It was only a matter of time. We all knew it had been ailing for sometime and was unable to compete with sexy new rivals, it was barely hanging on. Finally, they just had to pull out the plug…or in this case, the MMC card.

Nokia’s mobile gaming device and platform, N-Gage, is shutting down at the end of 2010. The N-Gage application will no longer be installed on Nokia phones effective immediately in favor of downloading games from the Ovi Store. However, people who have phones with N-Gage currently installed will be able to access the N-Gage website and multi-player Arena for another year.

The original N-Gage was a game playing phone that was released in 2003 to compete with the Game Boy Advance. Like most such creations, it was neither a good enough gaming device or a good enough phone to succeed, though it’s “Taco” shape would make it somewhat legendary in mobile tech circles and it revolutionized wireless multiplayer gaming. It also however gained a reputation for the fact you had to remove the battery to put in a new game, stored on MMC cards.

Once the N-Gage and then the N-Gage QD in 2004 crashed and burned (in the phone’s first week of release, the Game Boy Advance outsold the N-Gage 100 to 1), the N-Gage “Mobile Gaming Platform” was installed on many different Nokia cellphones, including the Nokia N81, N81 8GB, N73, N78, N82, N95, N95 8GB, N93, N93i, N96, N97, N85, N79 and Nokia 5320 XpressMusic.

The N-Gage system has had an impressive roster of games since expanding as a mobile platform, including mobile versions of such franchises as Tomb Raider, Sonic the Hedgehog, Metal Gear Solid, Need for Speed and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

The original N-Gage will go down as one of several failed attempts at gaming device hybrids in the period, including the gaming oriented Palm PDA, the Zodiac and the combination gaming device/GPS, the Gizmondo.

What finally spelled the end of the N-Gage? Well, on the surface the fact that nobody seemed to care about it anymore and that Nokia is hemorrhaging money would seem to be the culprits. However, Nokia had also been having a harder and harder time getting developers to create games for the system due to Nokia’s complex, arcane, frustrating development environment and approval process.

In the end, all of these are problems set the N-Gage up as an easy kill for a device that managed to create the phone and gaming synthesis that Nokia always seemed to have trouble with.

When Apple began selling the iPhone as a gaming platform, it was just a matter of time for the N-Gage.

Zealot (468 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).