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DOOM, Sonic, & Final Fantasy Finding New Life on Cell Phones
Alec Matias
14
You figured it'd make perfect sense: a mass consumer device like the cell phone + games everyone is familiar with = $$$. However, this budding market has been slow to develop in the US. But at this year's E3, many booths had small areas carved out solely for cell phone games from such big-name companies as Sega (Sonic The Hedgehog), Namco (Pacman), and Square-Enix (Front Mission). Even John Carmack is getting into the market, developing a DOOM RPG after he became disappointed with what he saw available.

In Japan, this is serious business. Japan's largest mobile operator, NTT DoCoMo, makes about $186 million yearly, not including any connection fees.

"It's a fallacy that Americans won't play games because they don't have any downtime," said Yoshiteru Yamaguchi, DoCoMo's executive director of content and customer relations, adding that game playing among DoCoMo users peak in the late evening when they're at home. "Mobile games are a great low-cost counterpart to bigger budget console games because developers can re-use the same content and the operator takes care of most of the marketing."
Square-Enix President Yoichi Wada, whose company has many Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles released in Japan, sees this as a banner year for cell phone gaming in North America. They recently released titles in the US based on Musashi and FF7 with even more coming soon. Their goal is to integrate games across all platforms, such as leveling your FFXI character on the phone while you're away from the computer.
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  • crummynz legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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    May 25, 2005 12:21 PM

    I dunno... it sounds nice in general, but I think if I were to get a cellphone decent enough to play decent games, I'd just get a GBA (metal slug, gunstar heroes... oh yes.)

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