Ulysse Sabbagh

Hundreds of metres above a burning city, a businessman crashes out of an office window. He arcs across the sky before curling into a stuntman’s tumble. He loses no momentum as he lands on the roof below and straightens into a sprint, his suit jacket flapping in the quickening wind. He leaps over a gap, his arms rotating like helicopter blades as he soars across it. He lands, and, accelerating again, continues to bolt from the unseen terror in pursuit. He miscalculates the next gap and leaps prematurely, then falls in slow motion toward a grisly death on the sidewalk below. A postmortem appears on the screen: “You ran 1533m before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death.” This is what it’s like to play Canabalt, a video game that has sparked an entirely new genre of play for mobile phones.

Amazing story, amazing game.