Mobile Slots: History

The first prototype of this game -- the "proof-of-concept" application -- took only six days to build, and ran on the MIDP 2.0-compliant Nokia Series 60 phones (such as the popular Nokia 6600). Most of the graphics I had cut, shrunk and pasted from the PokerRoom.com Fruit Slots applet. (Incidentally, I was the one who designed the original fruit symbols of the applet version.)

The management was impressed by this and eventually a mobile development team was formed, with the mission to implement the game properly from the ground up. The team consisted of me (the mobile Java specialist), a server-side programmer and a consultant project leader.

In order to reach a sufficiently large market segment without working ourselves to death, we decided to initially port the game to the three most popular (and technically feasible) platforms from three of the most popular phone manufacturers. Thus a total of nine different game versions. But after some extensive research we decided that we could get by with only seven: the Nokia 6600, 6230 and 6820, the SonyEricsson K700i and K500i, and finally the Motorola V600 and V220. Each phone has several popular "siblings" the game will also work on.

The whole development and testing process took about three months. During this time we also let a professional artist give the graphics an overhaul (but not the fruit symbols -- they were already perfect :-). You have seen the result on the K500i. On the right is what it now looks like on the Nokia 6600.

I'm not particularly optimistic about this game ever becoming popular. The kind of people who find slot games interesting (mostly older women) are the least likely to be able to configure their cell phone for Internet connections, assuming they would even have one that runs MIDP 2.0 Java. But my mobile development team learned a lot from this, which will be useful for more important projects later on.