Less Snake, More Quake: The Demise of Lo-Fi Mobile Games

Simple cell-phone games—Snake, Tetris, that one where you break bricks with a bouncing ball—are perfect for those situations where you need to kill time, like waiting in a line or riding a bus. They're also free, which is key for people like me, who are poor enough to have to wait in lines and ride the bus. At least I thought those games were free. On my quest for a new phone, I visited retail stores for five major service providers. Except for the wallet-busting BlackBerry, every single phone I looked at had no free games. Sure, they all have plenty of demos—limited-functionality versions of titles like NBA Live 07 and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Lockdown. If you like the demos, you can buy the full games for a full price. (Prices for mobile games vary by developer and service provider, but most seem to cost a shade under $10.) As I searched in vain for free, no-fi games like Snake, it hit me that the mobile games I knew and loved had gone extinct.