Our very own mobile phone or smart phone has a long history. They have traversed a long path. From simple and dull phones that can only make calls to sophisticated and sleek phones that can do multiple tasks at the same time. It has improved in every segments ranging from hardware to software or from features to processors.
Another segment that has improved in these devices is the games. No one could have imagined that these pocket mobile devices would be able to possess such incredible gaming capacity. Interestingly, the time has changed all that, and mobile gaming is now a success story and it only gets better every day. Let’s quickly walk down memory lane and see how it all started.
During the 1990’s most of the phones used to run on Java OS. At that time Android and iOS was still to grow. So the phones were simply used for calls and some text messaging. Gaming in mobile first came into focus in 1994 when mobile named Hagenuk MT-2000 was launched. It came up with a game named Tetris. It was both popular and simple enough for the phones hardware to handle it. But this device did not run well in the market, so many of us don’t know about the company.
Then 3 years later a game was launched that became a blockbuster and is still played. This game was brought by Nokia 6610 in 1997. Though it became outdated now, they were really addictive at that time. In fact, this game is found on more than 350 million devices.
Few other games were developed by Nokia as well as other phone brands. However, Space Impact and Snake still dominated. While these games were definitely something worth your time, they soon became primitive at the turn of the millennium. Right now, it seems funny to mention these ancient games when we have the likes of Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Temple Run, amongst the myriad of others available.
Over the last few years, mobile gaming has evolved at a rate that has superseded our expectation. The development of technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which were non-existent before has opened the mobile gaming to a lot of possibilities, especially multi-gaming. In fact, the emergence of new OS such as Android, iOS and Windows, have completely revolutionised the mobile gaming world leading to even more titles and variations. For downloading these games mobile content marketplace came into account. For Android, Google Play Store while for iOS, App Store was launched. Now instead of playing only pre-installed games users can also download new games. Games like Angry Birds, Subway Surfer and Temple Run have already crossed 1 billion download since they were introduced. Capability and functionality have also improved a lot since then. Various modes or categories of game were also introduced like Arcade, Shooting, Racing, Adventure, Sports etc.
PC game Player Unknowns Battle Ground was made accessible to every people by introducing PUBG mobile. Craze for the game can be seen by seeing the numbers. They crossed 100 million downloads (iOS and Android combined) in just 4 months.
Though one of the biggest implementation of technology in gaming is the introduction of augmented reality where the device uses the reverse facing camera. While playing the game, the player aims the device's camera at a location and through the device's screen, sees the area captured by the camera plus computer-generated graphics atop it, augmenting the display and then allowing the player to interact that way. The graphics are generally drawn as to make the generated image appear to be part of the captured background, and will be rendered appropriate as the player moves the device around. The starting location may be a special marker that is picked up by the camera and recognized by the software to determine what to present, or may be based on the location through GPS. A good example is the phenomenal Pokemon Go, which was in the headlines for some time.
More plans are being made for the expansion in mobile gaming community. It feels like we experienced only a bit of it and many are left yet to come. Whole gaming community really look bright in the 21st century and mobile gaming is one of them that is improving rapidly promising more in the future!
