I had no idea that a "T-Mobile Sidekick" existed, which is pretty wild given it was apparently a big success in America. Even today Elite take credit for a port of "Sonic the Hedgehog" to that system, but there's no other trace of it having existed. There's a suggestion a company called "Fujin" released a version of Pengo. Again, not much out there about that.
So I saw this thread on Twitter which seems to be an advertisement page for various Sega mobile games in the Prima Sonic '06 guidebook. It notably has some Uekawa art of Sonic holding a flip phone, similar to the one in the Sega Superstars box art style, and the 3D render. Unfortunately it's not on the wiki since I guess it's a digital copy which doesn't have ads? Would love a scan of this.
Yeah, the Sidekick was new to me too. I forgot to post some videos from sega's site. I don't know what codecs are required for these to play correctly, I got the video playing ok without audio in VLC player, i suspect there might be audio with the correct codec, but they might just be video only. Depth Charge Fantasy Zone Penguin Luv Space Gunner
Is it the same art as the demo ending screen? I can't really tell. I did mention the T-Mobile Sidekick a few pages ago, alongside there being only 2 games dumped for it, and no emulation.
Yup! Appears to be a modified version of it without shading, and the ifone logo over the Sonic logo, good eye!
Oh, I missed that. It sounds like these were actually native Sidekick apps rather than J2ME. Reading up a bit more on it I'm surprised I haven't heard about it before. https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2017-10-24-15-1/app-development-before-the-iphone A modern style app store which required approval from both T-Mobile and Danger, from where some of the latter left and started Android before it got bought out by Google in 2005 (Danger itself would get bought out by Microsoft in 2008). Fascinating. We kind of need to treat these more like iOS/Android than how we're treating J2ME games.
Okay thank you so much. I thought I found something new. Also the reason why I thought it was JP is due to the file name. Which, TBH is probably going to be deceiving from here on out.
There's some talk about Sonic Jump maybe being the first Sega-related Sidekick game (or at least originating there) or something. We're very vague with Sonic Jump - half the net says it was released in 2005, the other half in 2007. Which is it? Both! I think(?) Sonic Jump was originally released in Japan, and there it's a simpler game with cruder graphics and less content. When brought overseas by AirPlay and Glu Mobile in 2007, the game was updated and expanded (with maybe the double jump feature being added?). The original Android version (released everywhere) is based on the latter. More confusing is that the later release is sometimes called Sonic Jump 2. The Tectoy translation calls it that, and Sega Mobile (US)'s website suggests there were two games, but the Wayback Machine didn't archive the screenshots so I don't know. I don't know where the Sidekick version fits into this story. If I were to guess, I'd say Japan -> Sidekick (Elite?) -> Western mobile (AirPlay/Glu) but it's tricky without screenshots. There's also a 2012 Sonic Jump for iOS/Android that is unrelated to these two development wise, but almost certainly replaced them. The wiki pages might have to move to "Sonic Jump (2005)", "Sonic Jump (2007)" and "Sonic Jump (2012)". Not entirely sure if I want to call the 2007 edition "Sonic Jump 2" (as is the case on Sonic Retro right now) because most of the versions (and the original creators) don't call it that.
I'm pretty sure "Sonic Jump 1" and "Sonic Jump 2" are supposed to be two separate games, though I don't know how you're gonna name the articles. I'll leave it to Pirate Dragon to do internet research because they're far better than me at it, but for "Sonic Jump 1", the Tectoy version for Siemens (132x176) is dumped (there was also a Motorola 176x204 Tectoy version, but I don't know if the original JAR file remains without "mob.ua" edits done in post, or has it become one of the few such cases of "lost media"). For "Sonic Jump 2", there is a dump of the Brazilian localization under that name, as well as dumps of the Glu Mobile release under the name Sonic Jump, or as part of the compilation with Brain Genius. Apparently these games were also variously released on DoJa, BREW and Hiptop (that is, IDK which ones were), but no dumps exist yet to my knowledge.
It was pretty common for Sega to release significantly updated versions of their games with new phone "generations". Sonic Jump timeline; 2005-02-21: Sonic Jump released on i-mode in Japan 2006-05-10: This version shown at E3 2006-08-xx: Sonic Jump released in US (no mention of sidekick exclusivity) 2007-02-xx: Sonic Jump released in Brazil 2007-04-xx: Sonic Jump (AirPlay) released in Europe 2007-06-xx: Responsibility for Americas (North, South, and Central) moves to US from Japan 2008-05-xx: Sonic Jump 2 released in US 2008-09-xx: Sonic Jump 2 released in Brazil It seems that the original Japanese version got ported to US and Brazilian phones whilst Sega commissioned AirPlay to develop an updated version which got released in Europe where the original doesn't seem to have been released. This version then got released as Sonic Jump 2 in the US and then Brazil. I haven't played the dumps to see if they match this theory. Sega Mobile's home page is only archived up to August 2008, so includes the two Olympics games. After this I can only find evidence of one more game released by them, Samba De Amigo on 2008-11-10. I can't find any evidence that the Gameloft developed games got released in the US. https://segaretro.org/Press_release...ds_its_Agreement_With_SEGA_to_South_East_Asia They did get the rights to release in South East Asia (it's interesting to note that they include India and Sri Lanka with that region). That also shows that Sega considered the predominantly Chinese and Korean speaking markets of East Asia separately (maybe they already had exclusive deals for those markets). So after 2008 Sega Mobile seem to have stopped releasing feature phone games in the US, which matches with EA Mobile then releasing games from 2009. Looking at the manifests for the TecToy releases of Sonic Racing Kart and Sonic Tennis they were both released in 2009 too, so it looks like they had to dip into the Japanese back-catalogue then due to the lack of US games.
Excellent as always, Pirate Dragon. However, IIRC the Tectoy version of Sonic Jump (2005) has some English sounding names in the credits, possibly from Airplay, though I can't find credits footage anywhere anymore. Also, one of the dumped versions of Sonic Jump (2007) is for Southeast Asia from the looks of it, it credits SEGA as opposed to Glu Mobile in the manifest file and on the copyright screen, like Puyo Pop Fever DX, Shadow Shoot and the presumed Southeast Asian versions of Sonic 1 P1 and P2. I do believe there's a Vietnamese version of Sonic Unleashed dumped, though I'm unsure if it's a genuine JAR file.
Presumably based off of the US port, so I wouldn't be surprised to see English names there, would need checking to see who the dev was. Yeah, I think Glu just published/distributed games supplied by Sega. I'm not sure if they developed any original titles themselves (unlike Gameloft), so there are probably South East Asian releases for all of those. It's interesting if Gameloft translated their games into South East Asian languages too, they did have dedicated pages for Vietnam etc, so it's quite possible.
I'm picking up a feel for how mobile phones of the day worked (yes I was there at the time, but I wasn't paying attention - nobody was). The way I remember it in the UK is that everyone had a Nokia, until maybe 2004/2005-ish when they didn't. This is reflected a little on the wiki - at least as far as the European-published games are concerned, most of the phones mentioned in the compatibility lists were released between 2004 and 2007. The only supported phones from 2002/2003 are those made by Nokia. Nokia were making a lot of handsets around this time, but on closer inspection, I think it's because they were off their heads on some sort of wacky substance: This is the 7250, available in six designer colours, later re-released as the 7250i. It has a stupid key layout, so for business users they re-released this phone as the Nokia 6610i. But hey, we can reskin it again for the youf as the 3200 Why have twelve buttons for numbers when you can have six. But these strange business decisions means we have less platforms to consider, and this seems to be a recurring theme for Nokia around this time period. It was only later when they made every phone unique. "unique" being the operative word
There are a couple of extra versions of Sonic 1 and 2 we haven't documented - ports were put out by EA Mobile for J2ME and BREW. They're not super duper interesting - they seem to be derived from the Japanese Sonic Cafe versions, but they weren't written down, so here you go. They're "acceptable" ports for the time - some of the animations are missing, parallax scrolling has been simplified and rotating palettes are gone, and you don't get the luxary of sound effects, but they're recognisably versions of Sonic 1 and 2, complete with special stages. I don't know exactly how the EA Mobile versions differ from the Sonic Cafe outside of some localisation - not all versions have been dumped, but you can add it to the list of wonky mobile ports. Timeline: 2005/2006: Japanese Sonic Cafe versions, by Sega(?) 200x: Sonic 1 Part 1/Part 2 and Sonic 2 Dash/Crash by iFone 200x: Mysterious version(s) by Brizo Interactive for North America 200x: EA Mobile versions I'd still say the iFone ones are the most interesting because they cut half the content and play like garbage. I might make a big silly topic outlining some differences one day. EDIT: now that the wayback machine isn't undergoing maintenance: https://web.archive.org/web/2009122....eamobile.com/mobile-games/sonic-the-hedgehog https://web.archive.org/web/20091227114941/http://www.eamobile.com/mobile-games/sonic-the-hedgehog-2
I don't know where the info about the EA J2ME versions comes from, AFAIK the only Sonic game they released on J2ME (and BREW as well) is Sonic Spinball, which is an original production made by Distinctive Developments. Maybe it's not dumped or something, but how would that explain the fact that there are official-looking versions of Glu's Sonic 1 and 2 segmented ports with 2012 file dates inside the jar. On BREW, EA did re-release Sonic 1 (released earlier by Sega Mobile as well) which is presumably the localization of the Sonic Cafe game, and released Sonic 2, which is not that, but a port by Distinctive Developments which has signs of being based on the J2ME version (which is actually by Rockpool, not iFone, I think you knew that but forgot during your descent into madness). Sonic 1 on BREW does not have special stages, giant rings or chaos emeralds at all. Sonic 2 on BREW does have that content added back in, but the special stage implementation isn't that great tbh, and the special stage MIDI sounds especially horrible. The Brizo Interactive version from 2006 for North America is dumped for Sonic 1 Part 1 for Motorola phones with 176x204 game resolution (176x220 screen resolution), it's v1.2.9 or something. It has some quality of life changes compared to the iFone original, though some are questionable like the loading bars that can slow down the loads in practice.
The original BREW version on Verizon came out about the same time as the iFone versions. It's advertised as a new release on 2006-02-08 (previous day was advertising Sonic Jump as coming soon). iFone versions released 2006-02 too. EZweb BREW version released 2006-06-22. Looking at the Sega Mobile Sonic page, 2006-09-18 page only mentions Verizon, whereas 2006-10-23 page adds "NOTE: Depending upon your carrier, this game may be available as a two-part series.". So the Java versions probably released about then, unless they were just a bit slow to update the page. EZweb BREW version of Sonic 2 released 2009-02-19, so I guess the EA ones are probably based off of those. Not sure where Sonic Spinball came from, maybe and unreleased game Sega had already developed? Edit: Actually, Part 2 of Sonic 1 didn't get released by Glu until September 2006, so it's possible that Part 1 was already available by Sega Mobile, but they didn't bother to specify it was a two-part series until Part 2 released.
oh I'm definitely losing brain cells with this exercise Because there had to be one we were missing: The Nokia 2650. I can't tell if the design team were desperate for a holiday, or were inspired by the padded walls of their cells.
Yeah, there's probably a few that fell between the cracks, this one was on their site at least; https://web.archive.org/web/2012032...nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/2650/
Something tedious to look out for: This is the Zeemote JS1 - a Bluetooth device that lets you play mobile games with a better-but-also-not controller. Apparently Sega Mobile optimised some of its games to make them "Zeemote Ready" - I don't know what that means in practise.
The last feature phone I got was the Nokia N95 back in 2006. It had TV Out and you could connect a bluetooth keyboard to turn it into a rudimentary computer, which was pretty cool for someone who travelled a lot back then. I didn't really game on it, but according to that article the Nokia keyboard could be used as a controller for games. I guess this controller basically works as a keyboard, but with less buttons. One of the complaints from that article was that there wasn't a true controller available, funny how it took several years for one to come out.
