Number 10 george osborn finnside hall f tues
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Nokia was once the dominant mobile phone brand, shipping over 1.3 billion devices in 2007 alone. However, the company struggled to adapt to the rise of smartphones, falling behind competitors like Apple and Android. While Nokia made several missteps and partnership changes, it helped drive innovation in the mobile industry and connectivity worldwide for decades.
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Number 10 george osborn finnside hall f tues
- 1. From Snake to Windows 8 via N-Gage – Tracing the Nokia phenomenon
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, Thanks for joining me, I’m George Osborn. I’m Events Editor at Steel Media and I’ve been working on the history of Finnish mobile gaming, how it got started and what has made it quite so special today. In the course of my research, there was one company who stood out as particularly influential in that process. Nokia played a pivotal role in the evolution of the industry in the country, by first demonstrating that mobile games were viable and then by providing commercial backing to ensure that the industry in Finland succeeded.
- But before I dive into the practicalities of how that happened, I wanted to draw you into a little historical parallel to give you an idea of how I see Nokia’s role. This is the Pazzi Chapel in Florence. Considered to be one of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture, it was constructed by the Pazzi family in the mid 1400s to act as both a place to learn and for the family tomb. Designed by Brunellschi, the architect behind the design and construction of Florence Cathedral’s dome, it was commissioned principally for practical purposes, with an element of artistry involved, and acted as a catalyst for a swathe of talents. Beyond funding Brunelleschi further, the funding provided by the Pazzi family for the chapel funded the early careers of Niccolo Barabino, Giuseppe Cassioli and dozens of other artists – whose legacies would ultimately be remembered as much as the original commissioners.
- And it is that which I find has a strong parallel with the history of Nokia’s involvement in mobile gaming. To say that the company intentionally kick started the industry in 1997 would be something of an untruth, but they nevertheless played a strong role in commissioning that first hit game Snake. Intended principally as a demo for the Nokia 6110’s infra red functionality, Taneli Armanto’s game ended up on the final deck of the released handset and went on to be embedded in over 300 million Nokia phones by 2005.
- So the original intention for Nokia when they first took a game onto a phone was far from based on entertainment purposes. Yet the global success of Snake convinced Nokia that gaming could be a valuable part of their handset offering and they began the process of investing in local Finnish talent to develop titles for their handsets. Tapping into a pool of talented developers who had honed their skills in Finland’s Demoscene, a movement which saw developers competing to squeeze the most out of limited devices, Nokia’s commercial ambitions acted to support the early wave of mobile developers. These included the likes of Mr Good Living, Sumea and Digital Chocolate, whose games found their way onto Nokia handsets in the early days of Java and beyond.
- Early investments included a sum poured into Riot-E’s chaotic organisation, but the major catalyst for Nokia’s investment efforts was the N-Gage. Released in October 2003, the handset was an unmitigated disaster. The portrait screen, the need to hold the phone like a taco, the fact you had to remove the battery to put games in and the price point led to it bombing in comparison to the lower priced and better designed GBA it was rivaling. Despite attempts to revive it with a relaunch the following year, the N-Gage never took off and the platform it became in 2009 was one of those unceremoniously axed following the “burning platform memo”.
- However, the significant support thrown behind the handset helped the cause of mobile gaming in a number of ways. On the one hand, it helped Finnish developers to continue to grow in the tough environment of theearly industry between 2003-2007 in particular. The above image is an, admittedly grainy, shot of Pathways of Glory by RedLynx, one of the N-Gage’ comparatively major hits, helped them to establish their mobile gaming business further while the likes of Relude Studios, soon to be Rovio, and Bugbear found support there. At the same time, Nokia’s N-Gage did lay a technical blueprint that would remain important for the future of mobile gaming, with the introduction of features such as a mobile equivalent of Xbox Live and a commitment to high quality graphics and gameplay.
- Obviously though, Nokia’s fortunes turned for the worse in mobile. By the time the smartphone arrived on the scene, Nokia were in trouble and the success of the iPhone only furthered their decline. From their position as the dominant global player at the turn of the century, Nokia found itself and the Windows Phone OS it supported with the help of Microsoft in a distant third by the time the company became part of Microsoft’s global empire. Yet the talent who worked with Nokia at various points would go on to greater successes in the smartphone era. From Rovio to Supercell, staff who had benefitted either directly or indirectly from Nokia support helped to build and create games that would help establish Finland as the cornerstone of the mobile gaming industry in the modern era of mobile gaming.
- So while Nokia may now be more focused on bringing the Nokia X to developing markets across the world, the company played a pivotal role in the development of the mobile gaming industry in Finland by acting as patrons to the industry. The N-Gage was their less successful Pazzi Chapel but it nevertheless gave the developers, the equivalent of artists and architects, the opportunity to forge their own names, hone their crafts and set up their own success stories – which they were able to realise in the developer led app economy. Will there ever be another patron to the industry like this? I don’t think so. While Apple, Microsoft and Google do seem committed to supporting games, none of them had such an important impact on such a formative time in one of the country’s best placed to exploit the mobile revolution. Nokia might not be the leaders they once were, but the leaders of Finnish gaming are, I’m sure, grateful for the role they played in the emergence of their industry.