Mobile Mayhem

It's hard to believe that a tiny game featuring a pixilated snake that gobbles tiny dots is the basis for a revolution in gaming. But if you buy what Nokia's selling, Snake is the most played electronic game in history. Built into every Nokia handset released since 1997, millions of wireless users worldwide have wasted countless hours fumbling over their keypads directing a digital serpent's movements.

In February, Nokia plans to move away from blocky animations moving herky-jerky across an LED screen and take Snake to the next level. Nokia's new N-Gage mobile gaming deck, built upon the Symbian operating system, will approach the sophistication and complexity of what the world has come to expect from console gaming — tied, of course, to the wireless network.

“This is the logical step in the evolution of mobile devices,” a Nokia spokesman said. “Things that were once sidelines to the phone are now becoming its dominant features.”

If Nokia is enthusiastic about its move into mobile gaming, Symbian is absolutely ecstatic. Offering hard-core computing over the mobile network is what Symbian's OS was built for, and running the mobile equivalent of Doom or network games such as Everquest will put the OS through its final paces, said Bill Pinnell, strategic product manager for multimedia and gaming at Symbian.

“[My handset] can already play Snake, but why can't it do what my game console does at home?” Pinnell said. “There's no reason why it shouldn't.”

But don't get too excited yet. It'll be a while before you'll be able to lounge in a San Francisco café battling someone on a commuter train in New York for world dominance in a 3-D rendered post-apocalyptic wasteland. Current high-speed data networks don't boast the bandwidth necessary for the real-time, multiplayer carnage currently available through broadband.

But Pinnell envisions a whole new genre of games sprouting around N-Gage's mobile — albeit latency limited — capabilities: Games that allow users to act like urban commandos in GPS-attuned versions of capture the flag or play real-time trivia games with thousands of participants. And graphics-heavy games won't be limited to single players: Nokia plans to include Bluetooth in the new N-Gage, allowing players in close proximity to play head-to-head.

Nokia is revealing few details about N-Gage, but it has announced a deal with Sega, the world's largest game publisher, to develop titles for the platform. Therefore, it's almost a given that Nokia will bring its new game deck up against Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, the mobile game deck that practically has a monopoly on the portable gaming market. Nintendo has already struck deals with Japanese carriers to allow for multiplayer gaming on Japan's Wideband CDMA networks through rigs that hook Game Boy consoles directly to cell phones.

But that's where Nokia has an edge. They're the world's largest manufacturer of mobile handsets — a distinct advantage in wireless gaming that could prove to be a venomous bite for the competition.