As a continuation of this post - I had a go at filling in some gaps in our knowledge when it comes to the thrills and spills of early 2000s mobile games. Back in 2021 I had a fight with Japanese mobile phones from this period - before Android the market was split, which means from a gaming perspective, "i-Mode games" are different to "J-Sky games" (even though most were using Java underneath). Still, you could make sense of it if you tried - the Japanese are generally better at keeping records, even if playing the games in the modern age is neigh-on impossible. I thought America would be a nightmare, because SoA didn't keep nice records, and ultra mega capitalism means big tech doesn't like to dwell on the past. It's not impossible though - there were only a finite number of mobile phone "carriers", each with their own digital storefronts, and while it's not as neat and tidy, I was able to generate a reasonable list of Sega Mobile's back catalogue. Previously we were listing everything as "J2ME games", which while not incorrect, isn't ideal if the storefronts were locked down to certain carriers. So I copied Sega Mobile's old website and split things up, which was fine until I got to 2005, as at this point, the website was refreshed, going all on in Flash and breaking any chance of WayBack machine being able to archive it properly. So the period between 2005 and 2009 is mostly unknown - we know which games were released, but we don't know their platforms. And here's the thing, while you'd expect Sega of America would just localise Japanese mobile games, it commissioned a few for itself, meaning there were Sega games exclusive to certain brands of American mobile phone. Here's most of a list, and it contains a few interesting ones, such as Ikari Warriors and Paperboy (which are not Sega franchises) and an undocumented Vectorman game. Very few of these games have been archived, and as they were barely discussed at launch (meaning virtually no internet coverage exists), it's a black hole of knowledge. My favourite bit is Sega Monkey Ball, the first US-bound mobile game from August 2002. It was built into a few devices, including the "Samsung Rainbow". Google that term - you'll find nothing, because not only are the games barely documented, the handsets weren't either. The internet calls it an SPH-A500, but that's not what Sprint called it... apparently.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060902211533/http://www.segamobile.com/Wonder_Boy Some of the game pages have a drop down "select carrier" menu with the available carriers on it. You may have to go through the timestamps to find one with it.
I've done some research on old mobile games in the past (mostly ones by NAMCO). I can't believe Vectorman went past my radar!
They seem to have dropped the drop-down menu after September 2006, so you may need to search for URLs from before October 2006, example.
Hi, I'm one of the people who has been writing Sonic Retro Info articles lately about retro mobile Sonic games such as Sonic 1, 2, Shadow Shoot (corrections) and Sonic Bowling (documentation on the overseas version). I'd like to clarify some things. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to sort and divide mobile games by distributor as opposed to by platform. There were several very distinct mobile platforms at the time: J2ME (aka MIDP, Java ME, J-Sky, Vodafone Live, SoftBank S-Appli), BREW (aka ezWeb, but not the early ones which are J2ME) and DoJa (aka i-appli, or by the name of the service DoCoMo i-mode). If you were in Japan and had a phone with an app runtime, it was one of the three, in North America it was likely either J2ME or BREW, and in Europe it was J2ME most of the time (unless you had the insanely rare European BREW or DoJa phones - note that AFAIK Sega did not release DoJa games in Europe). Of course there were other mobile platforms like ExEn, Mophun and WGE (WGE my beloved), but those aren't relevant to this topic. Oh, also, if you know the undumped Sonic J (for Motorola Timeport) - it's for J2ME, but instead of the CLDC specification (used by MIDP and DoJa), it uses CDC, I don't know if it's emulated by anything at all, so there is that. Sega Monkey Ball is dumped, but only the J2ME demo version, my buddy dumped the preloaded game off a Samsung phone (I don't remember the model but I don't think it was the Samsung Rainbow). I can't say that about the Vectorman game though, judging by that page it looks to have been a J2ME exclusive from Bell (at least in the US), those types of games are never fun for preservation. Edit: wording corrections Edit 2: More on the topic of the thread, can someone find official mentions of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Dash and Crash ( https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(J2ME) )? I wrote that entire article because it's an actual game with way too many dumped versions, but the archived sites of publisher Glu Mobile and developer Rockpool Games seem to have no info about this game. Not to mention the official English versions of Shadow Shoot, Sonic Bowling, Sonic Hopping, Sonic Fishing...
As the different carriers had different prices and release dates we'll still need to take into account the carrier. Maybe just have the carriers as a sub-category under format.
This could be a case of trying to bite more than one could chew. Mobile phones had an insane outreach across the world - people who couldn't afford a console or a powerful enough PC for the latest games might've still had a mobile phone, which often had a version of one game or another made for it. In addition, in some countries such as Russia, J2ME games were often distributed not by mobile operators (or at least not only by them), but by various "content providers", the whole purpose of which was to distribute mobile wallpapers, ringtones and other stuff. You could often see them advertised in magazines or something, so anyway, finding a list of them for each country seems like a massive task especially these days. I would be however still interested in finding release info for each Sonic game that exists on old mobile phones, as some of them seem like an absolute mystery. Here are lists of Sonic games that I know are dumped on each platform. Please tell me if I forgot any. J2ME: Shadow Shoot (SEGA) Sonic Advance (Gameloft) Sonic at the Olympic Games (SEGA) Sonic Bowling (SEGA Corporation) Sonic Cricket (Indiagames) Sonic Darts (SEGA Corporation) Sonic Fishing (SEGA) Sonic the Hedgehog Golf (SEGA) Sonic Hopping (SEGA Corporation) Sonic Jump (Tectoy Mobile) Sonic Jump (Glu Mobile) / Sonic Jump 2 (Tectoy Mobile) Sonic Racing Kart (Tectoy Mobile) Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (Gameloft) Sonic Runners Adventure (Gameloft) Sonic Spinball (EA Mobile) Sonic Tennis (SEGA Corporation / Tectoy Mobile) Sonic the Hedgehog: Part One and Part Two (iFone / Glu Mobile) Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Dash! and Crash! (Glu Mobile / SEGA) Sonic Unleashed (Gameloft) BREW: Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA Mobile / EA Mobile) Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (EA Mobile) Sonic Spinball (EA Mobile) Sonic at the Olympic Games (SEGA) DoJa: Sonic the Hedgehog - base content only Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - base content only Sonic no Daifuugou
The problem with listing things as J2ME is it's like listing console games as "C++" (well okay a higher level language since there's a Java runtime involved but you get the point) - it doesn't take into account hardware considerations. Older phones won't necessarily run newer J2ME games. That and Sega put things into categories, so we probably ought to too. Although I agree it makes it a bit difficult for the cases where Sega just distributed J2ME apps without going through one of the official carrier storefronts/portals/services/whatever we want to call them. It might also have been tricky if we were covering games that weren't Sega's. Arguably Steam and GoG and whatever could be called "PC" but we chose not to do that - if it gets super messy we can re-assess. I don't know how it's going to be for every country - I guess we'd only want to cover the official channels (would Russia have had any during this period?), but there aren't many online records. For example, Sega Mobile's website lists "Telstra" as a carrier, which I assume is for Australia, but... that's about as far as the leads go.
That is true. I believe there were three versions of MIDP: MIDP 1.0, MIDP 2.0 and MIDP 2.1 (there were newer versions but they were not used for Java ME phone games). Phones with MIDP 1.0 on them would not run big versions of games made for MIDP 2.0 or 2.1 phones, but the devs at the publisher's whim might've attempted to make MIDP 1.0 versions of the game for those outdated phones, though certain outdated phones weren't supported forever by game publishers when they wanted to release their new game. Similarly, DoJa had a bunch of versions. For all MIDP games and some of the DoJa games, you can take a look at the MANIFEST.MF file or the .JAM file respectively to learn the intended minimum spec version for the game version, though I think it's specified for device compatibility's sake and thus might not always be correct. It is true that certain carriers such as Sprint and certain device manufacturers such as Nokia (these are singular examples but actually the rabbit hole goes deep) came up with their proprietary APIs for J2ME (MIDP), perhaps in an attempt to make game development more straightforward and smooth, but really they just made everything more fragmented tbh. In that regard it makes sense to document carrier availability AND device availability, for technical reasons. I did say the outreach was large. Not only there was an official localized version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Dash! into Czech and Russian that is dumped, but certain Samsung models in Russia and possibly some other East European countries had unlockable demos of Sonic 1 Part 1 preinstalled. This demo thing was not worldwide, as some Samsung phones have these unlockable demos in the Russian firmwares but not in various others. That's how I played a Sonic game for the first time, on my grandma's slider phone the model of which I don't remember. I do have a Samsung SGH-E200B bar phone, which contains some demos, but not Sonic, nevertheless, around the beginning of 2021 (I lived in Russia at the time) I bought an unlock code for another game just as a funny test, and it did arrive in an SMS from "i-Free" that cost me 160 rubles (the operator being MTS Rus - the price could be different on others). It's likely that the price was the same for all of these preinstalled games at the time.
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/sega-mobile-gaming-europe-1481442/1481442 Sega Europe didn't set up their mobile division until 2005, where they outsourced distribution to UK based iFone. The first game released was Super Monkey Ball Golf 2005-12 according to Sega, but iFone didn't put out a press release until January. Sonic the Hedgehog Part One was released February 2006 on the Orange network (UK) before coming to other major networks from March onwards (Sega say April). In April 2006 iFone was acquired by Glu along with their Sega deal. Sega Europe had planned to make deals directly with network operators as was done in North America, but ended up extending the deal with Glu in February 2007 just before it was about to expire (this time says for EMEA, previous deal only mentioned Europe), and again in September 2007 (also adding Australia & New Zealand to EMEA). They were still publishing Sega games as of June 2008 when they announced Beijing 2008. At this point the market is transitioning to smart phones with global stores, so I don't see Sega Europe bothering to publish themselves on feature phones after then. In a way it's simpler than the US situation as they just have a long list of compatible handsets, although they're not the same for each game. On the other hand their initial Sega games say this; So it's kind of the same as North America, except it's not. I guess this also explains the Telstra thing, they probably made a deal with Sega Mobile in the US before Sega Europe had set up Sega Mobile in Europe, but eventually Glu would take over. There's also "Sega Mobile Asia" which I haven't looked into yet, but presume this was a division of Sega Japan.
Good stuff. Matter of fact is that one of the dumped versions of Sonic 1 Part 1 says "iFone_OrangeSA" in the vendor field, although this sounds more like their French arm. Also yeah, that list of Sonic 1 Part 1 compatible phones may be long, but it likely doesn't include some later added phones for which Glu Mobile released compatible versions with their branding as opposed to iFone's. It looks as if Electronic Arts took over where Glu Mobile left off, though there are dumps of official Sonic 1 and 2 versions from Glu dated 2012. I'm gonna add publisher info to the above post with the dumped games a bit later today.
EA bought Glu for $2.1 billion, but that wasn't until 2021, maybe they had a partnership prior to that. And here's news of Sega Mobile's Sega Snowboarding launching with "Telstra Mobile Loop" in March 2003.
Héhé! Hoho! Ahah! I noticed not much was happening in Europe (which is odd), and I wasn't sure if these were the same games Japan were getting at the time (I mean it makes no sense to try and port Sonic 1 twice but... well this is Sega) There is one error in that slideshow though: "we made a phone" ...I don't think they did. This SA800i "kids phone" had a fair bit of coverage at the time given its child-friendly nature, but Sega is never credited for its existence. They did, however, optimise the Mushiking website to work with this device, and took some SA800is to a Mushiking convention to show it off.
I edited my post with the dumped game list. As you can see, EA Mobile released several of the BREW games (Sonic 1 was released originally by Sega Mobile and re-released by EA Mobile, apparently), and Sonic Spinball for J2ME, which exists for some reason. While I'm at it, two versions of Fantasy Zone on the J2ME are dumped. The Nokia Series 60 version for phones with 176x208 screen resolution credited to SEGA Corporation is faithful to the original (but has an added Easy Mode with health points) and has nice music, but on some phones that should in theory be compatible, it has graphical glitches. There's then the Sony Ericsson T-series (128x160 screen resolution) version credited to "Sega.com, Inc." (who's that now?) which has pretty-looking downscaled graphics and likewise an easy mode, but there's no music sadly. Also, the title screen of this version says "Fantasy Zone: Part 1" but I don't think Part 2 is dumped. Was there not much happening in Europe? Seems like more was happening and it just went under the radar. As for Sonic 1 ports, from what I can tell, Sonic 1 Part 1 and Part 2 for the J2ME are iFone's conversions of Sega's DoJa Sonic 1 game. There was that old forum thread with the guy from iFone talking about his experience working on the port. Most Sonic 1 P1/P2 versions have a credits list of people from iFone, but there are exceptions. Some versions timestamped 2007 only credit "SEGA Corporation", and there's one J2ME Motorola version of the game with noticeable changes (in the menus for example) that opens with a "Brizo Interactive" logo, and in the credits it mentions "SEGA Mobile" and "Porting: Brizo Interactive". Presumably this is a North American release, and I think they may have meant porting the game to the Motorola phones in question as opposed to J2ME - in various old J2ME games you can sometimes see phone-specific porting credits or just "porting team" credits related to releasing the games on as many phones as humanly possible. Also, I don't think Sonic the Hedgehog Golf on the J2ME is the same as the Sonic Golf games released in Japan that are documented on the wiki. Sonic the Hedgehog Golf on the J2ME is a sidescroller not unlike the golf modes in the fan remakes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110806042413/http://www.sonicteam.com/cafe/chu900/index.html iFone version left, Japanese version right I think we're going to need to collect some JAR files. The current sets on the internet are vaguely labeled and are missing context - if there are 3490823048932 releases of a game at different resolutions, we need to make a note.
A pair of MMORPGs released March 2005; Pocket Kingdom https://www.smartone.com/about_us/media_centre/press_release/2005/03/2005_03_07.pdf Can only find reference to this releasing in Hong Kong (there's an N-Gage version released elsewhere) Castle Jack Online https://www.gamesindustry.biz/sega-mobile-launches-castle-jack-online-on-snap-mobile-platform Probably Japan only. Both subsciption based. Edit: Actually, could these both be the same game?
There are some massive J2ME archives on archive.org - 50GB+, which struggle to display on a web browser (or at least Firefox). I can't really work with it in that state. What's beginning to interest me most, however, are the iFone/Glu titles for Sega Europe. My gut feeling at this stage is they're entirely separate to the Japanese library but have (erroneously?) been combined. For example, there was a mobile version of Sega Rally in Japan... but no screenshots have survived. There is this Glu version though: and aside from the oddity that the internet calls it "Sega Rally 3D" (when the game doesn't call itself that), this is clearly "inspired" by Sega Rally Revo, while the Japanese version was probably based on the 1995 original.
Internally the main classes are called "SegaRally2D" and "SegaRally3D" for the respective versions of the game on J2ME, if you say so then it's likely that the devs probably internally called the versions that to differentiate the two simultaneously released versions of the game called Sega Rally (not all phones could handle 3D or at least easily), and then J2ME enthusiasts, upon obtaining the game, started doing the same thing in order to differentiate the two versions. I've talked to Black Squirrel about this in private earlier which led to them looking into Sega Rally (3D), but I'm willing to look through the archives to find the best dumps of each version of the available Sega games, since the archives are essentially automated and unsorted, nobody has bothered to make a full J2ME good dump collection in the vein of No-Intro. I will just need some help with internet research in regards to the list of partners. I know that iFone / Glu Mobile, Gameloft, EA Mobile / Electronic Arts have collaborated with Sega, and those are worth looking into, but there's also Virtua Fighter Mobile credited to "Southend", which was a company in Sweden I've never heard of before. This kind of endeavor certainly is gonna take long but it'd be worth it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051120051537/http://sega.jp/kt/docomo/dragoon/home.html Castle Jack; Pocket Kingdom; https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/mobile/926701-pocket-kingdom/data https://www.gamespot.com/articles/pocket-kingdom-hands-on/1100-6120146/ Seem to be different games, but with similar gameplay. I guess targetted at different markets. I don't think Pocket Kingdom released in the west though, Gamespot got a look at it at Game Developers Conference, right when it launched, and GameFAQS has a US release date of Q4 2005, which is obviously a planned release window which never got updated and there's no evidence of a US release. There doesn't seem to be a dump of this either, which isn't too surprising if it only released in Hong Kong. Edit: Virtua Fighter Mobile published by Glu, developed by Southend.
Apologies, I was going off the MANIFEST.MF files of some versions, which have various metadata such as "MIDlet-Vendor", which was usually the game's publisher, but in at least two cases with Sega, the dev's name ended up there; the other one is Shadow Shoot (official English J2ME versions), which on the About screen mentions SEGA, but the manifest file reveals the developer company's name "Forecegen", which I can only assume refers to Beijing ForceGen Information Technology Co.,Ltd. which seemed to either be a frequent collaborator with Sega in China, or Sega's Chinese mobile branch or something. This Chinese stuff is a story of its own.
