We have recently had the chance to test the Latvian made “Fearless Wheels” at the Tech Chill event in Riga. Fearless Wheels is a motocross mobile racing game that revolves around a story of a boy dreaming to become a motocross superstar, hoping to race at the biggest stadiums in the world. If you are a 70’s-80’s kid then you might have a very strong nostalgic association with Nintendos’s launch title for the NES in 1985 – Excitebike. At least this is the first thing I thought when I started playing, in a good way, it felt good and I wanted to play more.
The first thing that you notice about the game is the production quality, everything feels like it was made by a professional gaming company from the game itself to the fonts and menu design. In fact, many “professional” and long-standing gaming companies overlook this completely. The gameplay is also quite intuitive. It is fair to say that we put the game on our radars at the event.
Last week, they have launched worldwide and we got together with CEO Arturs Matisons and developer Aleksejs Mjaliks to discuss the game. It seems that we were not the only ones waiting for it as over the weekend the game spiked to #1 iPhone paid game in Latvia, #6 in Australia, #8 in Italy. They were also the #1 Racing Game in Latvia, Australia, Italy, Belgium and France.
It all started because of a dream Matisons had himself. Matisons is a four-time world champion and ten-time European champion in BMX but always wanted to try Motocross, unfortunately due to his contract limitations he was not allowed to. So if he could not do it in real life, he decided to build an app.
Thanks to Matison’s affiliation with the Motocross and BMX world, they also focused their marketing strategy very heavily around the biking communities. So at launched, they contacted the worldwide Motocross and biking communities and this fuelled a lot of the growth. For instance Matison commented: ” In Australia one motorcross site wrote about us and the next day we were TOP 20, then we were TOP 10. Its all about the communities. ”
From there on out it is word of mouth, based on the fact that the product is great. We played around with the game and it definitely has a lot of potential. Sometimes the controls can be a little tricky and certain challenges just come at you too quickly, but I guess this is what motocross is all about – tricky controls and almost impossible to react to situations. Of course you can also modify your ride and even ride in a costume of a fearless-chicken.
The company took part in the VBI incubator in Latvia, developed the game in about a year and currently has 6 people working on the project. Fearless Wheels costs $0.99 on iPhone and $1.99 on iPad and currently boasts 40 levels with 10 more to come. Here is a video of the gameplay:
