Nokia's enigmatic N-Gage is 20 years old: The first gaming phone was ahead of its time (2024)

Back in the early 2000s, Nokia got an idea. Why not take the market leader in the portable gaming device market, the Game Boy Advance, and combine it with our latest Nokia phone? This would create a device that functions as a phone that can run great games at the same time. That idea spawned the N-gage, the first proper gaming phone. But was it a brand-new gold standard for mobile gaming and cell communication?

Source: flickr

No. It was a poorly optimized, chunkily built device, completely at odds between being a phone and a gaming console, failing at both. Nokia wasn’t used to designing handheld game devices, putting the N-gage on shaky ground from the start. The company failed to appreciate the main goals of gaming handhelds: intuitive controls, a game library optimized for the device, and general ease of use.

It was hardly an underdog story, either. Nokia was still doing reasonably well in 2004, not as good as it had been in years prior, but still a market leader. On paper, the N-gage had some fantastic features, like online functionality and impressive third-party support from the likes of SEGA, Activision, and EA. The games didn’t even look half bad, and despite their faults, the phone-button controls worked (sort of). So what went wrong?

Well, it turns out that while the N-gage was a serviceable cell phone, to be blunt, it sucked as a handheld gaming device, with every positive compounded by three negatives. Yes, there were tons of popular games available for it, but good luck switching them in public when you had to rip the thing apart to insert a game under the battery you just removed. When you finally managed to get into a game, the graphics that looked okay in static images were pretty shoddy in action.

The N-gage ruined the high-speed gameplay of Sonic Advance with its cellphone-centric vertical screen, resulting in players zooming off with basically no way to see what was ahead of them. The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey's exploration and combat was butchered by the handheld's wonky controls, only made worse by the game's abysmal hit detection. Even big brags like Call of Duty were hot garbage on N-gage, made semi-unplayable with an awful framerate and bloated loading times, keeping you waiting on the subpar experience until the battery died.

Source: flickr

Nokia's reputation was so tarnished that when they rolled out the N-gage QD, a re-release with improvements, it couldn't escape the shadow of its sibling and sold even fewer units than the OG N-gage, whose own sales records had fallen embarrassingly short of what Nokia expected. A $275 price tag before contract fees would have been a tough sell with a quality handheld gaming device, let alone a mediocre, openly mocked hot mess shaped like a taco perfect for sidetalking.

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You could say that the N-gage was ahead of its time and simply marred by the limitations of its era. But devices that successfully doubled as phones and handheld consoles weren't even that far off. Apple would release the iPhone only a few years later and made huge strides with cell phone/ gaming dual-functionality. The iPhone also ushered in the age of the touchscreen.

Every device has its place in history, even if just a morbid "what not to do" capacity, and the N-gage waves that flag with great enthusiasm. Ultimately, the device had lofty ambitions that were let down by poor execution, bad timing, and ill-advised presumed success. But it's curious to speculate what would have happened if the N-gage hadn't taken those risks and fallen back to earth so spectacularly.

After all, it took the entire Western games industry to crash for Nintendo to get its finger on the pulse of console gamers, and Apple might have had a few more problems without the forewarnings that the N-gage represented. More experiments fail than succeed, and the N-Gage's failure taught the tech industry some valuable lessons. It's just a shame that it had to be the taco-shaped ship that Nokia went down with. But hey, at least we got a beautiful meme out of it.