A wonderful story behind the success of a "chick" from China

Wen/Liu

A "Chick" from China runs in the forefront of millions of applications. I dig deep, for you to bring "chick" success behind the wonderful story.

I'm used to browsing the American App Store rankings on the ipad every few days to see if any new apps are available. One day in July, a game called "Run,run,chicken" rushed to the second. Download the demo, the form is very simple, but the operation is smooth, fun to play, very suitable for the time to kill debris, change the brain to relax. The game's icon style and art design looks familiar, very Chinese, I suddenly thought, this may be a domestic team development of the game! Under Search, sure enough, the game support website Contact Way has Sina Weibo. Then found that the game has been in the domestic fire, Chinese translation called "Chicken Run" (due to the same name as the famous cartoon, SEO is very unfavorable, hehe).

"Chick" from China has run a good place in the world

The person who went through the legend

On Weibo, the owner of the game "@ Small rice card" is very active, in the continuous reporting of chickens download more than n million, feedback to the user's opinion, but also incidentally leaked out his versatility: "Qualified Doctor" in the resume, will be English, French, Korean and other eight languages, there are galleries and painters quite fine, every day with a picture diary , there are studios like to play robot churn processing, in the team can do design, also occasionally guest programming ... Of course, I also found that he and I have a similar schedule, are deep night owls. What kind of team is this? Late one night through Weibo, I made an appointment to visit.

Met to know, chicken run fast development team of media Technology (Xmedia) is originally a part of the 3G portal, Li Yufao (small rice card) also served as the 3G Portal Technology Vice president. Li's happy experience is legendary, born in Korea Seoul, spent his childhood in Singapore, and later studied and worked in England. Cambridge was a medical background and worked for Goldman Sachs and Temasek. In the IT industry has many years of experience, and people in partnership for ARM graphics engine Epage research and development EFIF, obtained 13 patents. Last time it was depressed, he recruited a number of talented people in the UK and invested in Mika Mobile, which has now become one of the most powerful mobile game teams to launch the app Store TOP10 game Battleheart.

2008, Li Yufao, who graduated from Tsinghua University with a PhD in image processing in the UK, has just come to China to start a business, developed a cross-platform graphics technology Akebono (Japanese, meaning the Dawn), and based on this technology, on the functional mobile phone to achieve a gorgeous interface effect of the true 3D UI browser Ola. In 2009, after the name of the go browser to the market, the user cumulative more than 25 million, stable mobile browser top three.

The owner of the game Lee Happiness has a legendary experience

A painful transition.

2010, Lee happy to see the iphone and Android represented by the rise of smartphones, the trend began to think about transformation, facing a new era from scratch. The transition process is rather painful. The whole team in Guangzhou for two months, groping for a variety of ideas.

A cell phone? To solve many of the problems of software and hardware at the same time, it is likely to require long hard combat, the future is uncertain.

Do UI solutions? That must cooperate with handset manufacturers, OEM, authorization, etc., it is a big customer business, the risk is too large, the team is also difficult to big. Before the Mika in the British state-owned company products have reached the installed more than 200 million last but failed, of course, also do not want to repeat.

Continue to work around the existing 3D technology solutions? It's hard to make money in China by technology alone.

This time, there is good news from the Mika Mobile in Britain, where revenues are soaring as several iOS games are on the list. This makes Li happy determined to smartphone platform, to the game transformation. At that time, he didn't announce the big decision to the team immediately, but let everyone feel at ease after a spring festival.