There you are, sitting in an airport, waiting to board the plane, when the dreaded announcement buzzes over the loudspeaker: due to bad weather in Chicago, your flight has been delayed another hour. But you don’t care because you’re playing a first-person “shoot everything” game, Mobile Quake, on your mobile phone with ten other delayed travelers stuck in airports across the country. Are we dreaming? When did Mobile Quake come out? And why don’t I have it? Well, it hasn’t arrived yet. But in the next three or four years, when wireless networks move to high speed, such multiplayer wireless games on the Web will become reality. They may not be called Mobile Quake or Mobile Half Life and will probably look like an earlier version of Doom, but they will arrive. Jupiter Communications, which predicts that by 2004 there will be 95 million browser-enabled mobile phones in use, game developers like Marvel Entertainment are promoting collaboration with service providers and chasing this huge new market.
