Igor Pusenjak

Igor Pusenjak is a New York-based game designer and artist best known as co-creator of Doodle Jump, the 2009 iPhone platformer that became one of the first huge App Store hits. He runs Lima Sky, a tiny studio he co-founded with his brother Marko Pusenjak, who lives in Croatia and handles engineering, while Igor leads art, design and marketing.

Doodle Jump launched on iOS in March 2009. Players tilt the phone to guide the Doodler, a four-legged green creature, ever higher across hand-drawn platforms that look like notebook paper. Instead of a one-off release, the brothers pushed out free updates every few weeks with new themes and features, and those updates lined up with fresh sales spikes. For four consecutive months the game sold about 25,000 copies a day, a record by App Store standards at the time, before Angry Birds overtook it.

In April 2010 the brothers told AllThingsD that they had sold about 3.5 million copies in the previous year and that, after Apple's cut, each of them had cleared more than $1 million before tax, all while running Lima Sky from their homes with a part-time illustrator. Igor did much of the early marketing himself, writing to iPhone blogs and to the Apple staff who chose featured apps. Fast Company named him number 14 on its Most Creative People 2010 list.

By December 2011 Doodle Jump had sold 10 million copies across iTunes and Google Play. It spread to Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone and Kinect, got an arcade cabinet from ICE and Raw Thrills in 2012, licensed spin-offs such as Doodle Jump SpongeBob SquarePants, and even a mention on The Big Bang Theory. A sequel, Doodle Jump 2, launched on the App Store on December 20, 2020.

Igor's story is a classic of the early App Store era: two brothers, no outside funding and a simple hand-drawn game that turned into a long-lived franchise through relentless small updates.