Games By James Plafke Jan. 6, 2016 11:14 am
Yo, what up my glip glops? While you’re dealing with the excruciating wait for season three of Rick and Morty, Adult Swim has something that might make that wait just a tad easier: Pocket Mortys, a Rick and Morty Pokémon-style game coming to iOS and Android on January 14.
So far, Rick and Morty’s main gaming presence has been limited to a balloon-popping simulator — a real-life implementation of a barebones tablet game used on the show to cement the notion that Morty’s dad Jerry is a simple-minded man. While some of us openly and loudly hoped Rick and Morty’s first substantial gaming presence would be a real-life implementation of Roy, a Sims-like virtual reality game in the show wherein players play through the very normal life of the titular Roy, a Rick and Morty riff on Pokémon sure sounds like something we’d love to install on our pocket computers.
The announcement came from an Adult Swim tweet, seen above, and though the accompanying GIF looks like it was from a professionally developed game, the lack of any detail about the game — and the fast-approaching release date — made some of us wonder if it was just a funny but very cruel tease of a joke. Thankfully, show creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland confirmed the legitimacy of the game, and both were merciful enough to toss in a couple GIFs of in-game action.
Aside from adopting some form of a free-to-play model, details on the game are slim. The GIFs look great, capturing the aesthetics of the show, the feel of Pokémon games, and the terrible and hilarious way the multiverse of Mortys are treated. If you’re (justifiably) worried about that mobile game plus free-to-play combo, senior studio producer Chris Johnston assured us all that this will be a “real game.”
We’ll have to wait a week to see just how Pocket Mortys’ realness and depth stacks up to the franchise it’s trying to emulate, and just how the free-to-play model will affect the game. However that shakes out, though, we can safely assume that this will be at least one mobile game where we aren’t buying various containers full of “gems,” and will instead be trading in the show’s richly diverse multiverse of hilariously named currencies.