Natural Motion shows off cute Clumsy Ninja app on the iPhone 5

SAN FRANCISCO — Natural Motion has had a string of hits on the iPhone with titles such as My Horse and CSR Racing. Today, it showed off something altogether different: Clumsy Ninja.

Torsten Reil, chief executive of the game publisher, went up on stage at Apple’s iPhone 5 event to show off Clumsy Ninja, who is an interactive character that you can play with, much like the Talking Tom character from Outfit 7.

Reil said that his company has worked on the character and its artificial intelligence for years with a university. He said you can play with the character, who responds like a shy person. He’s a cute guy you can pick up with your fingers. But he will hide from you if you scare him.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.