Scribblenauts

Scribblenauts is an emergent puzzle action video game developed by 5th Cell for the Nintendo DS published by WB Games. The game was released September 15, 2009 in North America, September 30, 2009 in Australia, and October 9, 2009 in Europe. Konami released the game in Japan under the name Flash Puzzle: Maxwell's Mysterious Notebook (ヒラメキパズル マックスウェルの不思議なノート, Hirameki Pazuru: Makkusuweru no Fushigi na Nōto?) on January 27, 2011. It is the third Nintendo DS video game made by 5th Cell, the first two being Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest. The objective of Scribblenauts, as implied by its catchphrase "Write Anything, Solve Everything", is to complete puzzles to collect "Starites", helped by the player's ability to summon any object (from a database of tens of thousands) by writing its name on the touchscreen. The game is considered by its developers to help promote emergent gameplay by challenging the player to solve its puzzles within certain limitations or through multiple solutions.

Jeremiah Slaczka, creator of Scribblenauts, envisioned the game as a combination of solving life situation puzzles alongside Mad Libs. His vision was brought to realization through the "Objectnaut" engine created by 5th Cell's technical director, Marius Fahlbusch. Objectnaut allowed for a data driven approach, and a significant portion of the development time was spent researching nouns and their properties, and categorizing them into the Objectnaut database. This, along with the simple art designs of 5th Cell's Edison Yan, allowed for the team to easily add new words to the database without expending much effort to program new behavior.

Scribblenauts was first shown in a playable form at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, and became a sleeper hit, winning several "Best of Show" awards, being the first portable console game to win such praise. Reviewers believed that 5th Cell delivered on their promise to allow nearly any possible object to be created for use in Scribblenauts, but also lamented that the choice of controls in the game hampered their full enjoyment of the title.

A sequel, Super Scribblenauts, was developed for the Nintendo DS and was released on October 12, 2010. It features enhanced controls, the ability to modify nouns with adjectives, and an increased focus on puzzle levels. An iOS version, Scribblenauts Remix, was released a year later on October 12, 2011, featuring selected levels from both DS games and new levels for the iOS version. A sequel for the Wii U, Scribblenauts Unlimited, was unveiled at Nintendo's E3 2012 press conference. It was named the best of E3 Expo that year. Later, the Scribblenauts Unlimited sandbox game was released under Steam for Windows. In 2013, both Scribblenauts & Super Scribblenauts were re-released as a 2-in-1 combo pack for Nintendo DS, called Scribblenauts Collection.