Mobile gaming has certainly come a long way over the past decade. I remember sitting with friends playing Snake on the Nokia 6110, mastering the two finger diagonal controls to get out of tight spaces, and trying to out-do each other’s high scores.
Then came the Java games on color screens and the ensuing hours spent on Solitaire and Pacman clones, and badly converted platformers.
Gaming on a mobile phone was something firmly in the realm of geekdom, reserved for the rare few who resorted to their phones for entertainment when waiting for a train. The rest of the unwashed masses didn’t really care that their mobile phone played games. It was a phone…it made phone calls, end of.
Lots of manufacturers did try to kick gaming off in a bigger way, though. After all, the logic was sound; people carry their phones in their pocket all day long, so why would they need to buy a portable Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, or any other gaming device separately?
Surely if one could just integrate a gaming experience into the existing tech in people’s pockets, they’d lap it up, right?
