In a rare interview, Bluey creator Joe Brumm, the mind behind the show, sat down with Halfbrick CEO Shainiel Deo (Fruit Ninja) to talk about their collaboration to make Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen. The highly anticipated game release is pretty much the only dose of new Bluey storytelling fans are getting this year and one of Brumm’s last contributions to the beloved series he began.
The duo go way back, and when it came to breaking the concept of the upcoming Bluey game, Brumm knew fellow Aussie game studio Halfbrick was the way to go. “They make cool sorts of indie games. Like, that was the spirit of Bluey.” Brumm said of reaching out to Deo and his team to tackle a unique concept for Bluey, “I believe it’s a punk rock sort of show in that sense. So I thought, ‘No, these guys, they’ll make a cool game.’ And that’s happened a few times in Bluey, where people are just powered by, like, an alternate energy source. It’s how things end up good around Bluey.”
And one of those things that ended up good was the fan-favorite episodes “Dragon” and “Escape”, where audiences follow the Heeler family into their own art world. “In the series, we’ve created a mechanic where the kids draw, their drawings come alive, and we see them animated,” Brumm said of how that idea seemed ripe for a gameplay mechanic. “Rainy day outside, the whole family around the table drawing, and we’re going to go into their drawings.”
Brumm continued, “And now the story there is Dad’s taking the golden pen, and Bluey needs it for something she’s doing. And so there’s a pursuit, there’s multiple levels, and Dad’s always eluding them. Mum’s the creator of all the worlds, you know; she draws the worlds.”
“I’m really glad that Joe introduced that mechanic of the drawn worlds,” said Deo. “You know, the shackles were taken off. They could create all these different prototypes, which they would never have been able to do in the real Bluey world.”
Brumm added, “The beauty of these drawn worlds [they are places] where you can be really dastardly and villainous, and the kids love it because it’s their story and it’s a fairy tale and it’s over the top. There’s no meanness or spite there; it’s just a big, goosey game they’re playing.”
Deo cited their shared inspiration: “I was really excited, actually, to have almost like this open world, you know, where Bluey could just ride off, because we always wanted to have some core mechanics but have a place that the players could explore. I think we found lots of really interesting mechanics from games that we would have played way back in the day.” and elaborated, “For me, you look at old-school Zelda games, top-down isometric, there’s heaps of that in there, like Mario Odyssey.”
Joe added, “What I like about the game is that it’s meant to be fun. The story I wrote feels like the simple setup you’d get from a Commodore 64 platformer—we’ve got a problem, and we’ve got a villain, so let’s go get it.”
Deo continued to share how Halfbrick really wanted to honor the family dynamic Brumm began that families all over the world connected to, “For me, it’s just a good old-fashioned game. The worlds are whimsical, the story and the characters, they’re wholesome. They can be irreverent sometimes. Really, there’s just this wholesome sort of vibe to the whole thing. So it’s just a fun experience.”
Brumm explained how the game ties into the adventures he’s spent over a decade sharing through the show: “Bandit’s got a gold pen that can turn everything gold. He’s a bit of a cross between King Midas and David Lee Roth. Yeah—he’s me,” the creator shared, in one of the only times he’s admitted what fans have long speculated, that Bandit is an extension of himself.
Deo affirmed, “I could see that Joe is writing himself into this story 100%.”
The chat also dug into Brumm’s hopes for this latest Bluey release being the same as his hopes for the show. “Success for me with this game means the same as with the series. I want to see happy kids playing this game,” the elusive creator behind Bluey shared, “and when they play it, they’re smiling, and they love it, and they want to show their friends, and they want to tell their parents about it and go, ‘Hey, I did this.’”
Watch the rest of the interview below:
Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen will be available on the Apple App Store on December 11 with a free version to try and an option for a one-time purchase of all the levels. Its release through the Google Play store is set for January 10, 2026. The game is due to expand to bigger systems, including PC, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, later in 2026.
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