Talking about mobile gaming is complicated. Really, any mobile is a ‘gaming mobile’ from the moment in which games can be played on it. However, I think we recently started talking about gaming phones with the first Razer Phone. It was a mobile that had specifications, really, designed to enjoy video games, such as a 120 Hz screen, QHD resolution and a 16: 9 ratio, as well as great dissipation.
However, many years before Razer, someone went ahead by launching a gaming mobile with all the letters. It was the year 2003 and, how could it be otherwise, that someone was Nokia (the original, not now). And then, We tell you what happened to the Nokia N-Gagea mobile-console that dared to compete against the Game Boy Advance. And the play came out… regular.
20 years of the Nokia N-Gage
It seems a lie, but this year marks two decades since the launch of this eccentricity from Nokia. If there is a company that in its day helped everyone to have a mobile, that was Nokia. Well, Alcatel and Sony Ericsson also did their part, but the Finns had almost a 40% share in those years and, furthermore, they had a model for the whole world. Literally.
There were business models, luxury models that brought status, others who wanted to attract those who wanted their phones to be computers with full keyboards and all, others for music lovers, others for fashionistas, those who wanted small phones and the general public who wanted value for money.
As I said, they had phones for everyone and, in addition, the very famous Snake, the snake game that got better and better with each generation of phones and came to go hand in hand with the Finns. I think we all associate the little snake game with Nokia at the time.
However, although these mobiles were already ‘gaming’, they were far behind what consoles like the Game Boy and, above all, the Game Boy Advance offered. Nokia in the early 2000s considered that it was the right time to launch a mobile that competed against Nintendo.
Today, and you’ll forgive me for the personal note, I think they were too freaked out. If SEGA couldn’t, I don’t understand where a Nokia without experience in that hardware was going and, above all, in video games. In fact, over the years many have tried to launch consoles or get their hands on the video game business without success. Let them tell Stadia. With that said, let’s move on.
The Game Boy Advance had been on the market for a couple of years, achieving stratospheric sales, with a great catalog and support from the developers. And, as we say, in 2003 came the Nokia N-Gage. The design was very similar to the Game Boy Advance, but instead of a horizontal screen, it had a vertical screen.
This was not a whim, as many of us thought at the time, nor a way to revolutionize the market: it was an imposition by the software itself. The N-Gage belonged to Nokia’s 60 series and its version of Symbian did not support horizontal screens.
It was strange to look at, but hey, it was what you could imagine for a mobile to play in those days: a crosshead on the left, the screen in the middle and the keypad on the right. In this keypad we had two highlighted keys so that it was not necessary to look at the numeric keypad when playing.
Aesthetically, you may like it more or less, but it was well planned given the limitations. Now, it came to market with some problems that were incredible, and practically all of them were on the side of the hardware itself. To begin with, the internal memory was only 3.4 MB, ridiculous even then, and to expand the memory you had to buy their brand cards with a maximum of 128 MB at a very high price.
In addition, the games were also on cards and, To change them you had to remove the back cover., turn off the phone, enter the game, and then start the phone. That every time you wanted to change the game. Can you imagine now? It does not make any sense.
But hey, the machine was powerful with an ARM 920T as a processor, having Symbian, it was compatible with emulators of many previous consoles, including SNES and Megadrive and, in addition, it had a hardware MP3 player, Bluetooth connection and GPS navigator.
However, in addition to being a console, it was also a mobile, and the arrangement of both the microphone and the speaker was ridiculous. And it is that, it was not in the front, but in the frame of the upper part. That is to say, when you talked on the phone, you had to hold the console in a very strange way in your ear. It is something that earned him his own meme at the time, the ‘Sidetalking’. In fact, the fashion was to put anything in the ear: a toaster, a sneaker, a Game Boy Advance…
In addition, there were two other problems. The first was that it used to be sold in video game stores, not phone stores. I mean, I was really competing with other portable consoles such as those of Nintendo with a much higher price to the Game Boy Advance (about 300 euros of its time, 200 euros more expensive than the Nintendo console), but there were also very few games and these were also expensive.
Also, in 2003 the revision of the Advance was released in the form of the Game Boy Advance SP, a console that continued to sweep the market. Since US stores were out of stock, they tried to get rid of it with a $100 sale shortly after launch.
N-Gage QD: The hotfix that fixed issues, removed cool stuff, and didn’t fix anything
To try to reverse the situation, just a few months after the original model, Nokia released the N-Gage QD. It kept hardware, but it was much smaller. They placed the microphone and speaker on the front, they improved both the aesthetics and the button panel and the ergonomics were better and, most importantly, you no longer had to turn your mobile off and open it to change games.
However, also removed hardware mp3 player, as well as FM radio. It was no longer tri-band, but Dual Band, and it had a rubber on the frame that fell off with use. And I’m not talking about years, but weeks. The N-Gage QD didn’t last long enough to measure its problems in years.
In fact, this revision came in May 2004 and Nokia discontinued the mobile in November 2005 with less than half the units sold compared to the six million they wanted to sell and with a tarnished reputation. Despite the design flaws, I think that, in the end, the decline of N-Gage was sung.
In this video you will see in depth the N-Gage QD
The few games are blamed (the catalogue, despite having sagas like ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Virtua Tennis’, ‘Rayman’, ‘FIFA’, ‘Call of Duty’ or ‘Tony Hawk’, among other big names of the video game market), but since it did not really attract users, no machines were sold and the developers did not bet either.
And it’s not a case like WiiU, a total failure that was kept alive thanks to Nintendo’s own games: Nokia didn’t make games, it wasn’t in the video game software market, and besides, developing them was expensive both in time and in money for the companies.
Had to be developed specifically for the N-Gage Due to both the format of its screen and its power, it was not like now, when someone releases a mobile game and it will run fine on practically any model. You had to work exclusively for a machine that did not sell.
It just wasn’t profitable.. It may also have left earlier than it should, being one of many machines out of time. In fact, it had an online gaming platform, which in 2003 was crazy.
It may also have left earlier than it should, being one of many machines out of its time.
So, as we say, at the end of 2005 the announcement of cessation of production arrived, although N-Gage would take a little longer to die, since a few years later they launched a gaming platform for their mobiles called… N-Gage that, after a brief, also closed.
As I said a few lines ago, it is very difficult to compete against companies established in the industry. Sony did well with its PlayStation, a console that went from being the new Nintendo machine to being the brand new workhorse of a Sony that dominated with an iron hand with PS1 and, above all, PS2. Those associations that end in revenge happen more than we think in the business world, but the move does not always go well and N-Gage is an example of this.
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