Becoming an Earth Bender
The Making of Avatar: The Last Airbender – Earth Rumble
A quote has stayed with me for a long time:
With books, you imagine the story.
With movies, you see the story.
With games, you live the story.
It’s often attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto. Whether or not he said it exactly this way, it captures something deeply true about what we’re building.
With traditional controllers, you live the story through button presses.
With Nex Playground, you live it through your body.
Not digital input.
But physical movement.
The immersion goes one level deeper.
The World
When we think about living a story, few worlds feel as fitting as Avatar: The Last Airbender.
It’s family-friendly.
It has combat, but not violence.
And it carries real emotional depth.
Three seasons. Sixty-one episodes.
A story that aired from 2005 to 2008, but never really left.
For many of us, it’s part of our childhood.
Now, it’s something we share with our kids.
So when our partners at Paramount brought Avatar into the conversation, it immediately stood out.
This one mattered.
Our game designer, Brett Johnson, had long dreamed of building an Avatar experience. Our studio partner, The Odd Gentlemen, shares that same love for the world. From the beginning, there was a shared understanding: if we were going to do this, we had to do it right.
The result is something that feels genuinely new on Nex Playground.
The Experience
Earth Rumble is one of the deepest motion systems we’ve built.
You are in the game.
Every movement matters.
You dodge.
You duck.
You jump.
And you bend.
Small rocks. Large rocks. Spires. Blocks.
All of it happens in real time, in an arena where you face opponents that challenge both your mind and your body.
This is what it means to live the story.
The Making
And this is just the beginning.
We’re already preparing the next “book”, as the Avatar story calls it, with a major update coming later this year that expands the experience even further.
None of this happens without deep collaboration.
Between the team at The Odd Gentlemen and the many teams at Nex — across core technology, developer experience, partnership, playtesting, producer, prototyping, publishing, and quality assurance — this was a true collective effort.
Like many collaborations, there were frictions. Difficult moments. And a heavy dose of midnight oil.
It wasn’t easy. And there’s still more to learn.
But more than anything, we hope this is the foundation of something lasting.
A story we grew up with.
Now a world we can step into, together.