Mitch Lasky, Jamdat Mobile

Wireless gaming's holy grail is just around the corner. Ultimate game boy Mitch Lasky envisions citywide games of laser tag with 10,000 to 15,000 participants once location-based services arrive. “The guy in the gray suit sitting across from you on the bus may turn out to be your mortal enemy, and you have to zap him before he gets you,” said Lasky, Jamdat Mobile's CEO.

Trained as a lawyer, Lasky was a media business affairs lawyer for five years until he could stifle himself no more. Trading billable hours for billable minutes, he abandoned law in 1993 for the gaming industry, cutting his teeth at start-ups Serum and Activision before landing at Jamdat.

Lasky recalls, as a teen, critically appraising his first stand-up arcade Pong game and its primitive black-and-white rectangles floating on the screen. “Maybe it's a case of arrested development, but it was a seminal event in my life to see the possibilities.”

Each platform along the way created the nexus for more gaming ideas in different media. When Game Boy launched, Lasky recalls naysayers who doubted anyone would play on low-processing power devices when they had Sega Genesis. “But you couldn't play your Sega Genesis in the back of Mom's station wagon.”

Wireless represents the sixth platform for Lasky, where connectivity fuels a new generation of multiplayer interaction, doing things Game Boy can't. Jamdat cashed in on its popular WAP-based Gladiator, Gladiator II, Trivia Game, Tiger Woods Golf and Home Run Derby this year. The company hosts the games while carriers link through Internet browsers.

Jamdat also is extending its reach by licensing Hasbro's intellectual property for wireless Scrabble, Boggle and Yahtzee. These games can be played quickly — important because Lasky said wireless gaming should last three to five minutes.

But Lasky admits the era of the WAP game is over. So what's next? Next-gen provisioned environments, including Java and BREW, that allow gamers to download larger animation and color into handsets where they can execute them locally. “The difference between these games will be as dramatic as the difference between a static Web page and Flash.”