1997-2000
Mobile games really kicked off in 1997 when snake was released and Tetris was later released in this year. Snake first appeared on the Nokia 6610 phone, it was estimated to have shipped around 400 million copies of the game with the phone. My opinion as too why snake was so popular is that it was addicting, you wanted too keep beating the previous score all the time. The next step was too make something called WAP games. WAP stands for Wireless Application protocol and it allows mobile phones to connect to the internet. Considering YouTube and Facebook weren't around on phones then this was really evolutionary for gaming and actually shaped the modern day app market.
What game designers wanted to do with WAP was simple, hopefully make multiplayer games such as connect 4, chess or naughts are crosses. The key feature here was making a turn based game, I think this could've been quite interesting for the mobile and it would have definitely shaped modern turn based games today. Because of Infra red connections between phones, people could play Snake 2 in 2 player this also has shown how far the online or social gaming of mobiles has grown since 1997.
2000-2001
Steve Jackson's Sorcery was another successful game in the mobile games industry at this time. It was a turned based fantasy adventure game. There was one graphical drawback which is the game frame was limited to 3000 pixels and games were still monochrome at this time too (black and light blue).
There was also another game called "Alien fish exchange". The core aspect of this game was pick an alien and breed it. Initially players start with 2-3 aliens in a fish tank they must feed. the whole aim of the game was too keep them happy so they could breed into new mutations, I personally like the whole idea of this, it was unique for the time and the "happy" and "feeding" options of the fish were definitely unique to the time, it reminds me of Tamagochi somewhat and may have influenced the mobile game industry but not greatly. Another feature of the game is you can breed further exotic types of fish and these can be sold to the restaurant for cash. This game also had a Leader-board which shows off (for the second time besides snake and Tetris) a competitive feature to mobile gaming.
2001-2002
In 2002, there were 2 phones that were released that could support better software for mobile phone gaming. This language could finally come past turn based games or snake, the 2 phones that were released were the Nokia 3410 and the Siemens M50. The only drawback to this revolution of mobile games was that the phones could still not support colour yet and the resolution was also not as good as it could be with just 96x64 pixel screens.
Because of this companies stuck with WAP which was improving and finally brought colour to the mobile gaming industry. A good example of a new game with colour at this time is JAMDAT Bowling because of it's BREW technology which was the second biggest US network operator.
Space Invaders was also a fairly innovative game for it's time. It's still played today showing it has shaped the games industry, it was a large success and was a arcade game before it was released on mobile. This is probably why it was released on mobile in the first place (as it was played so much on the arcade machines).
Picture Source: http://media.pocketgamer.biz/2008/12/9633/jamdat-bowling-r471x.jpg
2005-2006
iFone was a UK mobile publisher in 2005-2006 era of mobile gaming. Through contacts the company was able to release versions of Atari's and Infogames' console games for mobile. iFone was named the best publisher for mobile gaming in 2005. Whilst I believe this too be important Atari and Infogames soon fell in terms of popularity and sales, iFone definitely made a difference but in my opinion it was not enough to make a large difference.
2007-present
January 9th 2007 was the release of the very first Iphone. This year was extremely significant when it comes to influential moments in gaming history. The reason the Iphone was revolutionary is because the app store is still used today, it's been going for 7 years now and has been incredibly successful. The app store is essentially a large market of games and apps that can be downloaded to any Iphone supporting an up to date version of Ios (as most of these games require IOS). This platform for buying games was as simple as downloading music as an Mp3 and payments could be made easily. This shows us the way that consumers use the Iphone, still today millions use the platform to purchase mobile video games. Evidence of the popularity of the app store on the Iphone include Angry birds: 3 billion downloads, Temple Run a 3D infinite runner: 1 Billion Downloads. In my opinion the app store released by Apple is a great platform for buying and distributing games for indie developers and large game companies, as a user of the platform myself I use the app store weekly and it's easy to use and very simple.
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