26-year-old woman who doesn’t code creates Asia’s hottest game
Tabi Kaeru, or Travel Frog, has been downloaded more than 30 million times following its November debut, with China making up 95 per cent of that total.
Japanese frogs are proliferating across Asia. The good news is, they are not an invasive species, nor are they real.
Tabi Kaeru, or Travel Frog, became the No 1 downloaded smartphone app in China for almost two weeks after its debut, and is still hovering at the top of the charts on the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan.
The idea for the game came from Mayuko Uemura, a 26-year-old employee of developer Hit-Point, who has never written a line of computer code.
The game’s objective is simple: pack a lunch, maybe a tent, plus a few other trip-friendly trinkets for your virtual amphibian, and wait for him to come back from his travels with pictures and gifts.
If the premise of gathering food and knick-knacks while waiting for animals to show up sounds familiar, that is because it is: Nagoya-based Hit-Point is behind the cat-collecting game Neko Atsume and came up with the latest hit.