Mobile game

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.