Founded in Auckland, New Zealand in 2006 by brothers Chris and Stephen Harris, Ninja Kiwi released its first game, Bloons, in March 2007. The premise was almost aggressively simple: aim a monkey's dart-throwing arm at a fixed arrangement of balloons, account for gravity and wind, and pop a required number of targets using a strictly limited number of throws.

A Carnival Game Idea From a Developer's Wife

According to the studio's own account, the concept traced back to a suggestion from Stephen Harris's wife, who pitched a browser version of the carnival stall where players throw darts at balloons for a prize. That single trajectory-and-physics puzzle — read the angle, read the power, account for the wind — became Bloons' entire design, stripped down to the same instant readability that made games like Bowman a syndication favorite in the same era.

The Warm-Up Act for Bloons Tower Defense

Bloons' popularity proved the balloon-popping premise had legs, and Ninja Kiwi wasted no time acting on it: Bloons Tower Defense launched free on August 16, 2007 — barely five months later — recasting the same balloons as an endless wave of enemies for a full defense game. The spin-off eclipsed the original almost immediately and became the foundation of Ninja Kiwi's entire studio identity.

Bloons was never meant to carry an empire — it was a single dart-throwing puzzle that happened to prove, in a matter of months, that popping balloons was fun enough to build a tower defense franchise around.

The original Bloons still exists as a quieter footnote in Ninja Kiwi's history, overshadowed by the tower defense series it accidentally spawned — a rare case of a spin-off completely eclipsing the game that made it possible.