Hill Climb Racing

The objective of Hill Climb Racing is to drive as far through progressively difficult racing stages as possible while collecting coins, taking advantage of the non-realistic physics and using only two simple controls: the Gas and Brake pedals. While in mid-air, pressing these pedals will instead cause the vehicle to rotate, allowing the player to control the angle with which they land. Fuel is replenished by picking up gas canisters or batteries along the way. The player can perform stunts such as driving the vehicle into the air for a prolonged time or flipping it over to earn more coins, which after the race may be spent on upgrades or to unlock new stages and vehicles (including a monster truck, racing truck, moon lander, dirt bike, tank, and Santa's sleigh). Conditions ending the game are depleting the vehicle's fuel completely and/or breaking the driver's neck. Since its inception, Hill Climb Racing has seen updates that add new content. For example, the "Garage" was introduced in a December 2016 update, where players can purchase cars and tune their parts. Gems were also introduced as another currency to the game. == Development ==

Hill Climb Racing was developed by Toni Fingerroos, a self-taught Finnish programmer who was 29 years old at the time of the game's release. Prior to developing the game, he started writing software at the age of ten. He was intrigued by car racing, wrote the racing game Ralli 94, and shared it with his friends. At that time, he named his own hobbyist firm Fingersoft. A decade after his first game, Fingerroos revived the Fingersoft trade name as a professional studio that programmed games for Nokia mobile phones. Fingerroos described he "failed at that quite miserably." He has since pursued other occupations, all with unfavorable outcomes. One of them was working with Pixolane, a game studio, and spending his money on developing a PlayStation 3 game called Rust Buckaneers It was released for Android devices on September 22, 2012. Amid the game's success, Fingerroos contacted Teemu Närhi, a former Pixoline employee, to port the game for iOS. and the game was later ported to Microsoft Windows on October 21, 2013, and to Windows Phone on November 27. Chinese version Fingersoft had plans to localize Hill Climb Racing in China. They had already released the original game in that region in July 2014, in collaboration with MyGamez, a Finnish-Chinese game publisher specializing in marketing non-native mobile games to China. Paalanen saw an opportunity to appeal to the Chinese audience by altering the game's theme to match their culture, while keeping the gameplay unchanged. Hill Climb Racing: China Edition was published by MyGamez in February 2015, coinciding with Chinese New Year. == Reception ==

Hill Climb Racings critical reception was somewhat positive, Modojos John Bedford respectively dismissed the graphics and soundtrack as rudimentary and repetitive but found a great deal of satisfaction in mastering the controls and called the game "furiously addictive." SFGates Peter Hartlaub praised the ability to upgrade vehicles, as he found it to dramatically improve the player's experience and demonstrate the game's "subtle" physics. Even though he found Ski Safari, a similar racing game, to have more sophisticated gameplay and better graphics and be more cartoonishly "fun," he also found Hill Climb Racing more engaging and concluded that the game is "a good example of the importance of mechanics over visuals in [the mobile gaming] market." Pocket Gamers Harry Slater compared it to Trials and found it to be less "bombastic" and the graphics slightly ugly but praised the simplicity of the gameplay. He called the game unimpressive, but decent in the genre of physics-based racing games and enjoyable. Swedish magazine Mobils Elias Nordling considered the game's freemium model and noted the progression system as fast enough to not make the in-app purchases tempting. He found the controls simple and the physics difficult, but his main complaint was the fact that when starting any level, the player always starts from the beginning, rather than from the highest achieved level. Elias concluded that that obscured the feeling of achieving anything, but he ultimately liked it and found it to be addictive. In the book Finnish Video Games: A History and Catalog, Juho Kuorikoski also found the monetization to be reasonable and the mechanics addictive. He described the visuals as being "amateurish" and particularly ugly for a successful game, but later argued that "good graphics don't make a good game". It was announced in 2022. A Lego-themed spin off known as Lego Hill Climb Adventures released as an open beta in early 2023, and officially launched on May 30, 2024. Sales In its first fiscal year, Fingersoft reported that it gained a total of €15.5 million in revenue via advertisements and in-app purchases. The company's net sales continued to rise until 2018, when Fingersoft reported net sales of €21 million, down from 2017's €29.6 million. This was attributed to the company's focus on building its team and not releasing any title in 2018, and its older games continued to be profitable. A few journalists have described the game's performance as having transformed Fingersoft into a "rags-to-riches" app studio. == References ==