![]() ![]() WAP created the basic ecosystem that would allow developers to make games and sell them over-the-air to willing mobile players. Looking up the price of your shares might have been the big thing in 1999 for everyone at (by then the newly renamed and IPO'd Unwired Planet), but the rest of the world wanted to do fun things on their fancy new Nokia 7110s, which incidentally as well as being the first Nokia phone with a WAP browser, also was the first to feature Snake II. ![]() Still, this might not have been such a problem if people had wanted to do what Unwired Planet envisioned they would with WAP. Unfortunately, the reality was four lines of black text on a green background and if you were lucky some simple monochrome graphics. UK operator BT Cellnet (now O2 UK) got very excited about this too, with its ' Surf the BT Cellnet' adverts giving a vivid impression of what using WAP would be like quickly moving through a Matrix-like world overflowing with interesting information. Hence, the idea of surfing it on your phone sounded incredible. Of course, back in 1999, the web was a much simpler place no Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr or Twitter and lots of people still hadn't fired up their modems and dial-up connections to use the Information Superhighway to which Al Gore had just put the finishing touches. In the end though, these were both roughly the same thing a small web browser built into the phone that allowed you to connect to a server and transfer data to your phone. In Japan, market leading operator NTT DoCoMo came up with its own i-mode standard instead.īack in 1999, the web was a much simpler place - no Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr or Twitter. Together with Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola, the WAP Forum (now the Open Mobile Alliance) kicked off, ensuring standardisation, at least in Europe. The company that did the most to develop this was called Unwired Planet, although it took it a good few years to come up with anything very useful.īut by the late 1990s, it had created a microbrowser that could run on mobile phones and a version of the web it called UP.Link. Officially known as the Wireless Application Protocol, WAP is a technology standard developed to enable mobile devices to connect to the internet. If Snake and those early embedded versions of Tetris and the like were Generation One of mobile games, the next step something we will call Generation Two were WAP games. Now Snake was all very well and good, but if mobile games were to really progress, you needed a way of buying new games. Not bad for a game that started life as a some black squares moving on a green background. It has been estimated that over 400 million copies have been shipped since and it's now in its eighth version. Still the most famous mobile game, Snake first appeared in 1997 on the Nokia 6610. Obviously you can trace mobile games back to the earliest mobile phones, but mobile games didn't really take off until Nokia launched Snake. ![]()
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