Category:I-Mode games

I-Mode was a mobile gaming portal (though some sources incorrectly call it a line of mobile phones) that was popular in Japan, taking advantage of the fact that Japanese phones were several times more powerful than western phones. The service was popular enough to get developers like Namco, Sega, and even Hudson Soft to make high-quality games for it.

While i-mode phones were made available in a limited fashion in Europe, strangely enough, the game apps weren't exported; the i-mode specific features were mainly used for enhancing web pages for mobile browsers and even the Java API is the different, more limited "Overseas Edition". Unfortunately, the main reason behind this was the fierce pushback by Nokia and other western mobile hardware manufacturers refusing to support the DoJa software standard until very late. The few game ports to J2ME were mediocre to disastrous, and smartphones stole all of its credibility in the 2010s, resulting in the portal closing down in November 2021.

Also, it's the bane of video game preservationists everywhere, thanks to the fact that ripping game data off these cell phones was once uncharted territory, and how Docomo decided to put heavy copy protection on the apps (ironic for phone games). Over time, however, these copy protection measures have been cracked, leading to the extraction and decryption of gradually increasing numbers of i-mode games. The next barrier were the phones themselves: any progress on the development of data retrieval methods have proven painstakingly glacial, but the fruits of these efforts have started to show in the mid 2020s. Expect more games to crop up here if all goes according to plan.