Cell phone games are big sellers

TOKYO -- Forget "Pong" and "Space Invaders." Seiya Ishizuka is hooked on a video game that has him shooting down bean sprouts, seaweed and other ingredients for a bowl of Chinese noodles -- before they attack him.

But the story line isn't the only novel feature of "Dynamite Ramen," a title from Japanese game whiz Success Corp. that has players chasing unruly vegetables through a maze of shrubbery. Ishizuka is playing the colorful action game not on a PlayStation console or GameBoy handheld, but on his Vodafone cell phone.

"You have to stop it from moving, then grab it," says the 17-year- old high-school student, who paralyzes a piece of pork with a shot of special sauce.

Ishizuka is an eager fan on the wacky new edge of cell phone gaming. Over the past few years, as mobile phones got brainier, video game makers have been developing faster, fancier, software for handsets, with trend-obsessed Japan leading the way.

A case in point: video game powerhouse Square Enix Corp. has recently made a version of its original "Final Fantasy" game -- which ran on the Nintendo Entertainment System -- for users of certain new powerful phones.

"We can put out games that are close to what's popular (on video game consoles) now," said Mariko Hayashi, president of Konami Online Inc., the online and mobile game division of game maker Konami Corp.

According to Hayashi, teenage boys and young men in their 20s are the main fans of the games, which range from gross-out noodle adventures to quasi-violent battle fare and classic brain-teasers.

Though player fees are small -- Ishizuka paid about 200 yen, or $1.85, to buy and download Dynamite Ramen to his phone -- sales of the amusements are adding up fast, creating multiple revenue streams in the process. Game makers such as Konami typically charge players a nominal monthly subscription fee for unlimited use of its games. Cellular carriers such as Vodafone reap a small commission as well as data transmission fees when customers download the titles.

According to the Nomura Research Institute, a Tokyo-based technology research firm, cell phone game sales in Japan totaled 31 billion yen ($287 million) in 2003, excluding carriers' download fees. Currently, Japanese cell phone giant NTT DoCoMo Inc. says small- screen games are bringing in more than 1.3 billion yen per month to its content providers.

While Japanese game makers now sell most of their wares to domestic cell phone carriers, a maturing market here is spurring a push to harness interest in the U.S. and Europe. Last year, for example, game veteran Square Enix Co. started selling a title called "Brave Shot" through Verizon Wireless in the U.S. Konami also has plans to sell through AT&T Wireless Services Inc. a thriller called "Castlevania," in which the hero goes through a haunted mansion whipping ghouls and ghosts. Konami offers such games in Japan, along with around 250 others.

With appetites for the digital diversions spreading fast, worldwide cell phone game sales could reach about $4 billion by 2007, compared with $584 million in 2003, according to the Informa Media Group, a London-based media and telecommunications research firm.

For established game makers like Square Enix, a big lure of the cell phone market is fat profits. Creators can reuse their vast libraries of old console games -- at relatively low cost -- on an entirely new platform.

According to Michihiro Sasaki, general manager of corporate strategy, the Tokyo company can quickly tweak an old game to use on cell phones for just millions of yen. By comparison, it takes Square Enix about two years, and many billions of yen, to produce new versions of its elaborate "Final Fantasy" role-playing game for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 console.

Pacman creator Namco Ltd. said that cell phone games accounted for about 4 percent of the conglomerate's total video gaming revenue for the first nine months of the fiscal year ended March 31, but 18 percent of video gaming profits. At Namco, which recently estimated it had 836,000 subscribers and users of its cell phone games world- wide, the biggest cell-phone moneymaker is a converted arcade game in which users tap on the keys in time to music, scoring points for good rhythm.

As the games proliferate, such adaptability seems critical. Konami has put out a cell phone version of its popular "Dance Dance Revolution" arcade game in Japan, where the fingers rather than the feet do the tapping. Konami says it plans to sell the game to cellular carriers in the U.S. too, although it hasn't set a date.

Carriers like NTT DoCoMo, for their part, are anxious to use popular game brands to bait young, hip users -- Japan's early technology adopters.

"We thought we had to put a game of games like 'Final Fantasy' in the newest handset," said DoCoMo's contents-development director, Yoshite ru Yamaguchi. The 40-something executive admits that he sometimes plays cell phone games in dull company meetings. Customers save because they don't have to download the pre-installed games, but the hope is they'll get hooked and pay for others.