Robert Craig Knievel, known professionally as Evel Knievel, was an American stunt performer and entertainer. Throughout his career, he attempted more than 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps. Knievel was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1999. He died of pulmonary disease in Clearwater, Florida, in 2007, aged 69.
Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless was an application development platform created by Qualcomm, originally for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phones, featuring third-party applications such as mobile games. It was offered in some feature phones but not in smartphones. First developed in 1999, as a platform for wireless applications on CDMA-based mobile phones, it debuted in September 2001. As a software platform that can download and run small programs for playing games, sending messages, and sharing photos, the main advantage of Brew MP was that the application developers can easily port their applications among all Brew MP devices by providing a standardized set of application programming interfaces. Software for Brew MP-enabled handsets can be developed in C or C++ using the freely downloadable Brew MP software development kit (SDK). The BREW runtime library is part of the wireless device on-chip firmware or operating system to allow programmers to develop applications without needing to code for system interface or understand wireless applications. BREW is described as a pseudo operating system, but not a true mobile operating system. BREW was not a virtual machine such as Java ME, as it runs code natively.
A mobile game is a video game that is typically played on a mobile phone. The term also refers to all games that are played on any portable device, including from mobile phone, tablet, PDA to handheld game console, portable media player or graphing calculator, with and without network availability. The earliest known game on a mobile phone was a Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994.
PopCap Games, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Seattle, and a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. The company was founded in 2000 by John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka.
EA Mobile Inc. is an American video game development studio of the publisher Electronic Arts (EA) for mobile platforms.
Gameloft SE is a French video game publisher based in Paris, founded in December 1999 by Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot. The company operates 18 development studios worldwide, and publishes games with a special focus on the mobile games market. Formerly a public company traded at the Paris Bourse, Gameloft was acquired by media conglomerate Vivendi in 2016.
Kongregate is an American web gaming portal and video game publisher. Its website features over 124,000 online games and 30+ mobile games available to the public. The company also publishes games for PC, mobile, and home consoles. It was purchased by GameStop Corporation in 2010 before being acquired by Modern Times Group MT AB in 2017.
Javaground was an American provider of a suite of development and porting tools for the mobile games industry called the Xpress Suite. The company was also a developer of mobile games. Javaground's Xpress Suite was noted for its set of automated converters, which were used to create games for a range of platforms including the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, BREW, and Flash, from a single set of Java ME source code.
IOMO was a British mobile game developer and publisher based in Hampshire, England. IOMO was founded by John Chasey, Glenn Broadway and Andrew Bain in 2000. Initially a developer, the company was very successful in the early stages of the mobile game industry and worked with the majority of mobile technologies and customers across the whole value chain. This ranged from pre-installed titles developed for handset manufacturers and carriers, creation of branded titles for mobile games publishers and self-published original titles.
Guitar Hero Mobile is a series of rhythm video games in the Guitar Hero series, adapting the normal console-based gameplay which uses a guitar-shaped controller to match notes of popular rock music songs to work with the face buttons on advanced mobile phones, including BlackBerry devices and those supporting the Windows Mobile platform. The first three games in the series—Guitar Hero III Mobile, Guitar Hero Backstage Pass, and Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile—were developed by MachineWorks Northwest LLC and published by Hands-On Mobile, while a mobile version of Guitar Hero 5 was developed by Glu Mobile. The series has proven to be popular; the Guitar Hero III Mobile game has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and over 250,000 songs are played each day across the series.
Zed Group is a large organisation of privately held interlocking European companies that provide mobile phone and internet entertainment, film animation and video game production. Besides the main company also named Zed, other important companies of Zed Group are Ilion Animation Studios –production company specialized in computer-generated animation feature films like Planet 51- and Pyro Studios –video game developer including "Commandos".
Magmic Inc. is an Ottawa-based developer and publisher of mobile entertainment and lifestyle software. Founded in 2002, they produce original and licensed apps for a variety of mobile platforms, including Java ME, BREW, Sidekick, Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.
Spil Games is a Dutch video game developer based in Hilversum. The company publishes free-to-play games for Android and iOS devices, as well as for the Facebook Platform.
Rovio Entertainment Oyj is a Finnish video game developer based in Espoo. Founded in 2003 by Helsinki University of Technology students Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen and Kim Dikert, the company is best known for the Angry Birds franchise. The company currently operates studios in Espoo, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Montreal.
Fishlabs GmbH is a German video game developer based in Hamburg. Founded in 2004 by Michael Schade and Christian Lohr, the studio is best known for its Galaxy on Fire series. Following a brief bankruptcy proceeding, Fishlabs was acquired by Koch Media and reorganized as part of their game publishing label Deep Silver.
Namco Networks was an American developer and publisher of video games for mobile phones, based in San Jose, California. The company was founded on January 1, 2006, as the mobile phone division of Namco America, and produced video games for mobile phones in North America, Europe and Asia, many of which were ports of older Namco video games. Their first release was a port of Pac-Man, which was part of a batch of nine titles to be released for the iPod. Namco Networks' licensed port of Scene It? Movies is regarded as one of the first North American mobile games to incorporate downloadable, streaming video content for phones. In 2011, the company was merged with Namco Hometek, who was Namco's older home console division, to form Bandai Namco Games America, which subsequently became Bandai Namco Entertainment America in 2015.
Team17 Group plc is a British video game developer and publisher based in Wakefield, England. The venture was created in December 1990 through the merger of British publisher 17-Bit Software and Swedish developer Team 7. At the time, the two companies consisted of and were led by Michael Robinson, Martyn Brown and Debbie Bestwick, and Andreas Tadic, Rico Holmes and Peter Tuleby, respectively. Bestwick later became Team17's chief executive officer until 1 January 2024. After their first game, Full Contact (1991) for the Amiga, the studio followed up with multiple number-one releases on that platform and saw major success with Andy Davidson's Worms in 1995, the resulting franchise of which still remains as the company's primary development output, having developed over 20 entries in it.
Versus Evil LLC was an American video game publisher founded by former ZeniMax Online Studios marketing director Steve Escalante to focus on the independent video game market. Versus Evil was bought by another publisher, tinyBuild, in November 2021. In December 2023, all Versus Evil staff were laid off, days before Christmas.
Amazon Games is an American video game company and division of the online retailing company Amazon that primarily focuses on publishing video games developed within the company's development divisions.
The popularisation of mobile games began as early as 1997 with the introduction of Snake preloaded on Nokia feature phones, demonstrating the practicality of games on these devices. Several mobile device manufacturers included preloaded games in the wake of Snake's success. In 1999, the introduction of the i-mode service in Japan allowed a wide variety of more advanced mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones, though the service was largely limited to Japan. By the early 2000s, the technical specifications of Western handsets had also matured to the point where downloadable applications could be supported, but mainstream adoption continued to be hampered by market fragmentation between different devices, operating environments, and distributors.
