From the archive
Over $25,000 Raised For Charity: Canabalt Goes Open Source!
On December 30, 2010, the Indie iPhone Holiday Sale passed $25,000 for Child's Play, the charity that brings games and toys to children in hospitals. To thank everyone who bought, Canabalt's makers put the iPhone game's source code online the same day. Wikipedia's article on Canabalt cites the announcement, and TouchArcade and Kotaku linked it at the time.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
The sale
Canabalt sold in the holiday sale beside Drop7, Eliss, Osmos, Solipskier and Spider. The total on the day of the announcement was $25,350.25, with a couple of days still to go, and the sale was later extended.
What was released
The download held the newest version of the game, ahead of the App Store: the game code, the studio's iOS port of the Flixel engine, and the graphics, sound effects and music, with 60 frames a second and Retina support on the iPad and iPhone 4. The online high scores and Twitter backend were left out, partly so as not to risk exposing the database or players' data.
The terms
The engine came under the MIT license, free to use for anything, commercial games included. The Canabalt-specific code, art, animation, music and sound stayed proprietary: free to study, never to redistribute. A follow-up post the next day explained the split in more detail.
Canabalt by the numbers, December 2010
- A Flash prototype made in 5 days by Adam Saltsman.
- Ported to iOS in 10 days by Eric Johnson.
- More than 225,000 copies sold by then, while publicly bucking the 99-cent price trend.
- A soundtrack by Danny Baranowsky.
- One of Apple's best iPhone games of 2009, by the studio's account.