The history of mobile gaming is a short, albeit, jam-packed one.

The industry has evolved so quickly that with full-colour games like Angry Birds for the iPhone, it’s hard to imagine a game like Snake being cutting edge technology.The first game of Snake, found on the Nokia 6610 in 1997, featured a thick black line chasing little black dots on a hospital green background.  

While most of the early mobile games have disappeared along with their outdated devices, Snake has come back with eight updated versions, according to an article from PocketGamer.biz, a leading industry website.

If Snake was the first generation of mobile games, then Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) would be the second.

WAP was the first standard microbrowser, a small version of an Internet browser that enables access to the web from a phone.  

The mobile phone, combined with WAP, created the basic framework for developers to create and sell mobile games online, according to PocketGamer.biz.

Some of the popular WAP enabled games of the early 2000s were the Tamagotchi-styled Alien Fish Exchange, which allowed players to breed virtual fish, and Lifestylers, in which players were a character that explored their virtual surroundings, interacted with other characters, and completed tasks to develop their character type or lifestyle.

The new millennium brought with it the birth of the mobile gaming industry’s giant: Jamdat Mobile. Jamdat created some of the most successful games like Jamdat Bowling (2002), Bejewelled (2003) and numerous sports games.By 2004, the company was worth over $400 million dollars, according to PocketGamer.biz.

Electronic Arts (EA) swooped in a year later and bought the company for almost $680 million dollars.

The mass-market switch to colour screens for mobile phones in 2003 was crucial for the development of new games.   

Arcade-style games were still popular but pseudo-3D games like Extreme Air Snowboarding and Ridge Racer 3D were becoming standard for cellphones, according to PocketGamer.biz.

An arms race of sorts ensued as companies spent millions patenting the latest cellphone breakthroughs and buying up or merging mobile gaming companies.
The biggest shakeup came from Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007, with the release of the touchscreen iPhone.

The iPhone presented a whole new platform for buying and selling mobile games with the launch of the App Store, where people could choose from millions of games to download. In 2010, Apple released the Game Center, which allows users to play App Store games against each other in online matches and leaderboards.        

Sources: http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/A+Brief+History+of+Mobile+Games/feature.asp?c=10618
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2006/id20060122_077129.htm

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