back in '03 i spent two weeks in urban japan, exploring its many train stations and alleys
imagine my shock at finding not only an #Ultima Online ad on a billboard, but showing it running on a flip phone five years after I had stopped playing it
i was always mystified by the billboard, and thought about it on and off for 20 years
i was finally able to track down the story behind the ad. it turned out to be a real game, but not#UO was we know it.
Ultima Online Mobile Edition was a completely different final fantasy-style pixel art combat game for the NTT DoCoMo network. it even had a monster/pet breeding minigame.
sadly, the game is lost to time - the game was only playable on a handful of japanese handsets, and no one ever thought to dump it before it disappeared.
what little information we have about it linked below. thank you to @bombbloke for their help in tracking this all down:
@vga256 The Game Preservation Society have been collecting a lot of stuff, but it feels unlikely you’d be able to recreate this kind of MMO from what was on a phone. Japan’s legal environment means it’s not likely people outside there org will get access to it either.
@misty yeah, this one's pretty much a goner. it cached 100kb of map and player locally, before pulling down map and skill updates from the server periodically
@vga256 I knew the Japanese mobile scene was wild and seriously advanced, but I didn't realize things like this even existed, let alone were highly marketed. Wild stuff!
@ktnjared it sure breaks my heart knowing how much of these mobile games we'll never know about is now lost. there just isn't a strong culture of preservationism/piracy in .jp :\
@vga256 Wow it was an actual MMORPG, and it cost 300¥/month to play (if I read that right).
Before smartphones, I was always so fascinated by the Japanese phone ecosystem with NTT DoCoMo et al. They had such incredible network features and speed.
And they kept flip phones around (easier to type?) for so long! I’ve only been in Japan for the first time in 2010 and everyone had gigantic flip phones then.
@pierrenick kiiinda sorta. i think there were limited means of interaction with other players, but yes - technically everyone was playing on the same map. if i understand it correctly, it was a single player game with multiplayer item trading
i packed my trusty Nokia 6130 to japan and looked unfashionable at the time 😆
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