Infinity Blade: The iPhone Game That Made Phones Look Like Consoles

On 1 September 2010, on stage at an Apple event, a knight walked into a sunlit castle courtyard on an iPhone screen. The stone glistened, the armour gleamed, and the audience could hardly believe the lighting was running on a phone. The demo was called Project Sword.

Three months later it became Infinity Blade, released on 9 December 2010 by Chair Entertainment, a studio owned by Epic Games. It was the first iOS game to run on Unreal Engine 3, it earned about $1.6 million in its first four days, and it became the fastest-grossing iOS app of its time. Today you can't buy it at all.

A showcase with a deadline

Epic had brought its Unreal Engine 3 to iOS and needed a game to prove what it could do. Chair, founded by brothers Donald and Geremy Mustard and best known for the downloadable console game Shadow Complex, was given the job. A team of about twelve people had roughly five months to make the game, and only two months to get a playable demo ready for Apple's stage.

Swipe to parry

Infinity Blade was not an open-world adventure. It was a series of one-on-one sword duels, built entirely around the touchscreen. You swipe to slash, tap to dodge left or right, hold a shield button to block, and swipe in the opposite direction of an enemy's attack to parry, which opens them up for a flurry of blows.

Its structure was clever, too. You fight your way through a castle to face the God King, and you will almost certainly lose. The game then jumps forward a generation: you are your character's descendant, keeping your gear and experience, and trying again. This bloodline loop made a short game endlessly replayable, though some critics found it repetitive. The original scored 87 on Metacritic.

A blockbuster on a phone

The numbers were remarkable for a premium iPhone game. After that $1.6 million opening, the game had earned at least $23 million by the end of 2011, helped by a run of free updates, including The Deathless Kings and Arena. In 2012, Epic said the series was its most profitable franchise relative to the hours spent making it.

Infinity Blade II followed on 1 December 2011, and Infinity Blade III on 18 September 2013, each launched alongside new iPhones and each showing off what Apple's latest chips could do. There was even an arcade cabinet, Infinity Blade FX, in 2011.

Gone from the store, then a sword in Fortnite

On 10 December 2018, Epic removed the whole trilogy from the App Store, saying the games had become too difficult to keep updated for new hardware. Players who already owned them could keep them, but no one new could buy them.

The very next day, the Infinity Blade sword appeared in Fortnite's seventh season as an extremely powerful melee weapon. Players complained that it was wildly overpowered, and Epic pulled it just three days later. It returned, weaker, in a limited-time Sword Fight mode in February 2019.

Why it matters

Infinity Blade was the moment people realised a phone could look like a console. It persuaded studios to take high-end mobile games seriously and helped make Unreal Engine a standard tool for mobile developers, a line that leads directly to today's console-quality phone games. It also left an uncomfortable lesson about game preservation: a hit that earned tens of millions of dollars can disappear completely when a platform moves on.

Because the trilogy is no longer sold, there is no official way to buy it today. For the modern heirs of its big-budget ambition, see our guide to the best PC and console ports on mobile, and for the other giants of 2010, our Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja histories.