To understand the Trism ($2.99) phenomenon and why Trism II ($2.99) is a historic game, even if it isn’t that great, we need to roll the clocks all the way back to April 17th, 2008- Before the App Store even launched. There was a lot of doubt surrounding how good games could even be on touchscreen devices, as most (if not all) mobile games of the time were played using a stylus in the case of the Palm Treo, the scroll ball (or joystick) in the case of the Blackberry, and similar input methods. Trism was among the first games to showcase just what was possible in a puzzle game where your only inputs were swiping and tilting. Check out this video from our first story on Trism:

The way the original played was, and still is, super clever. You slide rows of triangles to make matches, and then as those matches cleared themselves from the board, additional tiles slid in based on the orientation of your iPhone. The amount of depth the game had with its strategy was really sort of shocking, as stringing together your best matches involved a lot of thinking of which direction you wanted triangles to fill in from- Which really was unlike anything else available at the time. We were so captivated by the game we posted about it a second and third time, calling it “one of the better buys currently available on the iTunes App Store" once it finally launched. Where Trism really started to make waves was when developer Steve Demeter revealed that he had made $250,000...