What Happened to Jelly Battle?

As a young chap I had not a single console to my own for many years, but my family had an old Toshiba laptop, and after realizing that video games were something I enjoyed (dating back to before I was 5 years of age, playing Tomb Raider on a Playstation my grandfather owned) I was adamant on finding video games on the internet. This was solved at my discovery of browser games. These were games made by mostly singular development teams, made for nothing but the sheer love for the craft, and for entertaining people. Many a 2000’s kid can remember hours being spent on games like Raft Wars 2, Duck life, and Tasty Planet, and for good reason. These games were made with a passion that is much harder to find in today’s world of microtransactions, and false promises. Today, in a market dominated by mobile games, the casual gamer finds little use in these titles beyond nostalgia, and yet in my mind, one title stood out, Jelly Battle.

I remember this title being under appreciated by my younger self, as it was rather complicated. A great deal of strategy was required, one that my brain back then was not yet capable of, but today, screamed out to be played. I returned to the site that had at one point consumed much of my free time, Andkon Arcade. Not much effort was needed to find this title, as adorned nearly as front and center as possible, was the figure of 3 jelly men, waiting to be clicked, and yet to my horror, the message “Jelly Battle is no longer available” was plastered in my face. Many of you would have at some point in your life heard of the idea of the 5 stages of grief, and I would just give an update to you while I write this, I have passed through the first 3, and am currently in the stage of depression, and one question rings through my mind, what happened to Jelly Battle?

I am a rather pessimistic guy when it comes to my writing. When an idea arrives in my mind, my first thought is always “It has been done.” And for the most part, it has. Including this idea. It has been brought up notably 3 different times, each with a low amount of activity between them. The precise dates are available for 2 of the posts, the first chronologically of the 2 is by user “hgffgh3” wishing for it to return on a kongregate forum, dated January 16th 2016. It is brought up again by Riley Tyler on Andkon Arcade’s Facebook page, dated August 18th 2017, however he was much less delicate in his wording. We also have a post by user “MynameisZaxer2” on Reddit, but adding on to my personal vendetta with Reddit, it fails to give the exact date of the post, only saying it was 4 years ago, relatively in the same area of the last two posts. Along with the amount of questioning for Jelly Battle’s disappearance, we have a petition being created in 2017 for its return, started by user Sam Marogi of Change.org. The only answers we get are from Andkon’s facebook page, stating “The original developers took it offline” continuing with the dismissal of a revival, and bringing up Battle Monkeys, a similar game developed by the original creators that was featured on the IOS and App Store, however, I never found a connection to the company that made Battle Monkeys, Geek Beach, and they never responded to my inquires. For now, we have Andras Konya of Andkon Arcade, who responded to me stating that the original developers who worked on Jelly Battle were Gamenet, and InboxDMG, both of which seem to have been wiped off the face of the planet. Gamenet.com is nothing more than an email address to info@gamenet.com, while InboxDMG has links to Oli Christie, current CEO of Neonplay, as well as having a Twitter account that links to Jaywing.com, a “data driven tool” company.

As he was the only specific individual I found, Oli Christie was the first I would contact. After getting in touch with him, he explained that "InboxDMG made the game." and Gamenet.com was used as their distributor and hosting site. Continuing, "Gamenet was a website that would promote games, but also owned by Inbox (or their founder Gary Stevens anyway)." From my research on Gary Stevens, he seems to be how everything within the companies was possible, having the most shares of any of the holders, and having an annual income of 100,000 dollars in 1990 because of it. I was unnable to find more recent information concerning his money, but I think it is safe to assume he held up that monetary security.

InboxDMG was then combined with multiple other companies. This I learned from following InboxDMG’s twitter, whose site link now brings you straight to Jaywing.com, and contacting the email listed on the site. It seems as though Jelly Battle was simply a project that, despite its success, was lost in the shuffle of companies and their priorities. Jaywing.com moved away from developing games, and Neonplay, now controlled by the creative director of what was InboxDMG, looked to rebrand themselves with new games.

So! Will Jelly Battle make a return? It would seem as if it will not. The original company no longer exists in its previous state, now focused on data driven tools rather than games, and the others that would have any control over it decided to go in new directions. Sometimes things that play a large part in our lives, were very simple things to their creators, giving them no send off, but silently putting them in the trash.

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