This is an interview with Markus Kassullke of Handy Games who develop games for mobile devices. The are based in three locations and employ around 25 people.
Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Markus. Can you tell us a bit about Handy Games? What is the company background?
HandyGames was found in 2000 with a crazy idea to produce games on mobile devices and proof that we can make cooler games on black/white displays than "Snake" on the Nokia phones. We are one of the veterans in the mobile gaming scene. As a self-financed company I think we survived with our organisation, strategy and product quality a lot of VC pushed competitors and we will defend our position as one of the leading companies on this sector worldwide the next years. In total we are about 25 employees concentrating the whole day to bring fun to small devices.
Can you tell us a little about your approach and method to producing a mobile phone game.
Basically you have the same approach like on other systems. Some day under the shower you have a cool idea, you walk to the office, write a concept, setup the production plan and then your little elves start to produce graphics, sound, tons of code and marketing material.
The only difference is that you have to live with limits like in the old days of videogaming where memory sizes were low and graphics were poor. Today you have relatively good graphics, but still less memory.
"The art of mobile gaming" is to produce a innovative game on a lot of handsets in order to attract masses of players with a long term motivating gameplay. This sounds easy, but it isn´t. Especially on new Java handsets, you have always the problem of different software versions and virtual machines from the coding side, and also a lot of differences regarding display and sound hardware. Not to mention localization on Chinese or Russian for example…
How long does it take to produce a mobile phone games from conception to roll out.
This questions is very hard to answer, because the time you need to start the release depends especially on the complexity of the game you produce. You can say that a game production normally will not exceed 6 months for a very cool game.
Mobile phone games can be basic, so what do you see being possible in future, say two years from now.
Hard to say. Did you think that in 2002 that there will be almost no black/white handsets on the market in 2003/2004 anymore? I mean, the development of the market is so fast and changing all the time, that you cannot really say whats "in" or "out" in two years. Handsets will get faster, display will stay the size but maybe with higher resolution and you will have maybe MP3 support for sound.
I am no analyst who forsees large numbers of revenues coming to mobile game developers. I think, there will be companies which will make money and there will be some which will fail sooner or later. It is like in all other markets, but maybe faster.
Anyway it will be fun to see the things coming - and I am sure, we will survive the up and downs.
Do you specialise in any one type of game, platform for example.
I can say from our actual situation, we concentrate us more on J2ME, mobile internet (WAP and iMode) and embedded games. Our portfolio is very large with a lot of different styles. I doubt we concentrate on e.g. mind games in future, because mobile gaming is a mass market - and the mass wants different game genre.
Just take a look on our top titles "Townsmen" or "1941:Frozen Front". We try to set new standards and get maximum gameplay out of limits we live in. This is our specialization - not matter which genre.
Some traditional game developers put hidden features into their product, "easter eggs" I have heard them called. Have you ever done anything similar and if so, care to share.
Maybe, but we don´t want to share. ;) Would it be still in "easter egg" if we share it in public?
If you were to build your dream mobile phone game what would it do?
Mhm. Maybe Battlefield 1942 on mobile. I only have to get an adapter for
my optical mouse, joystick and my subwoofer to hear the explosions. J
<end>
Thanks once again Markus. If you would like to find out more about Handy Games their website is: