Robots Love Ice Cream

The recent crop of complex “first-person shooter games” with deep and convoluted storylines have many gamers longing for simpler days. Days of purity when a video game could provide hours of entertainment just trying to get a frog across the road without being hit by a car. Or when the only goal in life was to get the high score in Pac Man.

The trend in super flashy, highly involved games was what inspired up-and-coming game designer Burton Posey of Addo Games to divert away from what is becoming the norm and return to a simpler time in life.It’s what inspired him to create, what could be the coolest name in video games this coming year, “Robots Love Ice Cream.”

“I wanted to pay homage to the games I played growing up,” said Posey, who graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta in 2009 with a visual and game programming degree.

“Really, really old-school games. I’ve been playing video games since my uncle gave me his Atari when I was five. And I’ve been playing them ever since, much to my parents’ dismay.”

The basic principle behind the game is you, as the gamer, play the role of ice cream truck driver. You must defend your planet, nay, the galaxy, from attacking robots using whatever weapons are at your disposal, namely, ice cream cones.

“There’s not a ton of back story to it,” Posey, who lives in Inman Park, said. “The game doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s something that’s really silly. I wanted the gamers to say, ‘What was the person who made this thinking?’ I wanted to make something approachable, not something with a multi-hour commitment.”

And so Robots Love Ice Cream was born. The idea spawned from a desire to keep the game simple — he even considered using fireworks as his first weapon of choice. But then somehow it morphed into ice cream. At one point, Posey toyed around with a game where zoo animals had hijacked an ice cream truck before ultimately settling on robots.

Robots Love Ice Cream is as awesome as its name would indicate. It has a great, vintage video game school feel to it. Posey said it is reminiscent of an old-school Mario Bros. game.

As you’re driving the ice cream truck around the planets, robots come down ann attack them. Obviously, the only way to take the robots out is to shoot them with ice cream.

The game, still in its final phase of development, will be available on the iPad this fall, and heavily utilizes the “swiping motion” as the player advances in the game. Burton said he wanted to keep the functionality of the game simple, and that it plays a lot like Space Invaders.

“It’s very colorful, and very whimsical,” said Becca Posey, Burton’s wife and business partner in Addo Games. “The weapons are different flavors of ice cream. It’s all stuff people will be able to recognize.”

The Poseys met at Georgia Tech — Becca earned her public policy and MBA degrees there — while Burton majored in computer science before transferring to the Art Institute of Atlanta where he studied game development.

They partnered together to create Addo Games with the end goal of Burton creating a video game of his own.

“I knew I wanted to entertain people,” Burton said. “And I had a passion for video games. This was a way to combine the two. To pull at people’s heart strings and make them smile and make them laugh.”