泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
Looking back on 10 years in the mobile gaming industry
I have worked in the gaming industry since a cold winter day in January 2002. Looking back, writing a column related to a game, it seems as if ages had passed since then when I was an amateur gamer who had no background in the field.
The reason I give a long-winded explanation is to mention what I felt during a recent meeting for investment with a developer about the constraints of a mobile device for a mobile game. The developer, who has played an online game for a long time, talked about mobile computer device bringing about inconvenience: small screen, low specification, and difficulty of customization due to various devices.
Listening to him, it brought back the moment when I just set foot in the gaming industry, which made me be lost in the old memories. Mobile phones featuring color displays, one of the technologies that phone manufacturers were evaluated by, were first introduced in 2002. Phone makers also competed for a better sound such as 16 or 40 poly sound. And it was the time when flip phones were commonly used. A slide phone, which is rare to find these days, however, was considered as one of the most innovative technologies, was released in 2002 and its commercial formed attractive subjects of conversation in those days.
Let's back to the point. There have been many changes in most industries in the last 10 years and the mobile gaming industry is at the forefront of those changes. Early mobile game developers used to stay up all night to reduce storage space like 1-2 kB due to poor device environment. Given my first game with 127 kB, the recent environment, in which mobile games of over 100 MB are common, is quite different just like independent films and Hollywood blockbusters. I do remember and I was deeply impressed when a first mobile game of 1 MB was released 10 years ago. It is still fresh in my memory about the MB-capacity mobile game which was finally come out. The earliest mobile game developers had to make dozens of different versions in accordance with image resolution, mobile device, and mobile carrier, which is compared to today's slightly different versions depending on the producer and wireless carrier.
Mobile game market, as I mentioned in the beginning, is the fast-growing industrial field. It is needless to that it will move ahead for quite some time. It seems hard to expect what is coming out in 10 years because I cannot help laughing at mobile games released 10 years earlier. Picturing a local mobile game as the leader in the global market, I hope that I will enjoy talking about memories with device constraints and game-making difficulties, etc.
※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
(http://www.khgames.co.kr)
Translation by Kim Ki-hui
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