Nokia N-Gage

The N-Gage was Nokia's audacious bid to fuse a mobile phone and a game console into a single device, years before the smartphone would accomplish exactly that and render the whole concept moot. Launched in 2003, at the height of Nokia's dominance of the phone world, it was a serious, well-funded attempt to muscle into gaming and challenge the Game Boy Advance. It failed almost comically, and its blunders became legendary.

The original hardware was riddled with baffling design decisions. Its shape, tall and thin to serve its phone duties, forced players to hold the device sideways against the ear to make calls, a posture that earned it the enduring, mocking nickname "taco phone." The screen was oriented in portrait, poorly suited to games. Worst of all, swapping a game cartridge required removing the back cover and pulling out the battery, an absurd ritual for anyone wanting to change what they were playing.

Nokia poured real money into the platform and secured ports of substantial franchises, including Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and a well-regarded version of the online shooter that came bundled, along with original efforts like Pathway to Glory. But the hardware's flaws and a high price undercut every good intention. A revised model, the N-Gage QD, fixed the worst physical sins, restoring a normal calling posture and easier game-swapping, but by then the reputation was set in concrete.

Commercially it was a heavy defeat, selling only a few million units against the Game Boy Advance's tens of millions, and Nokia eventually abandoned the dedicated hardware, later reviving the N-Gage name merely as a software service on its phones.

The N-Gage's legacy is instructive rather than fond. It was right about the future, that phones and games would merge, and catastrophically wrong about how. Its failures are studied as a case in flawed industrial design and market misreading, and its silhouette endures as one of gaming's most affectionately ridiculed artifacts, the ambitious gadget that arrived a few years too early and a few design reviews too late.