N-Gage: Cell Phone Gaming's First Big Flop | Past Mortem [SSFF]

hey i'm derek it's me derek and welcome to stop skeletons and fighting in 2020 it was estimated that apple is the third largest video game company in the world well above nintendo and rubbing elbows with sony and microsoft which is weird because apple doesn't make games but they own the app store and hey turns out people really like the game on their phones the vast majority of app store purchases are games there is a lot of money to be made so much that well epic is currently forcing the industry to air out all kinds of dirty laundry in court but we should remember apple wasn't the first no the first device to really attempt to bring together video games and cell phones was oh my gosh oh in the middle of filming awesome i'm sorry everybody hello the nokia n-gage the nokia n-gage and friends let me tell you the tale of how it all went wrong is a fascinating one because the n-gage was the embodiment of ambition it had a full 3d tony hawk its own elder scrolls game a genre romero fps and futuristic tech that would become the standard like leaderboards wireless multiplayer internet capabilities rev it up with mp3s whatever the hell that means all wrapped up in a little taco that fits in your pocket it was released to compete against the gba and it was an extremely worthy competitor and a monumental failure so hop on oh wait that's not my show welcome back to past boredom where we break down and explore the stories of video games and it's time to talk about the little device that saw the future but just could never deliver it the nokia n-gage you might be surprised to learn that nokia as a company is over 150 years old beginning life as a humble wood pulp company in what is now finland but what was then the russian empire founded in 1865 nokia was a player in the wood processing business for over 35 years before expanding into electricity in the early 1900s from there nokia spent the next century gobbling up various companies and dipping their fingers into random industries they didn't start making phones until the 1980s starting with the mobiros senator and iterating from there and yes that is gorbachev doing important politics on one of nokia's earliest phones you don't run an eastern european company for over a century without learning to play both sides after a major internal shake-up in the early 1990s a devastating finish recession and you know the whole collapse of the soviet union nokia switched directions and went all in on the cellular market here's the thing about nokia they had a long history of being a bit of a shape-shifting company never afraid to take risks and innovate and with their focus now on cell phones is set to work and soon found themselves leading the pack they designed fashionable phones with wider varieties of styles and colors as well as scheming up luxury models for the disposable income crowd if you are my age either this or this is probably your first cell phone as they are not just some of the best selling cell phones but best selling devices in the history of electronics by the year 2000 nokia was a 30 billion dollar company roughly one third of all the world's cell phones were nokia cell phones their success came not just from the hardware side having the hottest phones on the market also meant innovating on the software running them and as both the hardware and software cell phones evolved there was more potential for video games beginning in 1997 you began to see snake pre-installed onto nokia's latest devices oh your first phone game was angry birds mine was snake this is my generation's pong primitive block and dot games were basically all phones could handle in terms of gaming at the time but remember this was when cell phones were built for phone calls first and foremost however technology evolved in nokia phones would eventually be some of the earliest to support java moving games well past blocks and dots and when some of those so-called j2me games started catching on in big ways your bejeweleds your zumas nokia took notice of a new emerging revenue stream there was money to be made selling games on phones of course portable gaming had been big business for years i mean look at nintendo the game boy was the top dog for most of the 90s despite competition from a slew of technically more advanced rivals the atari links in the game gear the wonder swan and the neo geo pocket but these were all just flashes in the pan compared to the unbreakable brick board which i feel need to remind people when almost a decade without a meaningful hardware upgrade we could thank pokemon for that but while the game boy was making baby steps portable technology was going through a boom of course it got nokia's wild success with cell phones but there was also walkmans portable cd players pdas and of course the ti-83 graphing calculator the game boy your teacher can't take away from you but then i'm also carrying a wallet and keys on top of that a fresh pair of jinko jeans can only contain so much people clearly the forthcoming millennium would be all about the battle of consolidating those gadgets into a single device and let's be real the gaming component would probably be the toughest part to nail and nokia knew that before directly competing with pokemon and they just released gba they first came to nintendo for an alleged partnership if you can't beat them join them right the story goes that in the early 2000s when the ds was still in early r d nokia pitched a nintendo phone a device to combine nintendo's gaming hardware with nokia's cellular tech the concept apparently spent some time in r d and was officially pitched to the board of directors where it was then rejected because of course it was or as the rumor goes this of course has never been confirmed publicly by either party but you know it's hard to believe that nokia and nintendo didn't at least talk before the n-gage but what we do know is that nokia was a company that built itself on risk and innovation there was money to be made in video games and they were going to get a piece of the action in november 2002 nokia announced their entry into the video game market with the n-gage game deck at their annual mobile internet conference event as explained by company spokesman keith nowak snake debuted in 1997 then we went to downloading games onto a cell phone then downloading even more levels for those games this is part of that evolution though there wasn't much in the way of system specs at this point nokia went ahead and promised that their upcoming handheld would boast gameplay richer than the gameboy advance held on swappable multimedia cards and working relations with some of the biggest publishers in the industry oh yeah and it was also a cell phone but they came out swinging in addition to serving up multiplayer over bluetooth and online connections which i'll remind you was still revolutionary for the time there was also a whole suite of other promised online features downloadable strategy guides cheat codes leaderboards even the ability to record and share game clips with other users in 2002 features years ahead of their time all wrapped up in a cell phone design that fit easily in your pocket of course promising the moon before you even unveil the damn thing is usually not the smartest idea but at the time nokia was one of the few companies that could actually pull this off so nokia had officially tossed its hat in the ring but talk is cheap they needed to show that they could back it up and there was no better place than e3 2003 for engage's big public debut nokia went all out with a big budget space on the show floor and an on-stage presentation on may 13th and by all accounts they they will uh when they say you never get a second chance to make a first impression the showcase opened with everyone's favorite game staple an awkward song and dance number complete with what has been described as the engage rap please believe me when i tell you we looked all over for any footage of this cursed performance there are pictures and brief b-roll snippets but nearest i can tell there is no surviving footage of the cursed engage rap so i prepared for you all a dramatic re-enactment my name is derek and i'm here the comedy of errors only continued over the course of the next hour with numerous technical and audio snafus in lackluster game demos with frame rates in the single digits at some point a short-haired john romero of doom and daikatanafame sauntered onto stage and showed off his port of red faction eurogamer described romero's presentation as quote one of the longest periods of silence in gaming history again we can only pray that one day video surfaces but that still wasn't the worst of it this is 2003 it ain't over until the booth babes show up to cap off the show a lady holding a skateboard walked onto stage and began dancing she then removed her shirt to reveal her bikini top and the n-gage's price painted on her stomach the n-gage would launch in the fall at a whopping 299 dollars with games going for 30 to 40 bucks a pop it was reported that there was quotes no applause now compare that to the game boy advances launch price of a hundred dollars with games topping out at around 30 the price was called suicidal a number so ridiculous that it immediately doomed the entire platform not even turk from scrubs could save it but his video game moment was still to come but i can see what nokia was thinking here i mean many phones of the time were priced roughly around three to four hundred dollars and when pressed on the price nokia's head of entertainment and media elka reiskanen said that at that price you're basically getting a brand new cell phone with a game console as a bonus and by that metric yeah it was a bargain since they could also play um check my notes here red faction but it created a question for the engage that would forever haunt it was it a cell phone that played games or a game system with a cell phone and somehow the ice-cold reaction to the unveiling still wasn't the worst thing to happen to the n-gage on the same day sony the masters of the e3 upset announced that they too were entering the handheld market with the playstation portable psp yes playstation portable it's simple this was such a big deal that they didn't even show anything but it stole the show kudaragi stood in front of a powerpoint slide held up a umd and that's all it took it didn't hurt that the hardware specs they planned for it ate nokia's lunch i mean sure the n-gage could compete with the gba but the psp was on a whole different level super impressive 3d graphics movie playback its own wireless multiplayer service all it seemed to lack in comparison was the cell phone functionality which outside of releasing much earlier than the psp was really the only thing the n-gage had over the competition except well that had its own set of issues so here it is the n-gage it's uh it's pretty big it's light i actually think it's pretty comfortable even if it looks like a little choco taco at a glance man i don't know it's pretty neat but the second you start using the thing problems immediately show up for example to make calls on an engage you have to not hold it flat against your face uh like this but like this because the speaker the earpiece is actually up here and thus the legend of the side talk was born complete with websites dedicated entirely to photos of people getting their side talking on that's right the engage was one of the first internet memes this is the actual lasting legacy of the engage if you knew anything about the engage it was probably this and if you've never heard of a young age this tells you enough hello hello they hung up actually the other legendary thing about the n-gage is that the design was allegedly inspired by goatsi which i mean i mean who knows who knows that's actually true but there are more important things easy there are more important things to discuss we we have to move on the facts were the n-gage was incompetently designed which is baffling nokia you make cell phones this is a bad design for a cell phone maybe the reason the speaker was on the side was that this tiny device literally didn't have any room anywhere else looking at the screen size in particular it's pretty obvious this was designed from scratch it was a frankenstein's monster from other cell phone designs this screen is fine for a phone but for gaming it sits with the dreamcast vmu and the pokemon mini not really something to play full 3d games on the best example of this is without a doubt sonic n which has a letterbox option just to make the game fully playable like look at this it is approximately one and a half by one inch this isn't so much a red flag that your device has problems so much as one with flashing lights and a bull horn it is one of the most ridiculous things i have ever seen the d-pad isn't great and using the number pad as buttons gets the job done but doesn't allow for much precision because their primary use was for dialing phone numbers and there isn't even a button that launches you directly into games but there's an fm radio button even for o3 what even the swappable multimedia cart idea seems to come from nokia's cell phone centric brain they'd have you believe this is a gaming device yet to swap out games you must remove the back plate remove the battery and slide in the cart there sure this tony hawk looked better than the gba versions and let's actually take a second to admire that all problems aside i'm impressed this game runs and plays as well as it does but to then have to do all of this just to swap from a gba sonic port to a ps1 tony hawk port was a kickflip too far when nokia announced their plans to enter the video game market the gba was their only competition but by the time they officially unveiled the engage the gba's improved upgraded model the sp had dropped and sony had officially entered the chat at this point nintendo had been undefeated in the portable market and sony was riding high on the success of a system that was well on its way to becoming the single best selling console in history yes engage was the only system with cell phone tech but it was still going to be a monumental task to square up against the competition undeterred nokia spent the months leading up to the n-gage's release locking down more publishers and tried to generate as many headlines as possible in one ill-advised example ilka reiskanen took shots at the gba writing their competitor off as a system for 10 year olds nintendo in response would describe themselves as unthreatened by nokia's upcoming entry into the market never forget the motto nintendo makes games does not play games in any event the last couple of months leading up to the launch saw games news sites gearing up for engage coverage adding engage categories and sections to their sites sharing all of nokia's press releases and hyping up their early impressions of the hardware sure it was a rocky dismount at e3 but the gaming press was ready to treat it like a real competitor they were given as fair a chance as anyone else october 7th 2003 the engage launched and how to do of course there were day one events some people lining up outside of stores but in reality it was not just bad but far worse than anyone had predicted first week sales in north america apparently totaled 5 000 units with sales in the uk reported as low as just 500 units now for comparison a year and a half earlier the gba sold 540 000 units in just its first week on us shelves maybe not the fairest comparison but still a factor of 100 to 1. part of the engages problem was a matter of accessibility nokia was a cell phone company at heart and on the tech side of things the n-gage was definitely phone first game system second which meant buying a system also meant getting yourself signed up with a cellular service plan a process which fun fact sucked back then too because of this n gauges were primarily sold by phone retailers they were available at game stores but if you bought and engaged out of eb games you still need to bring it elsewhere to activate the cell phone portion to then play the games even to get our engage up and running today we had to trot over to ebay and buy a dummy sim card apparently systems were sold with 30 day prepaid cards but there was still a monthly service plan after that it was a huge extra step between nokia and the gamers they were trying to court from nintendo and sony what people wanted was a game system that was a cell phone but instead what they got was a cell phone that played games which ironically is what we have now but it was 2003. and let's take a quick look at the games eight games were released within the first few days of the system and let's break them down real fast sonic n super monkey ball jr and puyo pop were all gba ports tony hawk tomb raider and pandemonium were all ps1 ports this version of puzzle bobble is terrible legitimately one of the worst games i've ever played and space impact evolution x which was a packing game was just a sequel to nokia's fine i guess shooter that was already on a bunch of their devices and this is just my take the few reviews the time weren't much better if you really cared about games at the time there was nothing here for you i mean it was neat having ps1 ports in your pocket tony hawk is shockingly really good and it's still really impressive to see the first tomb raider running on this thing but these games were four and seven years old at this point and despite advertising online gaming via cellular service it wasn't available at launch and when it was added it suffered from incredible latencies of up to 10 seconds suddenly a game boy link cable doesn't sound so bad was it really a surprise no one was rushing out to buy these things the response by nokia was swift by the second week of availability the price for the engage was slashed by 100 at gamestop and eb games locations in north america hope it was a well-paying gig for that bikini babe because she took her shirt off for basically nothing if you resided in the uk though you might have managed an even better bargain at mobile providers you can get your hands on an engage for as little as one penny with a more costly service plan to pair obviously but you can't make moves like that without people noticing the public began perceiving nokia as extremely desperate and to be clear they were within the company the goal was to move between 6 million and 9 million engages by the end of 2004 one year after launch with division director lauren schuster claiming that represents the critical mass required for the business to become a successful platform now seeing as nokia managed to sell through 150 million of their standard phones in the previous year in 2002 these engaged predictions sounded pretty reasonable but between those poor launch sales the number of gbas already in the wild and the public knowing that new handhelds would soon be on the way oh yeah sony announced the psp that summer but in november just one month after the end gauge dropped nintendo announced what would be the ds that six to nine million goal was looking more and more unrealistic on the public side nokia tried some clever spin bragging that over four hundred thousand units were sold to retailers which is clever business speak for moving 400k from warehouses but says nothing about how many moved into customer hands and even that 400k number was in contention regardless of whatever numbers they were throwing around the facts were that the likes of gamestop were already working to rid themselves of their stock removing as many as a third of their locations from the engage supply chain in terms of software sales for its october launch tomb raider became the system's top seller with only 2 960 copies other titles were even more dire thq's mlb slam only sold 153 copies your cousin's mixtape sold more than that and that was in spite of nokia's own distribution shortcomings apparently the selection of engaged games actually at a given retailer was a total crapshoot even with its limited library no one location would ever have the whole selection not many people wanted their games and those who did couldn't reliably get them if there were any die-hard engaged fans they were more likely to get their hands on games in a different way piracy within just a month of the system launched hackers already managed to crack nokia's game encryption and started putting all them up for download online not only that you wouldn't even need an engage to play them as it turns out they would run on any of nokia's symbian os phones remember what i said but these were not game systems with cell phones these were cell phones that played games nokia talks some big talk and they really went for it but pretty much immediately the n-gage was a full-on laughing stock point where websites were turning on it completely ngage would close off the year with eight more games 16 total which isn't bad but let's look at that lineup four sports games the gba port of rayman 3 the gba port of splinter cell moto gp which is not a gba port technically but still another game available on the gba and the highlight probably being john romero's red faction port a fairly impressive port of the ps2 game but honestly nothing you couldn't get on the gba on the surface these games are all actually fine outside of the screen size of course they're all mostly playable the bigger point here is outside of a really solid port of a four-year-old tony hawk game the n-gage had almost nothing for people who cared about games to use their own words against them it's the game stupid by february 2004 just five months out nokia had no choice but to admit they had fallen well short of their projections nokia chairman and ceo would confess that the sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal which is ceo speak for yikes he gave the system a hard deadline to prove itself november 2005 the system's two year anniversary and this is what i love about this story nintendo virtual boy flopped shut it down sega 32x flopped shut it down nokia the young gauge flops okay buster you got 19 months to shape up but that's it like can you imagine a company so massively successful that when a product expected to move millions instead only moves thousands you then give the team a year and a half to turn it around if that doesn't tell you how huge nokia was i don't know what else to tell you but they did have an ace up their sleeve a new hardware revision that they had hoped might solve some of their troubles just in time for the end of q104 nokia finally went public with plans for a new and improved n-gage though rumors had already been kicking around for months the upgraded system would be christened the qd an abbreviation for the latin quakeway da translating to everyday but let's just drink that in just imagine nintendo announcing the sp six months after dropping the gba that's what the qd was it has got to be one of the fastest redesigned turnarounds in history the stated purpose of the update was to cut down on production cost as well as fix some of the more evident design flaws of the original model such as no longer requiring the removal of the system battery in order to swap games or requiring it to be held sideways to use as a phone though it did not increase the screen size though other notable changes include axing the pointless fm radio functionality and adding a handy button to launch players immediately into games funny what designers can come up with after the fact this qd model was the real deal it is a solid piece of hardware and in total transparency this is the model we've been playing we were not able to get our original model engage working trust me it's dead but playing on the qd maybe this is why i kind of think these games are they're all right trust me i have played worse ngage had another showing on e3 may 2004 with a heavy focus on the spiffy new qd model along with a batch of new games and to be fair while psp and ds got their official unveiling they were behind mega long lines hey no waiting at the qd kiosks but nokia was still putting in the hours making a solid effort to make this work and if you were excited about the qd there was good news well if you lived in europe because they got the qd model later that month in may 2004 canada and the us would have to wait a bit longer in the meantime engage fans got some bad news in june just a month out from e3 nokia's chief strategy officer said during a helsinki press event that they'd be cutting the promised 50 to 100 games before the end of the year down to just 40. the company quickly tried to backtrack and put out a press release claiming that he misspoke and that they were still planning on 50 games to be out for the holidays why they decided to make this announcement a few weeks before the qd dropped in north america is beyond me when it did finally release in america in july nokia sweden the deal with a 99 rebate and a free copy of tony hawk's pro skater i mean yeah again it's a solid port but a solid port of a now five-year-old ps1 game ain't no one camping outside best buy for that the qd was a much improved device but the games simply weren't coming by the end of 2004 they'd only managed to release who wants to guess was it 50 games 40 games 33 games in the entire year since the original n-gage launched that is virtual boy numbers it was bad and by the end of the year the nintendo ds and sony psp had both launched in select markets with the rest of the world following in 2005. even if a region didn't yet have the ds or psp gamers would patiently wait until it did or just import it but this is just the public facing side of things as engage's credibility publicly crumbled things weren't going much better behind the scenes either when nokia disclosed their second quarter 2004 financial reports they had to admit to shareholders a 5.7 drop in worldwide production sales of course this wasn't the engage's fault at least not solely i mean nokia was a multi-billion dollar company with a lot more going on than just the n-gage and the fact was that sales for nokia's standard cellular devices had dropped since the previous year owning largely two competitors releasing slick new phone designs once these reports went public nokia's stock took an immediate 16 dive on the finished stock exchange this of course prompted swift major changes within nokia now as far as the end gauge goes nokia's multimedia division which included the engage business was actually operating at only a minor loss compared to some other wings the n-gage wasn't the sole reason why nokia was in trouble but still it was underperforming and heads were going to roll in early 2005 director of nokia's game business program division ilka nintendo was not a threat reiskanen was reassigned further away from the engage and there were rumors of production and r d facilities shutting down this prompted the uk's preeminent sales tracking service chart track to stop publishing engaged data altogether as they plainly laid out the fact that quote sales of the machine and its software have failed to make any impact on the market at all an absolutely brutal truth and one that nokia themselves must have been all too aware of also in january nokia announced 1.3 million engages had sold a significant portion of those sales came from a release into the asia pacific region and yeah 1.3 million that's not nothing but the ds just did half a million in its first week and this was a far cry from 6 million the minimum goal that had been set all the way back at launch in 2003. in the face of everything nokia said engage wasn't going anywhere and true to their word they stayed competitive systems were slashed to 99 oh we gotta update the bikini babe there we go and games went down in price too engage had another public showing at e3 2005 and would release 20 games in north america making 2005 the system's most prolific year yet but did it work in an october press event held in barcelona they reassured the public of their continued commitment to the engage system but just one month later on november 7th 2005 the two-year deadline nokia finally gave it up having fallen short of every projection and failing to gain any real traction in the portable gaming market the n-gage game deck officially ceased production by the end of the year its last games to release would do so with limited distribution and fanfare over the course the next several months trailers for these games exist but most don't even bother to show gameplay or the system itself north america 2006 saw the release of three games the final being warhammer 40k glory in death fitting the final system library was 57 games in north america 63 in powell nokia admitted defeat and had formally bowed out of the handheld gaming market but believe it or not this wasn't quite the end of the n gauge at the end of the day nokia still saw that games could be a big business on their phones with the collapse of the engage nokia finally saw the light instead of trying to make a game system with the phone they just brought the games to their phones you know the things that are some of the best-selling electronic devices in human history the engage branding was repurposed as an early digital distribution service where upcoming nokia phones would come pre-loaded with the app to purchase and download games sometimes called engage 2.0 2.0's public launch was in the spring of 2008 which came with a catch this service wouldn't work on the actual n-gage system because these new games would be too advanced for the older hardware to handle now i can't imagine many people were still using n-gages as their primary cell phones in 2008 but that's still a pretty solid cell phone that's what i would call a solid cell phone cell phone hello burn ward can you prepare a gurney thank you nokia had moved on to newer and better phones and engage 2.0 was poised to be a killer feature but when it finally launched it only offered a grand total of six games one of which was just a poker game ah for sakes guys but of course nokia never goes down without a fight and they would attempt to fill out their lacking catalog and you gotta give them respect they somehow lock down exclusive entries in the metal gear and resident evil franchises which what there's also an edf game apparently nearly 50 titles were released over the span of 18 months but unfortunately none of these games move the needle as a matter of fact nokia as a whole would enter into a decline around this time in the face of new competitors in the cellular market their business peaked in 2007 where they represented 40 percent of the mobile industry and then that slice of the pie chart started rapidly shrinking you know that gadget you're probably watching this on yeah smartphones like the iphone which first launched in june 2007 or android which came out in 2008 touch screen smartphones dropped like a bomb and everything else quickly became obsolete and that's not just hardware wise with these two new major mobile operating systems came with their own dedicated digital storefronts with software offerings quickly putting engage 2.0 to shame who needs our exclusive resident evil game nokia i got resident evil 4 on my iphone and it's just as good probably oh and resident evil degeneration did eventually come to ios uh you'll always have mgs portable i guess in any case nokia discontinued engage 2.0 in the fall of 2009 first shutting down their dedicated game development studio and later announcing the plan closure for the engage storefront in september 2010 though thanks to the ipad dropping earlier that spring it's likely you've noticed though the game deck system had died years ago this was the final nail in the coffin for the name the shambling corpse of the n-gage was finally put in the dirt in 2010. the engage 2.0 was succeeded by a new service ovi it was nokia's attempt to match the broader offerings of apple and google's app store there was also an effort to port a portion of the engage 2.0 game library but by 2014 ov would be discontinued as well where nokia by that point had become a shadow of its former self while the company managed to hold on to its market majority until around 2010 they underwent major changes after making a big deal with microsoft in 2011 to manufacture and develop windows phones later in 2013 microsoft announced plans to acquire nokia's mobile phone business as part of an initiative by ceo steve ballmer to re-envision microsoft as a device and services distributor but it wasn't too long after that they decided to just do away with the nokia name entirely and to brand all their mobile interests under the broader microsoft umbrella of course there's a lot more to nokia's existence since they remain a shape-shifting technology company but much like the n-gage nokia's mobile phones would go out not with a bang but with a whipper the n-gage as a product and then a brand started as a competitor to the gba and would find itself squaring up with just about every tech titan over a seven year run nintendo and then sony 2 then apple and android before microsoft gobbled the whole thing up it's the forest gump of failed early 2000's tech consumer electronics has many busts but the n-gage just refused to die despite never once actually being successful that is the legacy that is important to me and that is why i loved making this video this video was just about the story which was big enough that we needed to give the games their own space for their own video that is coming it's already in the cans coming very soon it's already available on patreon a lot of people to thank for this video huge shout out to cass was our lead researcher and writer for this project uh big up to the n-gage discord which that exists and they were awesome they helped us out and gave us a lot of uh a lot of assets and pictures and info big thanks to kelsey lewin for helping us track down an original engage and lending us a few games thanks to evan mcveigh for assisting with the edit and of course huge shout out to all of our patreon supporters who have been supporting us for six years now we are almost at our 1100 patreon goal which means it's about zebo time it's time for resident evil 4 on a damn zebo get ready all right support us if you can if not tell a friend what's the dumbest greatest youtube channel well lie and say it's ours but just tell a friend about stop skeletons of fighting i'm uncle derek that is producer grace over there and we just say thank you so much for watching we'll see you again real soon stay powerful

Channel: Stop Skeletons From Fighting

Views: 212,579

Rating: 4.9459281 out of 5

Keywords: ngage, n-gage, post mortem, cell phone

Id: sk7Pf12tUpA

Length: 33min 59sec (2039 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/DragonPup]

I remember seeing the N-Gage at E3 way back when. I asked the company rep how you change the cartridge and you had to turn the phone off entirely and remove the battery to get to the cartridge slot. Seeing how much of a pain in the ass that was made me realize how hard it was going to flop.

[u/Jackobi]

Man, oh man. Me and my school mates spent hours playing HORSE on Tony Hawks pro Skater. Tomb raider wasn't too shabby as well. Most games really weren't that good, but it was really great playing those really great java games with a game console-like input like Splinter cell games, 1944,... and some symbian games like Bounce.

[u/Fatdude3]

I had this and tbh the Worms game on it was so fucking good. Me and my friends would play it in school during recess passing it around.

[u/ecclasates]

I had this, the games were shit including Elder Scrolls: Shadowkey, but once I figured out how to turn it into an GBA Emulator it became my phone AND my Pokemon etc console.