You Got Games On There? A Return To The Nokia N-Gage

The year is 2003. I am a closeted 13 year old with one insatiable desire. I need a cell phone. My girlfriend, let’s call her Lady X, and I do not touch, but we do chat for hours on end about the Teen Titans cartoon currently airing on Cartoon Network. The only way to facilitate that without tying up the family phone line is for me to get a phone of my own. My relationship depends on it! In my hubris, of course, I’m not looking for just any phone. I’ve seen an ad, an ad for something I never dreamed possible: the Nokia N-Gage, a cell phone that not only would let me talk to Lady X whenever I wanted, but also could play the hottest videogames with high fidelity graphics. It seemed like a dream, one I was determined to make a reality.

As fate, luck, and destiny would have it, for my birthday that year I was given a gift like none I’d ever received before. I was given the N-Gage. After being bound to a single family phone line for my entire life I could finally make calls where no one could listen on the other line. I wouldn’t have to hang up when my older sister, let’s call her The Duchess, or my mom, let’s call her Mom, had to make their own call. I had autonomy. Cell phones were a thing that adults had, and if I had one I must be on my way there. Even more important, though, I suddenly had the ability to play videogames wherever I went, whenever I wanted. That, to me, was real freedom.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve used escapism to cope with some combination or anxiety and boredom for my entire life, and videogames were an enormous part of that. I’d never leave the house without my Game Boy Advance and at least a few games if I could help it, but that was not without its own stigma. Sometimes it was hard to be the kid who would rather be playing videogames. Family would tease me and comment on it, and hey, maybe they were right to, but I was doing it because I didn’t want to engage and calling attention to it only made me feel more alien. The N-Gage though… The N-Gage was my way out.

The N-Gage was my phone. It was there for emergencies and occasional social calls as long as I was within my allotted minutes. Why wouldn’t I bring it with me wherever I went? So what if it happened to have the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater game in it at all times, with a Tomb Raider cartridge on deck just in case? It didn’t scream “He’d rather be gaming” the way my Game Boy did, and with that came safety. It didn’t mean I had to be playing videogames at all times when I was out, but it did mean that I could, and just knowing that put me at ease. The escape plan was there, in my pocket. If I felt weird at a big family dinner, Tony Hawk was a few button presses away. The N-Gage would have my back.

The N-Gage, not unlike my relationship with Lady X, was, of course, doomed to fail. If we want to talk about functionality, it wasn’t particularly good at being a phone or a videogame console. It was incredibly awkward to take a call on and earned the nickname “The Taco Phone” for its bizarre shape. You needed to carry individual cartridges with you which was cumbersome and a bit silly. The games ran poorly and the graphics were impressive to the eyes of a 13 year old, but mostly looked like a mess to anyone else. Some games barely ran at all. I had Tomb Raider for it and never actually made it out of the first room the game starts you off in. To this day I’m convinced it was a problem with the game and not a skill issue. That didn’t stop me though. I’d put the cartridge in, run around that room, remember how to take my guns out and put them away, and be happy for a few moments.

The N-Gage was a good idea that lacked the foresight to actually make an impact. It couldn’t imagine where phones and videogames were headed, nor did it consider that wider markets might want console games to stay on consoles while making way for simpler phone exclusive games. It couldn’t see the future of ubiquitous, massively popular mobile games that arrived with smartphones. Because of this it faded away shortly after its release. It was an awkward shape and barely functioned, but at 13 so was I. My affection for this phone outlived many things from that era, and I remember it fondly to this day. On my first day of high school, almost two years into my life as an N-Gage user, a classmate with a Blackberry turned to me and said “Hey we both have cool phones.” I smiled back and nodded, but in my head thought, “You have a phone. I have the N-Gage.”

Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.