This was our highlight in 2008. A web-based iPhone/iPod Touch game, contest and birthday celebration all rolled into one. Six hours after its launch, Viking Smackdown was featured in TechCrunch and had over 300 players. In its first week, Smackdown was the featured game and “staff pick” on the Apple Web Apps site. And in its first month, over 100,000 people played worldwide while the story was featured on hundreds of blogs.

You don’t even need a fancy 3G model to play. We’re utilizing the tilt sensor (accelerometer) to trigger action in the Safari web browser. None of that crazy SDK stuff. This is old school iPhone technology.

So grab your device, then head over to VikingSmackdown.com.

But maybe you need another YouTube video to explain how all this got started? Okay. Here’s a another YouTube video:

We have a winner!

After six weeks of intense competition, John Hurwitz of NYC was declared the winner of the Smackdown High Score Contest. We suspect that John truly dedicated himself, like the other 1% of participants who (according to our server logs) played Viking Smackdown for over an hour at a time.

Of course, the game lives on. Even right now, someone, someplace, is probably still playing Viking Smackdown. You could be, too. (http://vikingsmackdown.com)