I must thank MochiBot for providing a tremendous flash tracking system for this, that we picked up from day 1.

Makes me wonder what it would have been like had we launched with MochiAds (if that was available back in Jan 2006) - which inserts ads into the preloading phase of the game, similar to AdSense. It’s too late to integrate that into the game now and reach many of the websites that are hosting the game, as the viral distribution to web hosts is largely over (or at last we think).

I always enjoyed the work we did on Ninjaman, and have been proud of how its done and the reception it gets when I show it around. I think it largely eclipses the work I’ve been doing since then (freelance web dev contracting and some other gaming stuff), on several points: the sheer audience it received, my enjoyment in making it, perfectionism in what we strove for, and the non-commercial drive behind it. Not to say that I haven’t enjoyed what I’ve done since; not at all; but its seeing stats like this and remembering back to then that really motivates me to do another fun online game, that isn’t so commercially driven as my recent work.

It is, after all, the year of soul!