Source: pixabay.com
Nokia N-Gage is a terminal that sought to revolutionize mobile phone gaming 20 years ago, but whose demand was quite limited. We are talking about a phone aimed at the gaming public in 2003, a time when touch screen phones did not exist until they were released on the market in 2007 by Apple with the first iPhone and later in 2008 the HTC G1 with Android.
Currently, although there are gaming-oriented mobile phones such as ASUS ROG or Black Shark, most smartphones are compatible with any game on the market. In this way, mobile phones have become an alternative to play as popular as PCs or consoles, even providing entertainment beyond video games such as online casinos where we can find the automatic roulette wheel, among other games of chance; or traditional games such as chess or sudoku, but in digital format. One of the most popular is Wordle, a kind of digital crossword puzzle where you guess a hidden word with a limited number of tries.
N-Gage was born from Nokia, a company that became popular in the 90s thanks to the 3310 phone, but whose lack of long-term investment and confidence in its success caused them to plummet within the sector. Despite this, in 1998 it surpassed Motorola, becoming the first mobile phone manufacturer, controlling 40% of the world market, until the arrival of touch phones.
Source: pixabay.com
Originally, N-Gage was a project between Nokia and Nintendo to launch a hybrid between a portable console and a mobile phone. The Japanese company ended up abandoning the idea, although Nokia wanted to continue alone despite its lack of experience in the video game sector.
This is how in 2003 N-Gage came out within the 60 series of Nokia mobile phones, with the Symbian operating system, which was the most widespread at the time. Its appearance was halfway between a portable console and a mobile phone with a vertical screen, control crosshead on the left side and numerical keys on the right, where two control keys stood out.
One of the big problems was its high price, 300 euros. While its main competitor Game Boy Advance was already established at only 100 euros. In addition, the internal memory of the device was 3,4 MB, a limited capacity with 128 MB expandable cards that had to be purchased separately.
With negligible space, games ran through memory cards, cartridge-style. Likewise, to change games you had to turn off the device, remove the back cover, change the card and start the phone. Quite tedious actions compared to any portable console.
Another of the negative factors that N-Gage found was a small catalog of games, although it had large launch franchises such as Tomb Raider, FIFA or Call of Duty, the developers lost interest due to its low demand. Announcing in 2005 the end of its production.
Thus, Nokia failed to popularize gaming on N-Gage mobile phones. But looking back, they were not wrong when nowadays playing on a smartphone is a fairly common practice.
