The hit cybersecurity-focused TV show “Mr. Robot,” a psychological thriller popular among the tech crowd for its relatively accurate portrayal of hacking, is now a mobile game. Released by Telltale Games in association with NBCUniversal, and developed by Night School Studio in collaboration with Universal Cable Productions, the game is played through the fictional E-Corp messaging app, allowing players to communicate in real time with characters in the show.
The game continues the show’s technically correct naming scheme, too. While episodes of the show are often titled with names referencing video files, like .avi or .flv, for example, the iOS game is called Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa — the .ipa referring to the iOS application archive file format. On Google Play, the file is named Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.apk, referencing the Android app file format instead. (Gotta love these little details.)
The game itself takes place during the first season of the TV show, according to the app’s description. The premise is that you find a smartphone on the ground outside the Fun Society Arcade at Coney Island. As fans of the show know, this is the meeting place for the hacking group, fsociety. As it turns out, the phone you’ve found belongs to Darlene, one of the show’s main characters and a black hat hacker poised to commit a large-scale cybercrime.
You’ll “play” the game by texting different employees of E-Corp, the global tech company being targeted by the hacking group, as well as interacting with characters in the show, like Elliot, Darlene and Cisco.
Through your chats, you’ll make choices that have consequences that affect the game’s narrative and story over a week’s time. Something like a modern-day choose-your-own adventure, players are offered different templates of responses they can use to answer the incoming messages.
“There’s a distinct Telltale style to all of the character interactions that our fans will find familiar, and fans of the show will be engrossed all through the night as they race to help fsociety pull off the unthinkable,” said Steve Allison, SVP, Publishing at Telltale Games, in a statement about the game’s release.
The game is not free — it’s a $2.99 download on the iTunes App Store and Google Play, but it doesn’t include in-app purchases or advertisements.
Below is a developer interview offering a behind the scenes look at the making of the Mr. Robot game:
