iOS as a Legitimate Gaming Platform
For as long as I can remember I have played video games in my spare time. From my father borrowing my neighbours Atari ST to the modern day I have owned every major gaming platform. The first console I that I didn’t have to share with my brother was the Gameboy Color. There was something personal about portable platforms that stuck with me through the years. When I finally left home and went off to college my life became a lot more mobile and my gaming habits followed suit. I might have bought my GameCube with me because it was a lot easier to haul halfway across the country in luggage but it was my Gameboy Advance SP that got the lions share of the gameplay. I tended to move frequently between campus, work, halls and shops and its clamshell design made it easy to just throw into a bag. In between chapters of Rashomon I could play through a few rounds of Advance Wars whilst waiting for my laundry to finish.
I hoovered up the Nintendo DS when it was released but it was the Sony PSP that really changed my habits. This was the first portable to be able to play home console-quality games on the go as well as movies and music. I happily ditched my TV gaming for a device I could play in bed, on the sofa and on my lunch breaks at work. For a few years things continued in this fashion. Having a console you can slot into the gaps in the day wherever you are is a godsend when you’re starting a family! But then 2008 rolled around and everything changed.
Mobile gaming started properly in the 1990’s when the cool kids at my school were playing Snake on their old Nokia handsets on the back row of GCSE Maths, my friends and I were questioning why we would even need a mobile phone. Colour handsets brought with them a common Java platform that allowed handsets to all play the same software which seemed like a good idea until you realised the games were all rubbish due to the terrible controls. Nokia themselves did try to remedy the situation with their ill-fated N-Gage handset. I ran some experiments with this for a while to see if having your phone as a games console could save you carrying two devices. This did not work out. The market was clearly not ready for such a device, not yet anyway.
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