Box Juice Mobile, a mini-game that is the latest brainchild of Jamaican brother-duo Akeem and Tyreik Pennicooke, is making waves in the gaming space and taking young people on a nostalgic trip down memory lane since its official release on iOS and Android devices in February. 

Akeem Pennicooke, in an interview with Our Today on this morning (March 1), explained that Box Juice Mobile is just a part of the larger Street Boy experience still under development. 

The game, set in multiple locations and featuring a bonus map, Ludi Derby, is rather simple: collect coins and special booster items in a race against others to finish first—all while showing off your best driving skills.

Nearly all the interface in Box Juice Mobile is done in Jamaican Patois, with gamers being prompted in the dialect at select stages of the game and while on the loading screen as an added touch of authenticity.

Box Juice Mobile is available for free and paid purchase in the Google Play and Apple App stores, with the proceeds of paid downloads going to further fund ongoing work on Street Boy.

The 30-year-old Jamaican, who moved to the United States at age nine, told Our Today that Box Juice Mobile offers ‘just a taste’ of a full Street Boy game, which he and his brother Tyreik, 22, are working hard on a demo for.

According to him, Box Juice Mobile was conceptualised on realising that the traditional ‘box juice trucks’ built by young Jamaicans in the 1980s and ’90s are effectively things of the past. The mini-game serves as a digital memento of the once-thriving makeshift toy culture.

“My background is in design, so as a teenager, I studied video game design and I realised Jamaica has reggae music, sports but we don’t have anything in the digital realm and a game was one of those things that [could] represent Jamaica. So, that’s how the idea came [about],” Pennicooke told Our Today.

“Box Juice Mobile is the classic take on using [juice cartons] and making trucks out of them back in the day. It’s based on that concept but now kids aren’t really making those so we moved it to the digital age where you get to play with a box juice truck on your phone. People my age and even older, once they see it, they get it right away,” he added.

The elder Pennicooke, who graduated from the Ohio-based Cleveland Institute of Art, said that Street Boy has been a nearly five-year labour of love that started in 2017. During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, a preview of Street Boy went viral on Twitter, which was a needed boost for the Pennicooke brothers to keep motivated and follow the game through to completion.

“Street Boy is a Jamaican cultural game based on a 14-year-old boy, Arlington, [who] finds his place in his community. Box Juice Mobile is a mini-game that will be featured in Street Boy,” the Jamaican advertiser by profession explained.

“I started in 2017 but we actually don’t have an official start date for the game, because right now, my brother and I are creating a demo to get funding to create the entire game,” Pennicooke noted further.

Tyreik handles 3D effects, Akeem manages programming, animation and level designs while other tasks are outsourced to third-party creatives.

Pennicooke also told Our Today that while box juice trucks aren’t exclusive to Jamaica or the wider Caribbean, he hopes the mini-game resonates with the inner child of all those who come across Box Juice Mobile—remembering the once-treasured innocence of play and how, as children, many of us are fascinated by construction and making miniature replicas of things in the human world.

“With Box Juice Mobile, it’s really about the nostalgic feeling you get. As I said, there’s not much representation of Jamaican culture and I know even cultures in Asia and South America have things that are similar but once you see this game or play it, you can identify Jamaica from it,” said the Montego Bay native.

“Street Boy is, however, what we wanna showcase more; Box Juice Mobile is just a slice of what will be featured in Street Boy,” he added.

Watch trailer: