Mobile Gaming Before the Smartphone

Abstract

Phones carried games a decade and a half before the iPhone. A Tetris variant shipped on the Hagenuk MT-2000 in 1994; Nokia’s Snake, written by Taneli Armanto for the Nokia 6110 and first sold in early 1998, put a game on hundreds of millions of handsets. From 1999 Japan’s i-mode and from 2001 its Java extension, i-appli, made games something a phone owner downloaded and paid for on the phone bill; in Europe and North America, Java ME and Qualcomm’s BREW did the same through the menus that mobile operators controlled, the “carrier deck.” By 2005 mobile games earned an estimated $2.6 billion a year and Electronic Arts paid $680 million for the publisher JAMDAT. The business ran on licensed brands, hundreds of handset versions of every game and operator gatekeeping, and Apple’s App Store made most of it obsolete within two years of opening in July 2008.

Games in the Firmware

The first phone games were built in. In 1994 the Danish-designed Hagenuk MT-2000 included a version of Tetris; the Siemens S1 hid another, called Klotz, and IBM’s Simon had a game called Scramble, both developed in 1993 and released in 1994. They were curiosities on expensive phones.

The game that made phone gaming a habit came from Nokia. Taneli Armanto, a software engineer who joined Nokia in 1995, was given the job of writing “some cool little games” for the upcoming Nokia 6110, while colleagues wrote the phone book, calendar and calculator. He first implemented Tetris, but Nokia dropped it because The Tetris Company wanted a payment for every handset sold, and Nokia did not want to tie royalties to unit counts. Armanto wrote Snake instead, a version of a genre that began with Gremlin’s arcade game Blockade in 1976: a line that grows each time it eats, and dies when it hits a wall or itself. He worked with “very little screen, just a few keys to control the game, not too much programming memory space available.” He added a short delay before each collision so that players could still turn at high speed, and removed it on the fastest level.

The 6110 was announced for December 1997 and went on sale in early 1998, with Snake included. Nokia put Snake and its sequels on phone after phone, including the 3210 and 3310 that became some of the best-selling phones ever made (see Nokia). Armanto received “a little one-time bonus” well after the product was finished; Nokia’s practice was to credit features to Nokia rather than to individual developers.

Misconception: Snake was the first mobile phone game

Snake is the best-known early phone game, but not the first. The Hagenuk MT-2000 shipped with a Tetris variant in 1994, three years before the Nokia 6110 was announced, and the Siemens S1 and IBM Simon carried games the same year. Snake was the first phone game that most people played. See Myths and Misconceptions.

Japan Downloads

Downloadable games arrived first in Japan, because NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service, launched on 22 February 1999, gave content providers what nobody else did: a menu on the phone, billing through the phone bill and a 91 percent share of the revenue (see Dead End: WAP). Konami announced its dating simulation Tokimeki Memorial for i-mode in 1999, and Taito, Namco and Hudson Soft followed with ports of their arcade and 8-bit console games, sold as monthly subscriptions. By 2001 i-mode had 20 million users.

The early i-mode games were web pages: each move loaded a new screen from the server. That changed on 26 January 2001, when DoCoMo’s 503i series of handsets went on sale, starting with the Panasonic P503i and Fujitsu F503i. They ran i-appli, Java programs downloaded to the phone and executed locally, with a limit of 10 KB for the downloaded program. Sega launched its “Sonic Cafe” service with the first handsets, and the games became paid downloads on 25 February. Space Harrier and other arcade conversions followed.

By 2004 Japanese phones had colour screens, 3D graphics and the third-generation FOMA network, and the large publishers made games for them that never left the country. Namco released Ridge Racer for phones; Square Enix released Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, an action role-playing game for DoCoMo’s FOMA 900i handsets, on 24 September 2004, and reported 200,000 registered users on the first day. Square Enix said the game had been designed for those specific handsets and would not be released abroad; it ran on Square Enix’s own subscription service, and when the service ended, the game could no longer be played.

Java and the Carrier Deck

Outside Japan, the technical standard came from Sun Microsystems. The Java Community Process approved the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP 1.0, JSR 37), the basis of Java ME, on 19 September 2000, with Motorola, Nokia and Siemens behind it, and Java phones reached the market in 2001 (see James Gosling and Java). Qualcomm launched a competing platform, BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), in February 2001. BREW ran only on phones using Qualcomm’s CDMA technology but had one large customer: Verizon Wireless built its download store, Get It Now, on BREW and launched it nationally in 2002. Verizon reported more than 50 million downloads of games by 2003.

The phones were programmable, but the store belonged to the operator. Games were sold through the carrier deck, the menu of downloads on the phone’s operator portal. The operator chose which games appeared, where, and at what price, and billed the customer; the publisher received a share after the operator’s cut. Getting “on deck” with the four large U.S. operators, or with Vodafone and its peers in Europe, was the business. In 2004, according to Playfish’s Kristian Segerstrale, billing alone cost 30 to 40 percent of revenue; the result, he said in 2008, was “high price, and low choice.”

Operators preferred names their customers already knew, so the deck filled with licensed brands: film tie-ins, sports leagues, board games, and Tetris, whose exclusive mobile licence was held by Blue Lava Wireless until JAMDAT Mobile of Los Angeles bought it in 2005 for $137 million, together with a 15-year exclusive worldwide licence. JAMDAT, which dominated Verizon’s deck with Bejeweled and JAMDAT Bowling, raised $89 million in an initial public offering in October 2004. On 8 December 2005 Electronic Arts agreed to buy it for $27 a share, about $680 million, rather than spend years building a mobile business of its own.

The other publishers of the period were founded by people from console gaming. Gameloft was founded on 14 December 1999 by Michel Guillemot, one of the five brothers who founded Ubisoft, and became one of the largest mobile publishers. Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and of the failed 3DO, started Digital Chocolate in 2003 with an $8 million investment round, promising original games instead of licences. In Finland, the students who founded Relude in 2003, later Rovio, spent six years making Java games, many of them commissioned by other companies, before Angry Birds (see Angry Birds: Rovio’s 52nd Game).

Porting

Java promised “write once, run anywhere,” and on phones it did not deliver. Each manufacturer implemented MIDP with its own bugs, screen sizes, key layouts, memory limits and proprietary extensions for sound and graphics, and a game had to be adapted and tested on every handset it was sold for. Large publishers maintained hundreds of versions of each game, built by porting teams and specialist porting companies, and Segerstrale’s 2008 talk contrasted a launch on 1,000 handsets with starting on ten. The cost of porting favoured big publishers and simple games.

The industry nevertheless grew. Global mobile game revenue was estimated at $2.6 billion in 2005, and more than $3 billion in 2007, with Japan, China and the United States the largest markets.

N-Gage

Nokia tried to sell a phone built for games. The N-Gage, launched on 7 October 2003 at $299 unsubsidised, was a Symbian smartphone shaped like a handheld console, with games sold on memory cards. To insert a game the user had to remove the plastic cover and the battery, and because the speaker and microphone sat on the edge, a call meant holding the device sideways against the cheek (“sidetalking”); its shape earned it the nickname “taco phone.” Sony announced the PSP at E3 that May, and Nintendo’s DS followed in 2004. Nokia replaced the N-Gage with a redesigned N-Gage QD in 2004, sold about three million in total, and withdrew the hardware from Western markets in November 2005. Fewer than 60 games were released for it. Nokia later reused the name for a games service on its Series 60 smartphones, “N-Gage 2.0,” in 2007.

Dead End: The Operator Store

When Apple opened the iPhone App Store on 10 July 2008, it changed every term that had defined the business. There was one store for every iPhone instead of one per operator per country; the developer set the price; Apple paid 70 percent of it; and there was one hardware family to port to instead of hundreds (see The Rise of the App Store). Google’s Android Market followed the same model. Within about two years the carrier deck lost its importance, the porting companies lost their purpose, and the publishers whose business was getting licensed brands onto operator menus either moved to the app stores or disappeared. Digital Chocolate closed in 2014.

The carrier deck failed because the operator was in the way: it controlled discovery, set prices and took a share for a billing service that cost the developer more than it was worth. i-mode had shown that operator billing could work when the operator passed on most of the money. The operators in Europe and North America kept the larger share and the control, and lost both when the phone makers opened their own stores.