Mobile game
video game played on a mobile device
A mobile game is a video game played on a mobile device. The term may also refer to any game played on a portable device, such as a mobile phone, tablet, PDA, handheld game console, portable media player or graphing calculator, with or without network availability.
The earliest mobile phone game was a Tetris variant released on the Hagenuk MT-2000 in 1994.
In 1997, Nokia launched Snake, which came pre-installed on Nokia devices for a number of years. Snake was recorded to be on 350 million devices worldwide. Through most of the 2000s, the majority of mobile games were powered by Java (J2ME).
As technology advanced, users became able to purchase and download games onto their devices. Initially limited to stores controlled by mobile network carriers, mobile gaming grew rapidly with the development of app stores in 2008: Apple's App Store was the first mobile content marketplace operated directly by a mobile-platform holder, significantly altering consumer behavior by increasing access to downloadable mobile apps and granting more leverage and opportunity to independent developers.
Mobile gaming is the largest and most lucrative sector of the video game industry today, accounting for 49% of total global gaming revenue in 2025.
History
Toward the end of the 20th century, mobile phone ownership became increasingly widespread worldwide, driven by the establishment of industry standards, the rapid decline in handset costs, and growing consumer demandeconomies of scale.
“Mobile game” enters the record as video game played on a mobile device. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mobile, game and video can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Mobile game” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mobile, game and video provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1121542. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1994, 1997 and 2008.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mobile game” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.