https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/ticket-to-ride-train-game/id432504470 Exactly ten years ago I bought my first mobile game, on my first mobile device, after seeing a refurbished iPad in a second hand store. Seemed really cool at the time to own such amazing technology lol. Glad to see Ticket to Ride is one of the survivors and was even updated a year ago. Stayed with iPads since then. Never owned a smartphone. Still use a vintage Nokia for mobile calls. Will take this opportunity to replay through my ‘purchased list’ from the start and see how far I get. Scary how many there are. Usually only play games for a few weeks so have forgotten most of them. I’ll be interested to hear about everyone’s first mobile game, device, and what got you interested?
Interesting question. I may have tried some basic games on my Razor and BlackBerry Pearl, but I can’t remember any of them. I bought the first iPhone (still have it) before there was such a thing as the AppStore. I remember a browser-based role playing/maze game that I played quite a bit. When the store finally opened, I welcomed it with open arms. I believe that it was around the same time that I joined TouchArcade. I had put aside console gaming a few years earlier, mainly because how difficult it was to find time for it in a two-person household (with only one tv set). I am Mac user, so PC gaming was limited, and over the years I owned PSPs and DSs, but neither gave me the experience of “gaming in my pocket.” From the start, the potential of iPhone gaming was clear. According to my purchase list, the first iPhone game I bought was Super Monkey Ball, followed closely by Bomberman, Crash Bandicoot Nitro, and De Blob. In those early days, big publishers were looking for ways to bring older console games to the platform, while the traditional mobile game publishers (Gameloft, Fishlab, Com2Us) were upsizing old phone games to the new platform. It’s crazy that today you can play something like Genshin Impact on a phone; back then it seemed like the ambition outstripped the capabilities of the platform, though it was great that there no assumptions about what a mobile game should be (and more people were willing to pay premium). Each new release generated a ton of excitement because there was so little available. Things are very different now. I’m not really nostalgic for the games of that era (even with the rise of free-to-play, there are still a ridiculous amount of great premium and indie games available) but I do miss the tighter, less jaded community from back then.
