Temple Run

In Temple Run, the player controls either Guy Dangerous, an average explorer; Scarlett Fox, an escape artist; Barry Bones, a city police officer; Karma Lee, the fastest runner in the Far East; Montana Smith, the "second greatest explorer ever" (referring to Indiana Jones being the greatest explorer); Frost Pirate, a ghost pirate; Francisco Montoya, a Spanish conquistador; Wally Nutt, a Christmas nutcracker; Edgar Twiggenbottom, a scarecrow; Simone Davies, a Caribbean commodore; or Zack Wonder, a football star. The character chosen embarks on an adventure to seek an ancient and valuable golden idol from an Aztec temple, not realizing that the temple is inhabited by a family of demonic monkeys who want to devour them. As the game is an endless running game, there is no end to the temple; the player plays until the character collides into a large obstacle, falls into the water, or is overtaken by the monkeys, all resulting in a game over sooner or later.

While the character is running, the player can tilt their device left or right to move the character to either side of the screen to collect coins and/or avoid obstacles. If the player wishes to turn left or right, the touchscreen can be swiped in the corresponding direction. If the player wishes to jump over an object, the screen can be swiped upwards and if they wish to slide under an object, the screen can be swiped downwards. There are three types of coins to be found while the character is running: gold, red, and blue.

Temple Run was designed, programmed, and produced by husband-and-wife team Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova with art by Kiril Tchangov. The game took a total of four months to develop. Development began after the financial failure of Imangi Studios' previous game, Max Adventure and used that game to prototype Temple Run's controls. Imangi Studios wanted to make a quick game with simpler controls in contrast to Max Adventure's dual analog controls.

Keith started the prototype by making a game where the character is always running and can be controlled by rotating the environment from a top-down perspective. This idea was scrapped due to causing extreme dizziness during testing. To fix the problem, constraints were added so that players can only make 90° turns and perspective be fixed behind the character. When it came to the game's aesthetics, multiple ideas were conceptualized but ultimately settled for the character to running on a pathway resembling the Great Wall of China or Aztec temple.

Since its initial release on the App Store, the popularity of the game has soared, to the point that Imangi Studios became more popular than Zynga. In the iTunes Store, the game was included in the top 50 most-downloaded apps in December 2011, and eventually became the number one free iOS app in the Store. It also reached the position of the top grossing iOS app. The Android version was downloaded one million times within three days of its release. By June 2014, Temple Run and its sequel were downloaded over 1 billion times.

Temple Run received an honorable mention for the Best Mobile Game category during the 14th annual Independent Games Festival, in 2012. Temple Run was voted as the Favorite App in the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards, and was also nominated for the same category a year later, which it lost to Despicable Me: Minion Rush. The Arcade version won the 2013 Best of Show Awards bronze medal for the "Videmption Arcade Games" category.

In the wake of Temple Run's success, other developers created games of a similar style, such as Temple Guns, Temple Jump, Piggy Run, Zombie Run and Pyramid Run. Imangi Studios co-founder Keith Shepherd found it flattering that developers were inspired by the game to create interesting games that make them unique. However, Shepard also found it frustrating when developers took exact gameplay, branding, and assets from their original game. This led to many of those games, including one from indie developer Anton Sinelnikov being removed from the App Store. The cost of imitating a full fledge temple run game on UNITY ranges between $10K to $90K.

Temple Run was followed by several sequels and spin-offs, becoming the first game in the Temple Run series. The second entry in the series is Temple Run: Brave and is a spin-off based on the Pixar film, Brave. It was released on Android and iOS on June 14, 2012. The third entry in the series is Temple Run 2 and serves as the direct sequel to Temple Run.