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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

I feel terrible for thinking that smartphones and mobile gaming didn't start until the iphone. I wrote off years of other people's hard efforts to establish the space that apple absolutely annihilated.

The fact that they had a category for "mobile game of the year" in 2005 just shows how hard people were trying to get smartphones going.

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I was alive during the era and almost no one had commercially released games on their phones. For one thing, storage was incredibly limited. For another, the cost was incredibly high vs what you got - not just the game itself but the actual cost of a plan that would allow you to download the game to your device.

Towards the mid-2000s we started getting some rather elaborate 3D titles but then we ran into the problem of a numerical keypad being a pretty bad control scheme for anything more advanced than simple arcade games or turn-based titles.

The one market that pre-smartphone phone games did well in was Japan but they had some very high-profile franchise tie-ins and otaku are well-known for buying almost anything.

It really is to Steve Jobs’ credit that he was able to wrestle his phone (mostly) out of the iron grips of the operators.

Because that was the reason mobile games worked this way: the operators decided what ran on your phone and the things you wanted apart from that were relegated to the java sandbox, take it or leave it. These days your operator controlled a setting on your phone for how many text messages you could store (on your phone). Pay some extra or be really nice and they changed the setting so you could store 100 messages instead of 50. You can imagine they weren’t too happy to lose that kind of control.

Pre-iPhone was full of all the elements to make an iPhone, but was clearly lacking business people (even in the mobile industry who were raking in money) to push the investment.

PDAs with vibrant full color screens and "acceptable" OSes predated the iPhone. Mobile internet was around for quite a while with awful text interfaces and crap standards.

What was probably missing was a good OS. What happened is that anything beyond a text OS, the industry cowered before the might of Microsoft, and Microsoft can't design UI for a damn, they can only copy it, or put the minimum amount in to try to keep other people from succeeding.

I don't even want to say Apple did some revolutionary job of making the iPhone OS. They just didn't do a terrible one like Microsoft, or hamstring themselves with bad hardware like Palm. Apple simply made a good OS atop a good hardware integration. And that was enough to vastly separate it from all the beancounter businesspeople and Microsoft incompetence.

Microsoft had at least 5 years to establish itself with windows CE and others, but they are just not a competent company when they don't have a monopoly to leverage.

I am not a Jobs fan or an Apple fan, especially since they are as or more anticompetitive than Microsoft, but the pre-iPhone scene really was fundamentally hamstrung by failure-almost-by-design on the part of the business people involved, and so Apple gets credit for that.

But yeah, kudos to those people that pushed the fundamental paradigms and programming, including Apple with the Newton and Palm that kept it moving forward.

I dunno; minus the lack of true multitasking (which the iPhone, too; originally lacked), OG PalmOS got really close, especially for the time.

By the time we got the HandSpring with it's removable/exchangeable extensions like GPS + MP3's, or the Treo, with it's built-in phone - PalmOS always felt solid and was so amazing on battery life it blew the mind.

Did you happen to live during it? If not, believe me, pre-iphone "phone games" basically pale in comparison to stuff that came out for the new era of touchscreen smartphones.

I don't doubt that there were amazing games but it just wasn't the same and I assume those are great more so because they lean in to the platform's flaws.

Maybe, but there were amazing games on the Motorola A1000 which had a resistive touch screen. Scumm was officially launched on there, plus doom, gb and gbc emulators, plus loads of properly released games - I had a tower defense style war game and a driving game that used to blow people away.

Depends on the device. I had Tomb Raider on my PDA in 2002 and it looked and played just as well as it did on the PC back in 1996. Feature phones like the Sony Ericsson series obviously couldn't handle anything like Tomb Raider but they did an excellent job at stuff that looked reminiscent of the SNES era of gaming. I had a few Zelda-style action RPGs (not Doom RPG weirdly though) that were great fun to play.

Tomb Raider was actually released on the Nokia N-Gage in 2003:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/ngage/tomb-raider

It was released on both (there’s a link for the Windows Mobile version in your citation). I never owned an N-Gage though which is why I didn’t mention it (also my opinion of the N-Gage was never that high). However I did own a PDA.

Since we are talking about mobile ports of Tomb Raider, it was also released for the Sony Ericsson range of feature phones too. Albeit in name only because that version was a side on 2D dungeon crawler. I did own that game too but it reminded me more of Roland on the Ropes (Amstrad CPC464) than Tomb Raider.

From what I’ve seen there were some quality ports for the N-Gage. Sega Rally looked surprisingly good from the YouTube videos I’ve seen. But I still don’t regret never owning one since it’s firm factor was, frankly, ridiculous.

I remember being really cool in the early 2k's with a Compaq Ipaq PDA, PCMCIA GPS receiver that slid into the back and TomTom maps in my car. Most devices didn't have GPS then. Damn, they go for a pretty penny on ebay. Have to go dig those things up!

I find it exactly the opposite! There were excellent phone games back then, now it's all microtransaction, spin-to-win/scratch-to-win, ad-infested "experiences" with some inane gameplay on the side, engineered for maximum addictiveness.

The whole J2ME era was a gimmick that went nowhere, did it? Like most of the 2000s write once run everywhere dream Java had for GUI apps.

Sidenote: I would love to read a retrospective of whatever happened to Java on the desktop since. There's an alternate universe out there where we're writing cross platforms apps in Java instead of Electron or Flutter.

It effectively went nowhere, but it wasn't quite as bad as you might think. On the last pre-smartphone I had I ran offline OSM, in J2ME. Not sure about the one before.

Maybe on US it didn't went anywhere.

On Europe Nokia and Sony phones were great at J2ME games, alongside Symbian, naturally like it happens with Android nowadays, when using flagship devices.

J2ME is mostly dead; I think it lives on as an option for interactive content on Blu-Ray though. But just because it's dead now doesn't necessarily mean it was a gimmick that went nowhere, IMHO.

Obviously, write once, run everywhere didn't apply. But Nokia Series 40 was J2ME plus some Nokia extras and had pretty big install numbers until it petered out. Of course, I think all the J2ME platforms had platform extras, if not just platform quirks. Of course, Nokia platforms more or less disappeared in the US somewhere 2005ish (reportedly over disputes about shipping phones with a built in SIP client), and their worldwide popular models were virtually invisible to US population and US based tech news; only after moving to Windows Phone 7 did Nokia phones start showing up in the US in volume again.

Android didn't want to pay for a J2ME license, so they just put actual Java on there (or cough totally not Java cough, but happens to be mechanically translatable from JVM bytecode, depending on how close to a courtroom you are). Having file streams that you can seek in both directions is super handy, so Android has expanded to fill the niche that J2ME phones took on.

I worked making J2ME phone games back then. There was definitely an element of going back to games of 10-20 years before.

When I started we were doing sub 100k games, and by the end it was about 1.5mb.

It was fun trying to make things that fit into tiny spaces.

Nokia and Sony phones could do some very basic 3D, but mostly things were 2D and resources were very tight.

I worked in a startup on an MMORPG that was going to work on phones and PCs, it was very low-poly and I tried to base the look on the video for Dire Straits - Money For Nothing.

I didn't have a good enough phone for any of these games but I read about them on IGN. It seemed ridiculous at the time, at least from the perspective of a high school video game nerd. Why not just focus on a handheld gaming system and let a phone be a phone? I never imagined the digital Swiss Army knives/pocket computers they would become

I remember playing Lock and Load 2 [1] in high school during that era against my classmates via Bluetooth.

It was pretty fun! Symbian has been a great OS, something I reaffirmed when I studied Tanenbaum's circus book in college.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC1xI3oGPU

Symbian was not a great from a development standpoint I understand.

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