Gurklikes

Gurk

Game
Developer
Larva Labs (Matt Hall & John Watkinson)
Released
2004 (J2ME) · December 30th, 2010 (Android)
Links

Gurk is a retro-styled role-playing game by Larva Labs, the two-person Brooklyn studio of Matt Hall and John Watkinson. It was first released around 2004 as a J2ME game for Nokia feature phones, running on a 128×128 screen, and was ported to Android in December 2010 and later to iOS.

The Android release was free and famously tiny: just over 100KB installed. It went on to pass half a million downloads, and its popularity is what gave the gurklike micro-genre its name.

Features#

The original J2ME release advertised:

  • 45,000 map locations across vast wildernesses and dungeons
  • 3 player classes and a three-character party
  • 24 dungeon levels
  • 44 different items to find and 23 unique monsters to fight
  • Melee, ranged and magic weapons; attack and healing spells; 3 types of armour
  • Experience points, levels, stat improvement, and shops to buy and sell gear
  • An estimated 12–20 hours of play on a single download

Play is entirely one-handed. The world is a tile grid walked one square at a time, and combat happens on that same grid: the player picks a target, moves, attacks or casts, and then the monsters take their turn. On Android the interface is a 3×3 block of on-screen buttons beneath a small viewport, mimicking a feature phone's number pad.

Story#

You take control of a party of three heroes and set out to defeat the evil dragon Braka, hidden in one of the world's many dungeons. There is very little narrative framing beyond that; Gurk II added quests and NPCs.

Availability#

Gurk has been delisted from both stores. The Android version was unpublished from Google Play on August 13th, 2021, and the iOS version is gone too. Only Gurk III is still on the App Store. Larva Labs later created CryptoPunks, and pixel art from Gurk fed directly into that project.

Inspirations#

External articles#

Screenshots#