Still have a core memory of sitting in the toilet, a long time after having finished my business, still playing snake and beating my highest score by a lot!
The fucking battery is almost empty after just three days! Just because I played Snake every break.
It was so sad you could not watch a 30 seconds ad to revive back then. No cosmetics to buy, nothing. Just an ugly snake running around.
/s
What are you talking about? Ringtones were the original paid cosmetics!
Ringtones and these Logo banners!
I remember there was a shitty website where you could buy credits to spend on banners and ringtones, but their website was utter trash that you could modify it and get them for free, so just got them all to fuck around with.
Millennial WAP
Could you get ringtones on Nokia 3210/3310 ?
Yes. You could pay some geek to type it in during recess.
Or have them (or operator logos, which were effectively wallpapers) sent over RTTTL texts. With WAP, actual wallpapers, screensavers, polyphonic ringtones, games etc. became available too.
That was a little later than 3210/3310.
RTTTL and logos over SMS were available on the 3310. WAP came 1 year later, and the 3410 already had downloadable games.
iirc on the 3310 you needed Nokia’s logo manager software
The one I really enjoyed was the 8110? I think. The one that was in the matrix with the slider. That one was a ton of fun to customize, different rings depending on the group (family, friends, etc)
Oh, I had forgotten about about that feature. I was like 4yo back then.
Excellent point about ads. Yes I still remember when every internet site DID NOT have advertising
Back then, websites didn’t need to show ads. They just distributed adware. Those days are long gone…
That shows a picture of a browser with a million search bars installed. This feels like it was more of a thing between 1998 and 2002. I’d say that wasn’t early Internet, it was when it started to become mainstream.
There was a time when websites had hours.
I started on the internet in 1995 (demon Internet in the UK TAM account using slip) and the Web then was actually a very small part of what I did online. Yep the websites that were around rarely had ads. If they did they were part of a garish geocities page most likely.
But I was more often on usenet (yes kids before it was used for paid piracy we did actually use it for it’s original intent) and IRC (remembering the efnet/ircnet split). The Internet browser was just another app you used online.
If you want free games with minimal functionality there is always f-droid.
Actually, Nokia’s first Java phone, 3410 (the one on the right except with a different key layout) featured a store with downloadable games, ringtones, screensavers, picture messages etc. Czech provider Eurotel distributed the first 3D Java game Munkiki’s Castles as a loss leader, and Space Impact came preinstalled but was very short unless you paid for downloadable missions.
I used to work for a J2ME mobile games developer. Fun times but it was wild west. They didn’t properly standardize the API so each mobile phone had its own glitches, incompatibilities and extra APIs and the emulatos were not very accurate either. That meant we basically had to have pretty much all phones there to test the games.
Ad break
I still have one of these somewhere. It didn’t break but the charger did
Snake > Snake 2
You were also able to type out a message and send it using a single hand, you only needed to recharge the phone once a week, and it didn’t shatter like an icicle if you so much as sneezed at it, it was cheap and it didn’t spy on you. Smart phones is the dumbest thing that happened to humanity.
Once a week? Those things could go pretty much forever on a single charge so long as you weren’t making calls, even with batteries that had a tiny fraction of modern capacity due to their simple hardware.
Nowadays even a completely idle smartphone on extreme power saving mode is lucky to last a couple of days, especially if you don’t/can’t disable the vendor-mandated bloatware that periodically wakes it up to phone home. When used regularly, it’s not uncommon for a phone to drain within a single day.
Sometimes I miss the simple, rugged designs - right up until I remember how much better smartphones are at literally everything else. Still wish companies would get the memo and focus on bigger batteries rather than smaller phones, though.
I remember paying 3$ for a ringtone
I remember ringback tones. When you wanted to inflict your music tastes on literally anyone who called you.
I remember making my own ringtone on the Nokia
I remember reading sketchy guides on how to add custom ringtones without needing to pay for the privilege. Arbitrary restrictions on user folder access predate Android.
I remember putting .jar (I think) games on my flip phone, when I discovered that it was like a whole new world. Sd card loaded with as many games I could find haha
Bring-ding-ding-ding
Bring-ding-ding-ding
Baaa-ba-ba-Bowaaaaar
This is what they took from us.
How dare they!
And you could use the IR blaster to play multiplayer games.
I used to code ringtones into peoples phones in exchange for cigarettes.
Last Resort by Papa Roach was most popular followed by Better Off Alone by DJ Sammy, because they both sounded killer in twangy Nokia synth.
Better Off Alone was by Alice Deejay.
Shit why am I thinking DJ Sammy? Old man moment
Mistakes were made along the way.
Everyone Nokia user knows that Space Impact was a better game than Snake
Later on I got a phone with Bounce, now that was the tits
Snake > Space Impact > Bounce
There were at least two different versions of it. The one where the second and third level are in the space ship (not on some sort of a bouncy rover thing) is the jam
Same era, I used to playing games on my calculator. I suppose you still can, but I used to do it. I remember I had RISK on my TI-89, but the games on my TI-82 were on par with the version of snake shown in the post. We would even trade the games around with the kids that didn’t have a computer and/or Internet at home. We’d connect them with funky little cables that looked like audio jacks.
Aye, it be true. It done been like the man say’th!
Now cell phone games play you.
I’m tired of the smart phones and their addictive games and whistles, just give me a phone that only does call not that “texting” BS and only one ring you cannot change !
Stuff like that exist more or less i don’t know if there is a phone that can’t even send SMS but there are phones with e-ink displays only doing calls sms and caleder.
You could also install a launcher on any android device that mimiks this
