page_title: Mobile game
section_title: Calculator games
hierarchical_section_title: Mobile game / History / Calculator games
caption_attribution_description: English: A photo showing a fan-made game, Portal, on a TI-84.
context_page_description: A mobile game is a game played on a mobile phone, tablet, smartwatch, PDA, portable media player or graphing calculator.
  The earliest known game on a mobile phone was a Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994.
  In 1997, Nokia launched the very successful Snake. Snake, that was preinstalled in most mobile devices manufactured by Nokia, has since become one of the most played games and is found on more than 350 million devices worldwide. A variant of the Snake game for the Nokia 6110, using the infrared port, was also the first two-player game for mobile phones.
  Today, mobile games are usually downloaded from an app store as well as from mobile operator's portals, but in some cases are also preloaded in the handheld devices by the OEM or by the mobile operator when purchased, via infrared connection, Bluetooth, or memory card, or side loaded onto the handset with a cable.
context_section_description: Calculator gaming is a form of gaming in which games are played on programmable calculators, especially graphing calculators.
  An early example is the type-in program Darth Vader's Force Battle for the TI-59, published in BYTE in October 1980. The magazine also published a version of Hunt the Wumpus for the HP-41C. Few other games exist for the earliest of programmable calculators (including the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, one of the first scientific calculators), such as the long-popular Lunar Lander game often used as an early programming exercise. However, limited program address space and lack of easy program storage made calculator gaming a rarity even as programmables became cheap and relatively easy to obtain. It was not until the early 1990s when graphing calculators became more powerful and cheap enough to be common among high school students for use in mathematics. The new graphing calculators, with their ability to transfer files to one another and from a computer for backup, could double as game consoles.
  Calculators such as HP-48 and TI-82 could be programmed in proprietary programming languages such as RPL programming language or TI-BASIC directly on the calculator; programs could also be written in assembly language or (less often) C on a desktop computer and transferred to the calculator.  As calculators became more powerful and memory sizes increased, games increased in complexity.
  By the 1990s, programmable calculators were able to run implementations by hobbyists of games such as Lemmings and Doom (Lemmings for HP-48 was released in 1993; Doom for HP-48 was created in 1995).  Some games such as Dope Wars caused controversy when students played them in school.
  The look and feel of these games on an HP-48 class calculator, due to the lack of dedicated audio and video circuitry providing hardware acceleration, can at most be compared to the one offered by 8-bit handheld consoles such as the early Game Boy or the Gameking (low resolution, monochrome or grayscale graphics), or to the built-in games of non-Java or BREW enabled cell phones.
  Games continue to be programmed on graphing calculators with increasing complexity.  A wave of games appeared after the release of the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus series, among TI's first graphing calculators to natively support assembly.  TI-BASIC programming also rose in popularity after the release of third-party libraries.  Assembly remained the language of choice for these calculators, which run on a Zilog Z80 processor, although some assembly implements have been created to ease the difficulty of learning assembly language.  For those running on a Motorola 68000 processor (like the TI-89), C programming (possible using TIGCC) has begun to displace assembly.
  Because they are easy to program without outside tools, calculator games have survived despite the proliferation of mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.
caption: A fan-made game similar to the game Portal
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