5 Minute Presentation

Before we broke up for the Christmas holidays we were given the task of creating a five minute presentation. The focus is on an industry development within the last 20 years. I decided to look at mobile gaming. With mobile devices becoming increasingly capable of running more advanced games the market has rapidly expanded in the last few years.

The first game to be available on the mobile was Tetris on the Hagenuk MT-2000 back in 1994. With the release of the Nokia 6110 (1997) came the incredibly popular game Snake.

Snake for the mobile

However as shown above these games were monochrome with limited graphics display and low processing power. This has down to the capabilities of the phone itself a well as the small screen size.

By 2003 Japan was leading in the development of mobile games, using the camera on the phone users could take pictures to interact with the game. Games included a pet game which would require you to take pictures of objects the same colour as the food they wished to eat and a fighting game with your character's stats based on your real life photo. 

With the release of the app store Apple allowed individual developers to create games directly for the iphone, giving a huge range of games for users to play. Some of these have become highly successful and have sold all over the globe. As of May 2012 nine of the top ten most popular paid for apps were games. Examples include Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump and Fruit Ninja.

Angry Birds (2009)

The aim of angry birds is to fire flightless birds at platforms containing pigs using a slingshot in order to destroy the structure and kill the pigs.

 This is an example of the gameplay.

It proved to be very popular and along with variations is currently the top of the paid app store charts in many countries around the world including the US and UK. (http://www.apple.com/euro/itunes/charts/apps/top10appstorepaid.html)

"It turns out that Angry Birds was a huge hit on Christmas Day. The series ended up getting over 8 million downloads on December 25 alone. The Finnish game studio, Rovio, released an info graphic today dealing with the Angry Birds success over the holiday. Christmas week (December 22-29) saw a total of 30 million Angry Birds downloads." (January 3rd 2013)

Cut the Rope (2010)

 

Cut the rope is a puzzle game with the objective of feeding the green monster named Om Nom a red sweet while collecting stars for bonus score. The game proved popular and other versions have now been released.

Overview

In conclusion mobile gaming has expanded greatly since the basic games released on phones in the late 90s. Graphics and processing power aids this and allows developers to create more highly complex games each year with better displays, physics and much more. The future is set to bring even higher quality games to mobiles around the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_game

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3186345.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_app

http://www.slashgear.com/angry-birds-downloaded-over-8-million-times-on-christmas-day-03262924/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_the_Rope