Why You Can Trust CNET Crossy Style: Psy makes Gangnam cameo in indie game Crossy Road
The award-winning (and hyper-addictive) mobile game gets a special update for its Korean fans, with 10 new characters including the famous rapper.
Psy -- yes, the Gangnam Style guy -- will voice his own character in Crossy Road, the award-winning mobile phone game from Australian developer Hipster Whale.
The hugely popular game is getting its biggest update yet -- and it has a particularly Korean flavour. Hipster Whale and game publisher Yodo1 have added 10 new characters including the Korean rapper.
Psy found fame outside of his native country thanks to his catchy Gangnam Style song and music video back in 2012. The video became the most played YouTube video ever, cracking 2 billion views. At time of writing it's currently sitting on 2,361,783,436. His followup hits have not proven quite as popular, but appearing in Crossy Road is still a significant cultural endorsement of mobile games, and a sign of the high esteem in which video games are held in Korea.
Crossy Road is deceptively simple: keep your characters alive as they cross busy roads, rivers and train tracks. It's like a quirky, colourful modern version of 80s hit Frogger. The game has proved insanely popular. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in May, Crossy Road creators Matt Hall and Andy Sum revealed that the game had been downloaded 50 million times in just 90 days.
Free to download, like many mobile games it makes money from in-app purchases. While you can earn new characters, which are purely cosmetic and don't help your score in any way, if you're impatient you can pay real money for them. In those 90 days, the game made $10 million.
Crossy Road currently has around 90 million players, according to Hipster Whale, and picked up a coveted Apple Design Award at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference.
This new Korean update is a thank you to the game's legion of South Korean fans, according to Sum.
"Korea is one of the countries where Crossy Road has been the most popular," he said. "So we wanted to make something really special for our fans there, as a thank you for playing our game."
The dev team travelled to South Korea to research the culture before designing the new content.
Psy, who will be available as a $2.99 in-app purchase, will also come with a new gameplay mode where you need to follow a lit-up dance floor as you traverse the game's tricky terrain.
Other characters in the update include Korean Chicken, Jindo Dog, Taekwondo Master, Pro Gamer, Korean Drummer, Korean BBQ, Kimchi, K-Drama Actor and Seonbi.
Psy will be on sale until September 25 this year. Crossy Road can be downloaded for free on Google Play, the Apple App Store, the Amazon Appstore and even the Windows Marketplace.