Draw Something

Draw Something from OMGPOP studio launched in 2012 and became one of the fastest-growing social hits of the early smartphone era, spreading literally from hand to hand among friends. The premise is simple: one player picks from a choice of words and must draw it with a finger on the touchscreen, while the other player tries to guess what it is, then the roles swap — each round plays out asynchronously between two friends on their phones without needing to play at the same time.

The drawing controls are deliberately limited to a handful of colors and brush thicknesses, so even a complete drawing novice with no talent whatsoever could manage it, and it was precisely those clumsy, often funny attempts to convey the given word that formed the game's main appeal and the material shared among friends and on social media. The game was free to download with ads and the option to buy coins with real money to unlock more colors, which was at the time a still relatively new but rapidly spreading model for such a massively popular game.

The popularity was so meteoric that Zynga bought OMGPOP just weeks after launch for hundreds of millions of dollars — a deal that later turned out to be one of the most discussed in mobile gaming industry history, since player interest in the title dropped off fairly quickly and the acquisition's value never fully paid off.

Why play it: the game is no longer actively supported at its original scale, but as a historical reminder of viral social gaming and simple drawing with friends, it still holds its charm.