Despite the iPhone being great for gaming, I’ve never really gotten all that in to it. The only game that really caught my attention was Jimmy Pataya – thanks to Rich Mulholland for getting me hooked there. However, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been fortunate enough to watch the coming together of a new little game – BloodRunner.

You play a vampire and your only job is to get to your coffin before you run out of blood. Along the way you get to avoid, navigate and dodge holy water, stakes and sun rays. Tilt the phone in the direction you want him to run and tap the screen to jump. The gameplay is easy to pick up and deceptively addictive. Not to mention incredibly frustrating. But in a good way. The kind that keeps you coming back again and again because, you know, if I time that jump just a little bit earlier I’m sure I can get to that last drop of blood.

The entire game was designed and coded here in Cape Town by (full disclosure) 3 people I know quite well. Alan Cronje, who heads up the creative side of AtPlay, designed all of the characters, screens and sprites for the game. Etienne la Grange, who coded the Engen African Welcome diary application for us earlier this year, handled all of the actual game coding, and Werner Marais, ex-Saatchi now at Y&R, wrote all of the copy and designed the levels. This is something that they worked nights and weekends to pull together and it’s great to see all of their effort come to life.

Since I got my iPhone I’ve downloaded a lot of mediocre applications and games. This is not one of those. If you’ve got a US iTunes account I’d highly recommend you grab this and give it a whirl. If not, hold on for a bit, it should be in the SA store soon.

Can’t wait to see what they bring out next.