Finnish phone maker Nokia is on the hunt for mobile games. Correction: Nokia is on the hunt for mobile games that don’t suck. It’s got the dosh to pay for them too. It’s offering €70,000 (around £55,000) to the winners of its new Mobile Games Innovation Challenge.
The first round has already been wrapped up, where ten of the most promising ideas were cherry picked by industry experts. Of the handful shortlisted, the winner will score €40,000 (around £31,000), while second and third places will be granted €20,000 (£15,700) and €10,000 (£7,900) respectively.
Naturally, these three will be granted a Nokia Publishing pre-production contract, and could well show up on the NGAGE platform in the not too distant future.
Here’s the list of the ten competing developers and their game concepts:
- Active Tecnologia e Consultoria Ltda. (Brazil) with Cinemarena – set in a movie theatre, controlling avatars on the big screen
- CreatePlayShare (India) with Ball – play any ball game on your mobile or even create your own new game
- Different Game (Sweden) with Ghost Wire – use your mobile device to communicate with ghosts
- Eclipse Interactive (UK) with Watchers – conspiracy adventure game that uses Nokia Maps and other real world tools to find locations
- Int13 (France) with Kweekies – augmented reality virtual pet game
- Jadestone (Sweden) and C4M (France) with Melokey – a music game for mobile devices where you learn to master songs and play them against other in-game characters to win the hearts of your fans
- LemonQuest (Spain) with Wave Pirates – turn into a pirate navigating the seven seas, looking for gold and glory
- Onur Yazilim (Turkey) with Comet Hunter – a 2-D shooting game which combines the excitement of shooting with natural sound effects made by players themselves
- Simlife (China) with XDancery – a music game where players can touch the screen, draw patterns on screen, shake the device or sing into it to hit the music tempo notes
- TechnoBubble (Spain) with Fun Cam – a mixed reality game that connects your camera on your mobile device to the TV
My money’s on Ghost Wire. I could do with tapping up my Granny for a decent cold remedy.
Gaming Challenge (via NokNok)
