I’ve been on a fun little nostalgia trip the last few days. As I was looking for a specific piece of code, I stumbled onto a backup drive that had almost all of my “first generation” Orangepixel games.
These are the games I created when I started Orangepixel back in 2004, games developed for “feature phones” years before we had the first iPhone or Android smart phones! Mobile gaming was a bit of a weird one, with hardware limitations being extremely silly compared to todays devices. We’re talking about screens with a 128×128 resolution, a 64kb file size limitation!! games that at BEST would run at 30fps, but in most cases pushing for 21fps was pretty much the standard.
And let’s not even start about music or sound effects! Most of these devices could only play one, literally, one sound at a time.
BUT! I loved all these limitations because they made you become more creative in working around them to create fun games.
I started just diving into it with a fun hobby project called Smash Dizzy, it ran on only a few devices as I had no idea how messed up the “unified” implementations of Java on phones was. So after that I quickly learned more and better techniques to get games running on as many different devices as possible.
Learning tricks to compress graphics data and music and game code so that it could all fit within 64kb file sizes.. CRAZY if you now download a random mobile game it probably comes in a bloated file that’s hundreds of megabytes big!
Grab the games
I figured it would be cool to have these games available as some sort of preservation. I’m a bit sad that not all games are in this zip file, I’m missing a few very cool releases from later in the Orangepixel timeline (2007-2008) but most of the games are here and from what I can tell, most of them will actually run in the right J2ME emulator (see link below).
The game zip comes with different versions of each game as most phones in those days needed their own version to run. For the emulator I recommend you load either the generic “midp2” build, or go with the Nokia60 build.. those have the best chance of running and should have all of the features (there will be some trimmed down builds to save on data and space, kicking out some levels or maybe just the music).
So grab the zip file full of Orangepixel History, and have some fun.. I can fully recommend DynamoKid (and if anybody has the two sequels to that, please hit me up)
Download: Orangepixel classic J2ME game collection (19mb)
J2ME Emulator: KEmulator v1.0.3 (160mb)
I will also have a video up on Thursday where I dig through these games a bit and talk about some of the design decisions and how technology pretty much MADE those design decisions a requirement!
