Nokia N-Gage dies a second time

God bless Nokia and its repeated attempts to break into the world of mobile gaming.

You can be forgiven if you've forgotten the original Nokia N-Gage. Released in 2003, the cell-phone-meets-video-game-console was roundly and immediately mocked by just about everyone. Not only did it fail miserably as a game console (the buttons were impossible to use and you had to remove the battery to put a new game in the thing), it was ridiculous as a phone, too. Users had to hold the handset sideways in order to talk on it, spawning a brief craze of people photographing themselves with things held sideways against the side of their face. (See photo above.) Put simply, it was hated because it was ugly.

Nokia pulled the plug on the N-Gage after sales proved pathetic, but the company kept dreaming of the gaming space. In 2008, Nokia relaunched N-Gage not as a specific piece of hardware but as a service, also known as N-Gage 2.0. The new N-Gage was a total shift in concept: Anyone with an N-Gage-capable phone could download games to be played directly on the hardware, which features dedicated gaming buttons for the experience. Ultimately about a dozen Nokia phones were made which supported the gaming system.

Alas, it was all for naught. After losing more than a billion dollars in the last quarter, Nokia has called it quits once again on the N-Gage.

The service will continue to operate and games will be purchasable until September 2010, after which the entire operation will shut down (including any multiplayer game features). But hey, at least the phones will still work.

Why didn't N-Gage fly again? Aside from the fact that Nokia continues to be an also-ran brand in much of the world where gaming is of interest, the new N-Gage had two big strikes working against it. First, per mocoNews.net, developers hated it, and you don't get far with a video game platform unless you can get people to write games for it. Second, and probably more importantly, is the little handset known as the iPhone. Now rapidly becoming a major force in mobile gaming, the iPhone has been devouring market share and developer interest. As mocoNews notes, the same game would often even be cheaper on the iPhone than the N-Gage, adding more fuel to the fire.

Farewell, N-Gage. Again.