N-Gage: Cell Phone Gaming's First Big Flop | Past Mortem [SSFF]

Hello, it's Derek, it's me, Derek and welcome to stop the skeletons and the fighting in 2020, Apple was estimated to be the third largest video game company in the world, well above Nintendo and rubbing shoulders with Sony and Microsoft, which which is strange because Apple doesn't. They make games but they own the app store and it turns out that people really like

gaming

on their

phone

s the vast majority of purchases in the app store are games there is a lot of money to be made so much that Epic is currently forcing the industry to come to light brought up all kinds of dirty laundry in court, but we must remember that Apple was not the

first

, no, the

first

device that really tried to unite video games and

cell

phone

s was, oh my God, oh, in the middle of the filming, amazing, sorry everyone, hello. the nokia n-

gage

the nokia n-

gage

and his friends let me tell you the story of how it all went wrong it's fascinating because the n-gage was the embodiment of ambition he had a full 3D Tony Hawk his own game Elder Scrolls a genre pilgrim fps and futuristic technology that would become the standard, like leaderboards, wireless internet multiplayer capabilities, speed up with mp3, whatever that means, all wrapped up in a small wad that fits in your pocket, was released to compete against gba and it was an extremely worthy contender and a monumental failure so move on oh wait that's not my show welcome back to the boring old days where we analyze and explore the histories of video games and it's time to talk about the little device who saw the future but who simply could. never hand over the nokia n-gage, you will be surprised to know that nokia as a company is over 150 years old and began life as a humble wood pulp company in what is now finland, but what was then the russian empire founded in 1865, Nokia was a player in the wood processing business for over 35 years before expanding into electricity in the early 1900s, from there Nokia spent the next century gobbling up various companies and dipping its fingers into random industries.

They didn't start making phones until the 1980s, starting with mobiros. senator and iterating from there and yes, it's Gorbachev doing big politics on one of the first Nokia phones. You don't run an Eastern European company for over a century without learning to play both sides after a major internal reorganization in the early 1990s. Devastating final recession and you know all the collapse of the Soviet Union Nokia changed of management and went all in on the

cell

ular market this is what Nokia has: they had a long history of being a shape changing company, they were never afraid to take risks and innovate and with their focus now on cell phones they are ready to work and they soon found themselves leading the pack, designing fashion phones with a wider variety of styles and colors, as well as coming up with luxury models for the disposable income crowd, if you're my age. or this is probably your first cell phone as they are not only some of the best selling cell phones but also the best selling devices in the history of electronics in the year 2000, Nokia was a 30 billion dollar company, about a third of all cell phones in the world.

Nokia cell phones their success didn't just come from the hardware side, having the most popular phones on the market also meant innovating in the software that ran them and as both cell phone hardware and software evolved, there was more potential for Video games starting in 1997, started seeing Snake preinstalled on the latest Nokia devices. Oh, his first phone game was Angry Birds. Mine was Snake. This is the primitive pong of my generation. Block and dot games were basically all phones could handle in terms of

gaming

at the time, but remember this was back in the days of cell phones.

They were created primarily for phone calls, however, the technology evolved in Nokia phones would eventually be one of the first to support Java moving games far beyond blocks and dots and when some of those so-called j2me games began to become popular throughout big, its jewels zumas nokia realized a new emerging revenue stream you could make money selling games on phones of course handheld gaming had been big business for years i mean look nintendo the game boy was the better for most of the 90s despite competition from a number of more technically advanced rivals, in-game atari links, marvelous swan and neo geo pocket, but these were all just flashes in the pan in comparison to the unbreakable brick board I feel like I need to remind people when almost a decade without a major hardware upgrade, we could thank Pokémon for that, but while the Game Boy was making baby steps, handheld technology was going through a boom, Of course, it got Nokia's big hit with cell phones, but there were also the Walkman portable CD players, PDAs, and of course the game boy that your teacher can't take away from you, but I also carry a wallet and keys on top a pair of new jinko jeans can only hold so many people, clearly the next millennium will be about the battle of consolidating those devices into a single device and let's face it, the gaming component would probably be the hardest part to achieve and nokia knew that before competing directly with pokemon and they had just released gba, they first came to nintendo for a supposed partnership if i can't beat them join them right?

The story goes that in the early 2000s, when the DS was still in the early days of R&D, Nokia launched a Nintendo Phone, a device to combine Nintendo's gaming hardware with Nokia's cellular technology, the concept apparently spent some time in R&D and was officially presented to the board where it was then rejected because of course it was or as the rumor goes, this of course has never been publicly confirmed by any party , but you know it's hard to believe that Nokia and Nintendo didn't at least talk. before n-gage, but what we do know is that Nokia was a company that was based on risk and innovation, you could make money from video games and they were going to get a piece of the action in November 2002, Nokia announced his entry. entered the video game market with the n-gage game console at its annual mobile Internet conference, as company spokesman Keith Nowak explained.

Snake debuted in 1997, then we moved on to downloading games on a cell phone and then downloading even more levels for those games. part of that evolution, although there weren't many system specifications at this time, Nokia went ahead and promised that its next handheld would feature richer gameplay than the Gameboy Advance, based on interchangeable media cards and working relationships with some of the most important editors. in the industry, oh yes, and it was also a cell phone, but they came out with a bang, in addition to offering multiplayer via bluetooth and online connections, which, I will remind you, was still revolutionary for the time, there was also a complete set of other promised online options.

Includes downloadable strategy guides, cheat codes, leaderboards, even the ability to record and share game clips with other users in 2002. Features years ahead of their time, all wrapped in a cell phone design that easily fits in your pocket, of course, promising the moon before you even reveal it. The damn thing usually isn't the smartest idea, but at the time Nokia was one of the few companies that could actually pull this off, so Nokia had officially thrown their hat in the ring, but talk is cheap, they needed to prove they could back it up. . and there was no better place than e3 2003 for Engage's big public debut.

Nokia pulled out all the stops with a big-budget showroom space and a stage performance on May 13, and from all indications, they'll do it when they say you never arrive. a second chance to make a first impression, the showcase opened with everyone's favorite staple, an awkward song and a dance number complete with what has been described as the engagement rap, believe me when I tell you we searched high and low. parts any footage of this damn performance. There are images and brief snippets of additional material, but the closest I can tell is that there is no surviving footage of the cursed rap, so I put together a dramatic recreation for you all.

My name is Derek and I'm here. The comedy of errors only continues. Over the course of the next hour, with numerous technical and audio issues in mediocre game demos with single-digit frame rates, at some point, a short-haired John Romero of Doom and Daikatanafame took the stage and showed off his port from eurogamer from the red faction described Romero's presentation cites one of the longest periods of silence in video game history again. We can only pray that one day the video appears, but that wasn't the worst of it. This is 2003, it won't end until the booth girls show up to cover up.

After the show, a lady holding a skateboard came on stage and started dancing, then she took off her shirt to reveal her bikini top and the price of n-gage painted on her stomach. The n-gage would launch in the fall for a whopping $299 with games. for between 30 and 40 dollars each, it was reported that there were no quotes, there was no applause, now compare that to the Game Boy Advance launch price of a hundred dollars with games maxing out at around 30, the price was rated of suicide, a number so ridiculous that it immediately doomed the entire platform, not even the Turk from Scrubs could save it, but its video game moment was still to come, but I can see what Nokia was thinking here, I mean, a lot of phones from At the time they were priced around three to four hundred dollars and when pressed The price, Nokia's head of entertainment and media Elka Reiskanen said that at that price you basically get a new cell phone with a game console as a bonus and , by that metric, yes, it was a bargain since they could also play, check my notes. the red faction here, but it created a question for the compromise that would always haunt him: was it a cell phone gaming or a gaming system with a cell phone and somehow the icy reaction to the revelation still wasn't the worst. it happened to the n-gage the same day sony the masters of e3 announced that they too were entering the handheld market with the playstation portable psp yes playstation portable is simple this was so big they didn't even show anything but it was stolen the show kudaragi stood in front of a powerpoint slide he held up a umd and that was all it took it didn't hurt that the hardware specs they planned for it ate nokia's lunch I mean I'm sure the n- gage could compete with the gba but the psp was on a completely different level, super impressive 3D graphics, movie playback, its own wireless multiplayer service, all that seemed to be missing in comparison was the cell phone functionality, which apart from being released a lot Before the psp, it was really the only thing the n-gage had. had over the competition, except it had its own set of problems, so here's the n-gage, it's pretty big, it's lightweight, in fact I think it's pretty comfortable even if it looks like a little chocolate taco at a glance, man , I do not do it.

I don't know that it is quite good, but the moment you start using it, problems appear immediately, for example, to make calls on a connection, you should not hold it flat against your face, like this, but like this because the speaker, the earpiece , it's actually up here. and thus the legend of the side chat was born, complete with websites dedicated entirely to photos of people speaking on their side, that's right, the pledge was one of the first internet memes, this is the real lasting legacy of the pledge, yeah If you knew anything about participating, it was probably this and if you've never heard of a young age, this tells you enough hello, hello, they hung up, actually, the other legendary thing about the n-gage is that the design was supposedly inspired by goats, that is, I mean, who. knows who knows that's really true but there are more important things easy there are more important things to discuss we have to get on with the facts where the n-gage was designed incompetently which is baffling for nokia you make phones cell phones, this is a bad design for a cell phone maybe the reason the speaker was on the side was that this little device literally had no space anywhere else, if we look at the screen size in particular it is quite obviously it was designed from scratch, it was a frankenstein's monster from another cell phone design this screen is fine for a phone, but for games it is combined with dreamcast vmu and pokemon mini, it is notreally something to play full 3D games.

The best example of this is undoubtedly Sonic n which has a letterbox option just to make the game fully playable, check this out, it measures about an inch and a half by an inch, this is not so much a red flag that your device has problems, but one with flashing lights and a horn is one of the most ridiculous things. I have ever seen that the d-pad isn't great and using the numpad as buttons does the job but doesn't allow for much precision because its main use was dialing phone numbers and there isn't even a button to launch it. you jump right into the games, but there's an FM radio button even for O3.

Even the idea of ​​the interchangeable media cart seems to come from Nokia's cell phone-centric brain. They would have you believe this is a gaming device, but to swap games you have to remove the back. board, remove the battery and slide it into the cart, this Tony Hawk sure looked better than the GBA versions and let's take a second to admire that, all issues aside, I'm impressed that this game works and plays as well as it does, but to then have to do all this just to switch from a gba sonic port to a ps1 tony hawk port was too big a leap.

When Nokia announced its plans to enter the video game market, the gba was its only competition, but by the time they officially announced the commitment to the improved gba model, the sp had fallen and sony had officially entered the chat at this point, nintendo had been undefeated in the handheld market and sony was riding high on the success of a system that was on its way to becoming a best-seller. console in history, yes, hook was the only system with cell phone technology, but it still worked. It was a monumental task to take on the competition without flinching.

Nokia spent the months leading up to the launch of n-gage blocking more publishers and trying to generate as many headlines as possible in one reckless example. Ilka Reiskanen attacked the gba. dismissing its competitor as a system for 10-year-olds nintendo in response would describe itself as not threatened by Nokia's upcoming entry into the market never forget the motto nintendo makes games doesn't play in any case during the final months leading up to the launch I saw gaming news sites gearing up for engagement coverage, adding categories and engagement sections to their sites, sharing all of Nokia's press releases, and promoting their first impressions of the hardware.

Sure it was a tough teardown at E3, but the gaming press was ready to treat it like a real contender, they were given as fair a chance as anyone else on October 7, 2003, the pledge was released and how to do it, of course there were events on the first day, some people queued outside the stores, but in reality it was not only bad, but much worse than anyone else. had predicted that first week sales in North America apparently amounted to 5,000 units and sales in the United Kingdom were reported to be just 500 units. Now for comparison, a year and a half earlier the gba sold 540,000 units in just its first week on US shelves, maybe not. the fairest comparison, but it's still a factor of 100 to 1.

Part of the problem with the interactions was a question of accessibility. Nokia was a cell phone company at heart and, on the technological side, the n-gage was definitely the phone's first gaming system, which meant buying a system also meant signing up for a cell service plan, a process that , as a fun fact, it also sucked back then because of this, n meters were mainly sold at phone retailers, they were available in game stores, but if you bought and participated in eb games you still need to take it somewhere else to activate the part of the cell phone and then play, to even get our commitment up and running, today we had to go to eBay and buy a dummy SIM card, apparently the systems were sold with 30 day prepaid cards, but there was still a monthly service plan after From that, it was a big additional step between Nokia and the gamers it was trying to woo from Nintendo and Sony.

What people wanted was a gaming system that was a cell phone, but instead what they got was a cell phone. who played games which, ironically, is what we have now, but it was 2003. And let's take a quick look at the games. There were eight games released in the early days of the system and let's run through them real quick. Sonic n Super Monkey Ball Jr. puyo pop were all gba ports tony hawk tomb raider and pandemonium were all ps1 ports this version of puzzle bobble is terrible, legitimately one of the worst games I have ever played and space impact Evolution x, which It was a packaging game, it was just a sequel to Nokia well, I guess the shooter was already on many of their devices and this is just my opinion, the few reviews at the time weren't much better if you really cared about the games at that time. moment, there was nothing here for you, I mean, it was great to have PS1 ports in your pocket Tony Hawk is surprisingly good and it's still really impressive to see the first Tomb Raider running on this thing, but these games were four and seven years old in that time and, despite advertising online games over cellular service, they were not. available at launch and when added suffered incredible latencies of up to 10 seconds, suddenly a Game Boy link cable doesn't sound so bad anymore.

Was it really a surprise that no one was rushing to buy these things? Nokia's response was quick. For the second week of availability, the pledge price was reduced by 100 at Gamestop and EB Games locations in North America. I hope it was a well paying gig for that bikini babe because she took off her shirt for basically nothing if she was based in the UK, although she may have got an even better deal with mobile phone providers, she can get a share for just a penny with a more expensive service plan to pair with, obviously, but you can't make moves like that without people noticing in the public.

He began to perceive Nokia as extremely desperate and, to make it clear that they were inside the company, the goal was to move between 6 and 9 million commitments by the end of 2004, a year after launch, and division director Lauren Schuster , stated that this represents the critical mass necessary for the business to become a successful platform, since Nokia managed to sell 150 million of its standard phones the previous year in 2002, these compromised predictions seemed quite reasonable, but between those poor sales release date, the number of gbas already on the market and the public knowing that new handhelds would soon be on the way, oh yes, Sony announced the PSP that summer, but in November, just a month after the indicator dropped Finally, Nintendo announced what the DS would be, that goal of six to nine million seemed increasingly unrealistic to the public.

Nokia attempted a bit of cleverness by boasting that more than four hundred thousand units were sold to retailers, which is clever business talk for moving 400 thousand from warehouses, but it says nothing about how many went into the hands of customers and even that number of 400 thousand was in dispute, regardless of the numbers that The facts that were doing the rounds were that companies like Gamestop were already working to get rid of their stock, removing up to a third of their locations from the Engage supply chain in terms of software sales for launch in October. Tomb Raider became the system's biggest seller. with only 2,960 copies, other titles were even more terrible, q's mlb slam only sold 153 copies, his cousin's mixtape sold more than that and that was despite Nokia's distribution shortcomings, apparently compromised game selection at a given retailer it was a total gamble.

Even with their limited library, no one location would have the entire selection, not many people wanted their games and those who did couldn't get them reliably, if there were die-hard, committed fans, they were more likely to get their hands on games. A different form of hacking, just a month after the system was launched, hackers already managed to crack the encryption on Nokia games and started publishing them all for download online, not only that you wouldn't even need a stake to play them, but it turns out that they would be executed. on any of Nokia's Symbian OS phones, remember what I said, but these weren't cell phone gaming systems, these were cell phones that played games.

Nokia talks a lot and they really tried, but almost immediately, the n-gage was full. at the laughing point where the websites were going crazy, ngage would close out the year with eight more games, 16 in total, which isn't bad, but let's look at that lineup, four sports games, the gba port of rayman 3, the Splinter Cell Moto gba port. gp which technically isn't a gba port but it's still another game available on gba and the highlight is probably john romero's red faction port a pretty awesome port of the ps2 game but honestly nothing you can't get on gba on the surface, these games are actually all well off screen size of course, they are mostly playable.

The bigger point here is that outside of a really solid version of a Tony Hawk game from four years ago, the n-gage had almost nothing for the people who cared about it. games to use your own words against you is the stupid game In February 2004, just five months later, Nokia had no choice but to admit that they had not met their projections. Nokia's chairman and CEO would confess that sales are in the bottom quartile of the group we were targeting, which is the CEO, speaking for himself, gave the system a strict deadline to prove itself in November 2005, the second anniversary of the system and this is what I love about this story. nintendo virtual boy failed, turn it off.

Sega 32x failed, close it. down Nokia, the young caliber

flop

s, okay, you have 19 months to get in shape, but that's it. Can you imagine a company so successful that when a product that is expected to move millions, instead only moves thousands, then you give the team a year and a half to turn it around if that doesn't tell you how big Nokia was. I don't know what else to tell you, but they had an ace up their sleeve, a new hardware revision that they hoped would solve some of their problems just in time. By the end of Q104, Nokia finally made public its plans for a new and improved n-gage, although rumors had already been circulating for months the updated system would be christened QD, an abbreviation of the Latin quakeway da which translates to everyday, but let's drink.

Imagine Nintendo announcing the SP six months after abandoning the GBA, that's what the QD was. It has to be one of the fastest redesigns ever. The stated purpose of the update was to reduce the cost of production and fix some. of the most obvious design flaws of the original model, such as no longer requiring removal of the system's battery to change games or that it must be held sideways to use as a phone, although it did not increase the size of the screen although there were other notable changes. They include removing the useless FM radio functionality and adding a useful button to immediately launch players into games.

Funny what the designers come up with after the fact that this qd model was the real deal, it's a solid piece of hardware and in complete transparency, this is the model. We've been playing, we couldn't get our original model to work, believe me it's dead, but I'm playing on the qd, maybe that's why I think these games are okay, believe me, I've played worse, I had another one. was shown at e3 in may 2004 with a big focus on the fancy new qd model along with a batch of new games and to be fair while psp and ds were having their official reveal they were standing behind mega long queues hey, no waiting at the qd kiosks but nokia was still putting in hours of solid effort to get this thing working and if you were excited about the qd there was good news well if you lived in Europe because they got the qd model later that month in May 2004, Canada and the United States would have to do so.

In the meantime, wait a little longer. Participa fans received bad news in June, just a month after e3. Nokia's chief strategy officer said during a press event in Helsinki that they would cut the promised 50 to 100 games before the end of the year. to only 40. the company quickly tried to backtrack and put out a press release stating that they were wrong and that they were still planning to release 50 games over the holidays, so they decided to make this announcement a few weeks before the qd came out. North America is beyond my comprehension when it finally launched in the US in July.

Nokia Sweden, the deal with a 99 refund and a free copy of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. I mean, yes,Again, it's a solid port, but a solid port that's now five years old. old ps1 game no one camping outside better buy because the qd was a much improved device but the games just weren't available in late 2004 they only managed to release who wants to guess if it was 50 games 40 games 33 games in the whole year since the launch of the original n-gage i.e. the virtual boys numbers were bad and by the end of the year the nintendo ds and sony psp had launched in select markets and the rest of the world followed in 2005.

Even if a region didn't have the ds or psp yet, gamers would wait patiently until they had it or just import it, but this is just the public side of things, as Engage's credibility publicly crumbled, things weren't much better behind of scene. or when Nokia revealed its financial reports for the second quarter of 2004, they had to admit to shareholders a 5.7 drop in production sales worldwide, of course this was not the company's fault, at least I don't just want say that Nokia was a multi-billion dollar company with much more. There's more going on than just the n-gage and the fact is that sales of Nokia's standard cellular devices had fallen from the previous year, largely owned by two competitors that launched new sleek phone designs once these reports were reported. went public, Nokia shares immediately fell 16 in the finished stock.

The exchange, of course, caused major and rapid changes within Nokia now when it comes to the final caliber. Nokia's multimedia division, which included the engagement business, was actually operating at only a minor loss compared to other wings; n-gage wasn't the only reason Nokia was in trouble, but it was still underperforming and by early 2005 heads were going to roll. The head of Nokia's commercial game programs division, Ilka Nintendo, was not a threat. Reiskanen was reassigned further away from the commitment and there were rumors that the production and R&D facilities would close. This led leading UK sales tracking service Chart Track to stop publishing compromised data entirely as they clearly exposed the fact that quote sales from the machine and its software have failed to have any impact on the market, an absolutely brutal truth and that Nokia themselves must have been well aware that also in January Nokia announced that 1.3 million interactions had sold a significant portion of those sales came from a launch in the Asia Pacific region and Yes, 1.3 million, that's nothing, but the DS just made half a million in its first week and this was a long way from the 6 million, the minimum goal that had been set since the launch in 2003. versus Everything Nokia said, compromising was going nowhere and, true to their word, they remained competitive systems. they were reduced to 99 oh we have to update the bikini babe here we go and the games went down in price too.

Engage had another public presentation at e3 2005 and would release 20 games in North America, making 2005 the system's most prolific year yet, but did it work in At a press event held in October in Barcelona, ​​​​they claimed to the public of its continued commitment to the Engage system, but just one month later, on November 7, 2005, the two-year deadline was finally abandoned by Nokia, having failed to meet all projections and unable to make any real profits. traction in the portable gaming market, the n-gage gaming console officially ceased production by the end of the year, its last games released would do so with limited distribution and fanfare over the course of the next few months.

There are trailers for these games, but most don't even bother to show the gameplay or the system itself. North America 2006 saw the release of three games, the final one being Warhammer 40k Glory in Death proper, the final system library was 57 games in North America, 63 in Powell, Nokia admitted defeat and had formally withdrawn from the portable gaming market, but believe it or not, this was not at all. At the end of the n gauge, at the end of the day, Nokia still saw that gaming could be big business on its phones with the collapse of engagement. Nokia finally saw the light instead of trying to create a gaming system with the phone they just brought out. games to their phones, you know, some of the best-selling electronic devices in human history, the Engage brand was repurposed as one of the first digital distribution services where upcoming Nokia phones would come preloaded with the app to buy and Download games.

The public release of 2.0, sometimes called Engage 2.0, was in spring 2008, which had a problem: this service would not work on the current n-gage system because these new games would be too advanced for older hardware to handle. , now I can do it. I don't imagine many people were still using n-gages as their primary cell phone in 2008, but it's still a pretty solid cell phone. It's what I would call a solid cell phone. Hello burn room, can you prepare a stretcher? Thanks, Nokia had moved. We moved on to newer and better phones and Engage 2.0 was meant to be a great feature, but when it finally launched it only offered a total of six games, one of which was just a poker game for everyone's sake, but Of course, Nokia never fails without a fight and they would try to complete the catalog they are missing and you have to respect them.

They somewhat lock in exclusive entries in the Metal Gear and Resident Evil franchises, which there is also an EDF game, apparently almost 50 titles were released in the span of 18 months, but unfortunately none of these games move the needle; In fact, Nokia as a whole would go into decline at this time in the face of new competitors in the cellular market. Their business peaked in 2007, where they accounted for 40 percent of mobile telephony. industry and then that portion of the pie chart started shrinking rapidly, you know, that device that you're probably seeing this on, yeah, smartphones like the iPhone, which was first released in June 2007, or Android, which came out In 2008, touchscreen smartphones dropped like a bomb and everything.

Everything else quickly became obsolete and that's not just in terms of hardware, with both of these major new mobile operating systems they came with their own dedicated digital stores with software offerings that quickly put Engage 2.0 to shame. Who needs our exclusive Resident Evil game? Nokia. I have Resident Evil 4 on my iPhone. and it's just as good, probably, and the degeneration of Resident Evil finally arrived on iOS. You will always have portable mgs. I guess, in any case, Nokia discontinued Engage 2.0 in the fall of 2009, first closing its dedicated game development studio, and then announcing the We plan to close the Engage store in September 2010, although thanks to the iPad dropping early of that spring, you probably noticed that although the game console system had died years ago, this was the final nail in the coffin of the name, the staggering corpse of the n. -gage finally went away in 2010.

Engage 2.0 was replaced by a new ovi service. It was Nokia's attempt to match the broader offerings of Apple and Google's App Store. There was also an effort to port a portion of the Engage 2.0 game. library, but in 2014 ov would also be discontinued, where Nokia at that time had become a shadow of its former self, while the company managed to maintain its majority in the market until around 2010 when they underwent major changes after making a big deal with Microsoft in 2011. to manufacture and develop Windows phones in late 2013, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Nokia's mobile phone business as part of an initiative by CEO Steve Ballmer to reimagine Microsoft as a distributor of devices and services, but it wasn't long after that they decided to just drop the Nokia name entirely and brand all their mobile interests under the broader Microsoft umbrella.

Of course, there's a lot more to Nokia's existence, as it continues being a shape-shifting technology company, but just like Nokia's n-gage mobile phones. not with a bang but with a shaker, the n-gage as a product and then a brand started as a gba competitor and would find itself taking on almost all the titans of technology for seven years with nintendo and then sony 2. Apple and Android before that Microsoft swallowed it all, it's the forest of failed consumer electronics technology of the early 2000s, it has many failures, but the n-gage just refused to die even though it never succeeded, that's the legacy which is important to me and that's why I loved making this video.

This video was just about the story, which was big enough that we needed to give the games their own space for their own video that's coming. It's already in the cans. Soon. A lot is now available on Patreon. of people to thank for this video, a big thank you to cass was our lead researcher and writer for this project, very big for the n-gage discord out there and they were amazing, they helped us and gave us a lot, a lot. of assets, images and information. Many thanks to Kelsey Lewin for helping us locate an original entry and lending us some games.

Thanks to Evan Mcveigh for helping us with the editing and of course a big shout out to all our Patreon supporters who have been supporting. We have been almost at our goal of 1100 Patreon for six years, which means it's time for zebo, it's time for Resident Evil 4 on a damn zebo, get ready, okay, support us if you can, if not, tell a friend what is the best dumbest YouTube channel. lie and say it's ours, but tell a friend about stopping the skeletons from fighting, I'm Uncle Derek, that's producer Grace over there and we just say thank you so much for watching, we'll see you again very soon, stay mighty.