Why Apples Were Rejected For 'Monkey Ball' iPhone Game [GDC 2009]

During a panel titled "Post Mortem: 'Super Monkey Ball' iPhone," Ethan Einhorn, SEGA's Producer of Digital Content, talked about the different things they tried with the game before it launched with the release of the iPhone App store last year. One idea SEGA of America had was to have the monkeys collect apples instead of bananas as "a fun reference" to the Apple iPhone platform. Einhorn added, "The Japanese development team said quite reasonably, 'Monkeys eat bananas,' so let's leave it at that."