The History of Mobile Phone Games

The first game that was pre-installed onto a mobile phone was Snake on selected Nokia models in 1997. Snake and its variants have since become the most-played videogame on the planet, with over a billion people having played the game.

However, until the introduction of wap and JAVA (J2ME) compatible phones, there was no way of buying and installing a game and so the market was limited. When wap compatible phones became available, sales of mobile phone games took off with many specialist game companies popping up to take advantage of the new market.

Initially, the limitations of the mobile phones meant that many games were clones of early arcade games such as Space Invaders and Pacman. As the capabilities of the phones increased, so did the scope of mobile gaming - from black & white sprites with 'beep' style sounds to full colour 3D polygons and sampled music.

As the complexity of the games increased so did the development costs. This was further compounded by the ever increasing number of mobile phone models that were available – porting and testing a game to 200 different phones doesn't come cheap!

The increasing cost of development and network operator's desire to sell branded games (requiring expensive licensing deals) soon led to many of the small mobile phone games companies going out of business or being bought up by games industry giants such as Electronic Arts. Today the market is dominated by just a handful of companies such as EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu and HandsOn who produce polished and original games for a huge range of mobile phones.