Guadalajara´s Cantina Mexicaltzingo was jumping last week with jubilant young people wearing purple T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “One Simple Idea.”
They were celebrating the fact that on this day, September 10, a video game they had developed in Colonia La Calma was being added to Apple’s App Store for downloading all over the world.
“Previews of the game proved so popular that Apple expects over one million downloads during the next two weeks,” boasted Ovidio Escobedo, the head honcho of One Simple Idea, a Guadalajara graphic design company that has been producing web pages, commercials and animations for 12 years, but video games only for the past two years.
Mucho Taco is advertised as “a game in which you have to prepare a great variety of tacos to convince the world you are the greatest taco chef ever.” In it you “follow the advice of Barbacoatl, a shaman-like taco expert who teaches players all about the golden tortilla, a magical artifact that has the power to create an infinite amount of tacos.”
At Cantina Mexicaltzingo I also learned that Mucho Taco is classified as a “clicker,” where the more you click, the more rewards you get – a non-distracting sort of game that aficionados might occasionally play for fun, but only if it has great graphics and/or other outstanding characteristics.
Ricardo Ibarra is the technical artist on the six-person team that created this game. A native of Guadalajara, he recently returned from Angouleme, The “Comic-Strip Capital of France,” where he completed his studies in video-game development.
“It all began in the spring of last year,” Ibarra said of the idea for Mucho Taco. “Our team was looking for something to eat but discovered all we had between us was a single tortilla. Everything snowballed from there. What you could put on that tortilla to make a taco, what could accompany the taco – all the way to restaurants specializing in tacos. At that time we had been looking for a simple idea that would appeal to everyone and we decided that this genre was ideal.”
The team spent a year and a half working on the game, and often on weekends too. “It’s one thing to make a game and another thing to make it right, because there are always those little details that could easily go by unnoticed and spoil the experience,” said Ibarra.
One Simple Idea took Mucho Taco to the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco last March, where a Canadian game publisher called Noodlecake fell in love with it and decided to promote it.
Noodlecake describes itself as “a small indie game studio in Saskatoon, a.k.a. a big barren patch of land in the middle of nowhere.” Apparently it was Apple’s invention of the iPhone and App Store that “changed everything,” making it possible for a group of friends to successfully develop games anywhere. Thus, Noodlecake expanded into a publishing company and, according to their their web page, “we are partners with amazing developers from all over the world.” Including, I might add, some amazing game developers impacting the world from Colonia La Calma, right here in Zapopan.