By Avery Score and Wireless Gaming Review Staff
Design by Marty Smith

WGR's Matthew Bellows introduces mobile gaming and the new Mobile Channel on GameSpot

Video games have evolved in the same way as any emerging technology. There are the early adopters, who welcome the advent of each new advancement with an enthusiast's zeal. If you bought an Intellivision, a TurboGrafx-16, or an Atari Jaguar, you probably fall into this category.

There exists a second category of gamer--one who lacks the monomaniacal drive necessary to spend 100 irreplaceable hours of his or her ephemeral existence in order to complete a strategy RPG but who still enjoys the occasional fighter or puzzler. If you fall into the former group, you probably hate the guy who played Enter the Matrix for its license but lacked the depth of character to immerse himself in Lost Kingdoms II, a quaint card battler that a couple of dozen people were smart enough to enjoy. Like it or not, the casual gamer is the fastest growing demographic in video games and will continue to change the way we think about and play games.

New Mobile Channel

GameSpot is pleased to announce a new partnership with Wireless Gaming Review. Together, we present GameSpot's new mobile games channel, which will provide reviews and full coverage of the rapidly emerging mobile games market. Cell phone games have come a long way since the days of Snake, and the new mobile channel will provide you with all the information you need to keep track of the best mobile games.

Will Wright, Maxis' social theorist turned games developer, has been making a killing on this very concept. He is fond of saying that his titles, such as The Sims, are more akin to toys than to video games. Playing them is like fidgeting; it fills idle moments and doesn't require undivided attention. Casual gaming is ideal for the nondedicated gaming platform, such as the PC, on which The Sims first launched, giving all of us a persistent, virtual world to explore, in lieu of advancing our own lives and careers.

Yet, the PC--with the exception of Windows CE-powered handhelds--can't fit in your jacket pocket. Its potential is limited by this simple size constraint. True casual gaming must take place on a device that is portable and is an existing part of a reasonable person's lifestyle. Nintendo's GBA still hasn't found its way into too many executive briefcases, even if the SP's cool form factor does make it look more like a laptop than a gaming console. Besides, the GBA is one of the few modern gizmos to lack Internet connectivity. Casual gamers are social creatures, and fiddling away in a corner is isolating.

Built-in networking is, and always has been, the promise of the mobile phone as the next-generation gaming platform. Nearly everyone has a handset, giving wireless gaming, as a whole, a larger installed user base than the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox combined. Secondly, phones are--obviously--networked devices. It doesn't take a visionary game designer, like Wright, to recognize the tremendous potential of mobile phones as a multiplayer medium. Downloadable content, online competition, a constantly expanding library of games--this is the type of experience you'd expect from Xbox Live, yet it all comes on a platform that you, along with your family and friends, probably already own.

Recently, media pundits everywhere have taken notice of this emerging medium. With a cell phone game inevitably following every major console, PC, or cinematic release, they have to. It was not always so, however. Mobile gaming had to earn its place among mainstream gaming.

For many of us, wireless gaming began with Snake.

The first cell phone game, and--ironically--probably still the best known, is Snake, which was first released in 1997 as an embedded application for Nokia phones. Even the Finnish mobile giant couldn't have known that this simple addition would inexorably alter the function of a cell phone. With Snake, and the slew of games that followed, cell phones transcended their role as communication devices and became entertainment accessories--a modern accoutrement. For some, this was the first video game they had ever played. For those who recognized the title for its Apple II and Commodore 64 roots, Snake heralded good things to come.

And come they did. Soon, the new paradigm was WAP, or wireless application protocol. WAP titles were simple, usually featuring text-based gameplay structured like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Graphics were sparse and simplistic on the black and green screens that pervaded the WAP era, but the games had one astonishing feature: online competition. Titles like Jamdat's Gladiator or nGame's DataClash seem silly today, but they spoke of a brave new world of constant connectivity and wireless competition.

It was DataClash that convinced Matthew Bellows and Cashman Andrus to join forces, Double Dragon-style, and cofound WGR Media Inc., a company combining perhaps the two most perilous industries: Web publishing and mobile gaming. Somehow, they made it work. In a few short years, Wireless Gaming Review grew, along with the mobile gaming industry, from a fledgling startup to, well, a more-established startup. Today, WGR has joined forces with GameSpot to bring you the most comprehensive coverage of wireless gaming available.