Ahead Of Their Time is a recurring feature by Rollin Bishop focusing on technology from the past that came a little too early for it to be effective for whatever reason.
These days, combining video games and cellular service is just … well, "natural" comes to mind.
Most folks have either something from Apple or an Android device for a phone — both of which prominently feature video games as apps. Trying to imagine a world before this seems almost impossible, but it really wasn’t all that long ago that companies were still baffled as to how to combine the two effectively. For a good example of this thinking, one needs only to look at 2003’s Nokia N-Gage.
At the time, the plan made total sense. In 2003, a fair number of folks carried both a phone and something on which to play games. Nintendo’s continued focus on pumping out handheld video game consoles did good things for the company, and they all sold well overall if you ignore the slightly misguided Game Boy Micro. So, why not make a handheld game console that’s also a phone? Or a phone that’s also a handheld game console?
The problem? The way Nokia decided to go about it. In fact, it’s difficult to pin the N-Gage’s commercial failure on any one issue — a lack of decent games, the interface of how to actually play them, the physical design of the thing as a phone or one of the other smaller problems with it. It was more the sum of them all that made for a disappointing piece of tech.
Perhaps it’s as simple as the physical buttons. The touchscreen inherent to nearly all modern phones is a pretty obvious part of the appeal for video games on those devices. The buttons existing to either side of what was essentially a regular cell phone screen certainly did the N-Gage no favors beyond having consumers compare it to a taco and worse. By the time the updated Nokia N-Gage QD hit, the market had more or less moved on.
At this point, it’s probably fair to say that the Nokia N-Gage isn’t remembered for much beyond the “sidetalking” meme, if that. Nokia’s digital platform that kept the N-Gage branding once the physical devices died out didn’t last past 2009, and online functions for even that have ceased as of 2010. Fewer than 60 games released physically for the original N-Gage, and of those, maybe only two or three were of note. The rest could easily be summed up for the most part as poor ports from other systems or uninspired in general.
So, with all these negatives to its name, why talk about the N-Gage at all?
“Unfortunately, several design flaws severely limit the device's usefulness,” summarizes a 2003 PCMag review of the device, “and we fear that the N-Gage will go down in history as a poorly implemented great idea.”
In the end, that’s really the defining point of the N-Gage. It was an idea that was ahead of its time — combine a handheld video game console with a mobile phone — with an implementation characteristic of the technology available at the time.
