Missing Love Island? The show's hit game that could fill the void

Played by 12 million people around the world, Amelia Heathman meets the team behind the wildly successful reality dating show game
Fusebox Games
Amelia Heathman20 May 2020

Love Island faced the coronavirus axe earlier this month with ITV announcing this year’s summer instalment of the hit reality show would be put on ice. For those mourning the loss of the show in 2020, there’s another way to get your fix: the Love Island game.

Created by London-based games studio Fusebox Games, the first Love Island game was launched in 2018. Two years later, it has over 12 million global players — only a third of which came to the game after watching the show — and it recently surpassed £25 million in revenue. The Love Island game is a hit in its own right.

Fusebox started in 2016 with the idea of extending well-known TV shows into gaming. Founded by Wil Stephens, Michael Othen and Rory Scott Russell, the studio started off with the rights for shows such as Baywatch and X Factor, the by-product being the X Factor Life game. This was such a success that Fusebox started a partnership with ITV to use its intellectual property. Though the founders initially pitched a game for I’m A Celebrity in 2017, they instead came out with the rights to Love Island.

“At the time we didn’t really know much about the show,” explains co-founder and CEO Wil Stephens. “We knew it was blowing up and that it was becoming really popular, but we left agreeing to do a game for it now really knowing how we were going to make it.”

At a central London networking event a week later, their solution arrived in the form of narrative writer Ed Sibley. Sibley describes himself as the “happy crossover between Love Island fan and narrative game writer.” That summer, he had become hooked on the show and had been thinking about how he would create a game around it. He pitched this to Othen, without realising the studio had the rights to the game.

“He took a step backwards and was like, ‘It’s strange to hear that because we’ve just finished negotiating a contract for it, you should come into the office.’ I had the most unlikely serendipitous experience to meet the one person who had the thing I wanted,” he laughs.

The idea behind the game is to give everyone who has ever thought, ‘If I was on Love Island, how would I do it and who would I couple up with?’, a chance to live out those dreams. The first season was based round 65 episodes written by Ed and another Fusebox employee, which amounts to about half a million words. Each episode is divided up into a day in the villa and takes between 10 and 20 minutes to play.

A new cast is coming to the Love Island game in season three, which is set to launch this summer
Fusebox Games

In season one, the player always wins the money, but in season two, which is longer with 14 different Islanders and about 100 different routes, it’s not always so clear cut. “We don’t want it to be too challenging, but also quite gentle and enjoyable to play. If you don’t want to win you have to really connive at that and play a shady route through the villa,” says Sibley.

Like the show, there are challenges, re-couplings, and new Islanders thrown into the mix. “We’re in a strange situation where it is entirely fictional so we have to simulate what would happen on the show in some respects. So that means we use the same mechanisms they use to produce drama, but from a position where it feels essential and like a season of the show would,” explains Sibley.

They try to design the villa to look like the IRL one, though they don’t get to see drawings until a few weeks before the show will launch. Sibley says the team tries to keep up with the Love Island lingo (“It is what it is”, “Sauce,”, “Pied,”) but give that the game is written months before a new season it’s important not to use too much of last year’s phrases so it doesn’t feel dated.

Things happen in the game that won’t necessarily be in the show. It’s possible to have same-sex relationships in the game, this has only happened once in the Australian edition, and Sibley says the team has strived to include storylines around mental health as a way of opening up a conversation.

“We always want the game to contain the types of conversations that we would like to see more of in the world,” he says. “If we can have even a small amount of content in the game which shows people how to talk about these things or ask for help then hopefully the game is accomplishing a material good for people.”

Love Island 2020: Series 6 - In pictures

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It goes back to the fact that Fusebox has a unique audience when it comes to gaming: 85 per cent of its players are women, who don’t necessarily class themselves as gamers or seem themselves as such. This is often found in mobile gamers — a recent study by Activision Blizzard, parent company of King which makes Candy Crush Saga, found that 71 per cent of mums in the UK, US, France, and Germany play video games but only 48 per cent would classify themselves as such.

They spend too: though Love Island is free to play, you can pay for accessories and clothes and to unlock extra content. The average revenue per daily active user is $0.88, not bad for a free game.

“They don’t see this as a game, it’s more of an interactive novel,” says Stephens. “There’s no barrier to entry, it’s very accessible to pick it up and play. It’s a gateway into gaming for a group of people who might not necessarily classify themselves as traditional gamers.

“We feel a great responsibility to our player community and we think our writing is really sympathetic and empathetic towards issues our player base is dealing with in their day-to-day lives.”

Season three will be launching later this summer even though the IRL show won’t, with a new fresh cast of characters and an emphasis on positivity, kindness and compassion. There’s a new match-three game within Season 3 too, which draws on the mechanism of games like Candy Crush Saga and Farm Heroes Saga.

“Social distancing doesn’t stop the game from bringing joy to millions of players who might be stuck at home and looking for a moment of escapism,” adds Stephens.

The Love Island game is ready to download now on iOS and Android

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