An NYU Game Center Game Jam alum just won an Apple design award

A success story for the Brooklyn game design ecosystem added another chapter last week, when Mushroom 11 won an Apple Design Award in the Games category.

In the game, the user plays through an adventures in an eerie world as a blob of mycelium, a type of fungus, which moves across space, growing by devouring what’s around it, while the end parts of the blob are burned off.

Apple picked the game “for its intriguing alien landscapes, rich hand-painted levels, and incredibly unique, tactile, and immersive gameplay on iPhone and iPad,” according to the company.

Honored to announce that #Mushroom11 is a 2017 Apple Design Award Winner! #WWDC17 @AppStoreGames https://t.co/jp4eDQTpk1 pic.twitter.com/QGqla3rDg8

— untame (@untamegames) June 7, 2017

Musroom 11 is the work of the South Brooklyn couple Julia Keren-Detar and Itay Keren, who together make up the game studio Untame. We interviewed the couple in 2015, after the game garnered positive reviews and was beginning to take off. They said the game came out of the NYU Game Center’s Global Game Jam, held at NYU Tandon’s campus.

“The theme was a snake eating its tail,” Keren-Detar explained at the time. “Itay came up with this idea pretty quickly actually. After 20 hours we had the basis of this game. People said it’s really fun and it plays really well and we decided to keep working on it.”

You can download the game here.