Pocket God

In Ep 1, all you could do was pick the Pygmies up and throw them. I'm serious.

What kind of god would you be? Benevolent or vengeful? Play Pocket God and discover the answer within yourself.

—Bolt Creative

Pocket God is a smash-hit app and God Game for the iPod Touch/iPhone. The app was created by Dave Castelnuovo and Allan Dye, of Bolt Creative, a San Francisco-based developer. In Pocket God, you play as a god who has control over a race of islanders called "Pygmies". You can reward them with gifts or kill them. There can be up to six pygmies at a time and if killed, you can bring them back. You also have control over other things as well, such as animals and the weather. The app is constantly updating and has had forty-two episodes released so far. Plenty more are to come.

The app has recieved a comic book mini-series, which has been well received.

It has received a sequel/spin-off for the iPad: Pocket God: Journey To Uranus.

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Tropes used in Pocket God include:

• All Animals Are Dogs: The barking spider barks and whines like a dog.
  • The turtle in the Moron Pests minigame growls like a dog when the Pygmy first disturbs it.
• All Just a Dream: Anything that takes place on the Island of Misfit Crossovers.
  • Or Was It a Dream?: If Pygmies get killed here, it still acts like they got killed like in the real world.
• An Ice Person: The ice monster. A boss battle.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Graveyard Island.
• Bigger on the Inside: Inside the snake. Justified in that this is in a Dream World.
• Bloodless Carnage: The things you can do to the Pygmies and yet they don't spill a drop.
• Bubbly Clouds: The sky (where the 'Ooga Jump' minigame occurs).
• Butt Monkey: The Pygmies.
• The Cameo: Doodle the Doodler appears as an enemy in the Ooga Jump minigame.
• Chew Toy: Again, the Pygmies.
• Crossover: With Doodle Jump, The Creeps!, Harbour Master, Trenches and The Moron Test.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Charlie
• Cruel Player Character God: Guess what this game thrives on...
  • To elaborate: There are twelve gifts and seventy-eight sacrifices. The game encourages you.
• Darker and Edgier: Later updates seem to make the sacrifices more violent and nightmarish.
• Death Mountain: Ape Mountain. Fitting, considering the location's features are all about sacrificing Pygmies.
• Did Not Do the Research: See Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying.
• Downloadable Content: The game has a DLC store, which has various packs. Most of them are skin packs.
• Down the Drain: The pain drain (where the 'Pain drain' minigame occurs).
• Dream World: The Island of Misfit Crossovers. To access it for the first time, you have to tap the dream bubble above a sleeping Pygmy.
• Easter Egg: Three of them:
  • Hold a meteor in front of the sun to cause an eclipse. This can protect the vampire Pygmy when the sun is out.
  • Tapping the Sand Island statue threes times in succession cause it to vapourise all Pygmies and says: "You know you like Pocket God."
  • After cooking a Pygmy over the fire on Rock Island, drop it in the ice hole on Ice Island to create a geyser which sends icicles showering down on Pygmies below.
• Eenie Meenie Miny Moai: There used to be a Moai statue on Sand Island, but it was replaced with a statue of a fictional octopus god. See Unfortunate Implications.
• Eldritch Abomination: The giant demon in the background of the Lava Tube.
• Electric Jellyfish
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: There is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. A boss battle.
• Everything's Better with Monkeys: Not for the Pygmies. They throw the Pygmies off cliffs and rip their faces off!
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: You can create double rainbows. See Shout-Out.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: You can bury Pygmies in a grave which turns them into zombies on Graveyard Island. They then walk about and bite other Pygmies, turning them to zombies as well.
• Everything's Even Worse with Sharks: The shark. You can feed Pygmies to it, drop it on their head, knock them into the water with it, or let them (attempt) to catch it...
• Everything's Squishier with Cephalopods: The ice squid can eat Pygmies. Or pull their head off!
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Well, for the Pygmies...
• Gasshole: One of the idle animations.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Some of the episode names:
  • Ep 21: Flipping the Bird
  • Ep 30: Great Job, Ice Hole
  • Ep 32: Crack is Wack
  • Ep 36: Konkey Dong
• Giant Spider: The barking spider. Also a boss battle.
• A God Is You: Well, duh.
• Gotta Catch Em All: The God Idols.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Some of the episode names:
  • Ep 3: You Always Hurt the Ones You Lava
  • Ep 29: The Pyg Chill
  • Ep 31: What's the Story, Morning Gory?. See Shout-Out.
  • Ep 34: Monkey See, Monkey Chew
• Just Eat Him: Most the wildlife in the game (except for dodo birds, monkeys, fish, and swordfish) kill the Pygmies by eating them. The boss monsters do this to gain health.
  • The ice monster, on the otherhand, can accidentally eat Pygmies if they are flicked at it when it's mouth is open, and this actually does damage instead (according to Bolt Creative, this is because of indigestion).
• Lethal Lava Land: The Lava Tube (where 'The Runs' minigame occurs).
• Mama Bear: According to the help menu, the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Barking Spider are female, and are only attacking to protect their babies.
  • Which makes killing them much Harsher in Hindsight.
• Monochromatic Eyes: Zombie Pygmies have them.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Charlie can turn into a High Priest Vatican Assassin Warlock.
• Off with His Head: If you try to pull a Pygmy too hard when its in the ice squid's grip.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampire Pygmy. It doesn't bite Pygmies or suck their blood. It just knocks them into the ocean.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The zombie Pygmies sport blue skin, pupil-less white eyes and have the classic Zombie Gait. They also perform the Thriller and Smooth Criminal dances.
• Palmtree Panic: Sand Island.
• Potty Emergency: If a Pygmy takes too long in the outhouse, a nearby Pygmy will start waiting, and if you let them keep waiting, they will eventually burst.
• Prehistoria: Technically the whole game (its set in the time of Pangaea), but Rock Island is most fitting (it has a tyrannosaurus Rex).
• Schizo-Tech: Despite being set in the time of Pangaea, the outhouse on Rock Island has a flushing toilet, the underwater area has a shark with a laser gun strapped to it's head and a sunken pirate ship in the background, there is a jetpack in the "Ooga Jump" minigame, and the Pygmies get electric guitars in "The Pocket God Update Song".
• Shock and Awe: One of your god powers is striking Pygmies (and dodo birds and monkeys).
• Shout-Out:
  • "Ep 28: Barking Spider, Crouching Pygmy"
  • "Ep 31: What's the Story, Morning Gory", which is reference to the song "What's the story, morning glory" by Oasis.
  • The zombie Pygmies can do the Thriller dance and Smooth Criminal dance.
    • Ordinary Pygmies can do the Napoleon Dynamite dance.
  • In the alien world skin pack, you can change the meteor into a interrogation Droid and the spear into a lightsaber, the t-rex egg into an alien egg, and can turn the Sand Island statue into the monolith from 2001: A Space Oddyssey.
  • The retro gamer skin pack, which contains references to Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Sonic, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Tetris, Centipede, Galaga, Dig Dug and Q*bert.
  • The demon that appears in the lava tube is a tribute to Ronnie James Dio.
  • "Ep 35: Double Rainbow All the Way Across the Sky" is a reference to the Double Rainbow Meme. The Pygmies even shout qoutes from the video when they see them. In fact, their voices for those quotes are actually Paul "Yosemite Bear" Vasquez's voice (the guy from the video), except digitally doctored.
  • The "Konkey Dong" update.
  • Charlie, a 7th Pygmy who talks about winning, and shouts Charlie Sheen quotes. He also can turn into a tiger (because he has tiger blood and Adonis DNA) and a High Priest Vatican Assassin Warlock. The episode was called "Two and a Half Pygmies" to drive the point home.
• Sixth Ranger: Charlie, a seventh Pygmy. See Shout-Out.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Ice Island.
• Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: The Tyrannosaurus Rex didn't exist in the time of Pangaea.
  • There are hominoids and dinosaurs existing together in the same time/place.
    • This really belongs on Did Not Do the Research, but in a related topic, hominoids didn't exist in the time of Pangaea either.
• Spikes of Doom: In the Pain Drain.
• Super Drowning Skills: Pygmies will drown when they fall in the water.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: In the underwater area, the Pygmies never run out of air, which causes a logic problem with the before mentioned Super Drowning Skills.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: On the Pocket Blog, about the Underwater Skin Pack:

Allan Dye: You can make your island an underwater paradise, with flying dodo fish and sponge doodlers who in no way resemble SpongeBob SquarePants. Okay, maybe a little.

• Take That: A comment on the Pocket God Update song:

Allan Dye: And yes, the pygmies do what any good boy band would do...lip-sync!

• • The Pocket God Update Song itself is a Take That at fans who constantly expect weekly updates.
    • To be fair though, Bolt Creative did say at one point that they would go back to weekly updates, but this never happened....
• Tear Off Your Face: One of the more nightmarish sacrifices.
• Too Dumb to Live: The Pygmies. They'll eat burnt food (which they choke on) and swordfish (which stabs them), and no matter how many times they are brought back, they will continue to eat them.
• Under the Sea: The Underwater Area and Coral Reef.
• Video Game Caring Potential: You can reward the Pygmies with gifts such as food, fishing rods and dancing...
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: ... or you can kill them in a load of different ways: Drowning, flicking, striking with lightning, volcanic eruption, feeding to sharks, feeding to tyrannosaurus rex, feeding the barking spider, feeding to squid, incinerating with magnifying glass, cooking over fire, impaling on spikes, choking on food, thrown off a cliff... the list goes on!
  • You can also use a few things on the dodo bird and monkeys.
• Womb Level: Inside the snake, where the Moron Pests minigame occurs.
• Zombie Gait: Thanks to the zombie Pygmies.