Plenty of mobile games have tried to make the jump to animation, and back in the summer of 2018 it was Subway Surfers’ turn. Subway Surfers: The Animated Series arrived as an 11 x four-minute, 2D-animated run made in partnership with Canada’s DHX Media and the Denmark-based CGI studio Wil Film, according to Kidscreen, premiering on SYBO’s own YouTube channel on June 1st, 2018.
The series was scripted by Brent Friedman and Francesca Marie Smith, with Daytime Emmy winner Sander Schwartz producing. Animation Magazine reported, at the time, a creative lineup that on paper promised more polish than your average mobile-game tie-in.
Long before any of that, the whole Subway Surfers universe started life as a 2009 short film that won an animation award, according to Animation World Network, made by Bodie Jahn-Mulliner and Sylvester Rishøj about a graffiti artist dodging a grumpy inspector and his dog. That short eventually spawned the mobile game, which by 2017 had become the most downloaded game in the world.
Rishøj later described the cartoon as carrying over the game’s “edgy, cool street-style vibe,” framing the show as a natural extension of the world players already knew rather than a separate creative experiment.
Whether that promise held up depends on who you ask. One independent review from around the time of the premiere, posted on the Blunimation blog, noted that Jake, the game’s signature runner, “looks nothing like his counterpart from the game,” while newcomer Yutani was reworked into a gadget-obsessed inventor with a moody robot sidekick, for better or worse.
Redesign-on-arrival is a familiar story for game-based cartoons. A similar pattern showed up in a previous review of Darkstalkers: The Animated Series, which found a game’s cast toned down and reshuffled until the show was barely recognizable to fans of the source, chasing a broader audience at the expense of fidelity.
On paper, IMDb lists B-Water Studios, DHX Media and SYBO Games as the production companies behind the show, spanning Denmark, Spain and Canada, with the entire run adding up to roughly 48 minutes of total footage and an official billing as a spin-off of the 2012 mobile game.
Looking back at it now, an archival upload of the complete run on the Internet Archive praises the animation, soundtrack and voice acting as solid for what amounts to a promotional short-form series, while also noting that production simply stopped after the eleventh episode in January 2019, with no word since on whether more episodes are coming.
That silence is a sharp contrast to the game itself, which has barely slowed down. The mobile hit had racked up over 1.8 billion downloads by 2021, and SYBO has partnered with Poki to bring it to browsers as a free, officially supported web version, where Subway Surfers has been playable since 2018 and has gathered more than 17 million player upvotes. Eleven episodes and one missed long-form follow-up later, the cartoon never returned, but the characters it introduced are still out there running every time someone loads up the game.
