Show HN: Awesome J2ME

Wow this brings back a lot. I did J2ME at Macrospace/Glu, Masabi, Javaground and EA, and at one point near the end was simultaneously responsible for 128k jars of Tetris and 4GB apk + obb for Real Racing because that is how rapidly the field exploded. Absolute madness.

J2ME gets a lot of stick, but modern mobile has actually recreated almost all the same problems. The big one for apps was the out of the box UI components were awful and utterly inconsistent between manufacturers. Several of the above companies tackled this (think conceptually like Flutter), but the market wasn't ready largely because data plans were expensive.

For games though, honestly, J2ME was dreadful, but in non-obvious ways: the control interfaces were hopeless, and sound was basically a non starter. People would be willing to forgive a lot more had the controls and sound been decent. Then the graphics stuff was just inconsistent enough that too much time ended up focused on portability and not enough on if the game was actually as fun as it should be. A consequence of that is most of the best J2ME games were ports from other systems or shameless reskins of other things.

But there is something to be said about taking a tube/metro/bus and seeing people playing stuff you did and enjoying it, especially given back then it was impossible to know who the players really were since things were sold through the carriers.

It was really a euro thing. Think the whole Jamba/Jamster ecosystem (Crazy Frog) and the explosion that occurred with premium SMS and ringtones.

It was all about selling into carriers associated with that, and that was a recipe for pain. I don't believe anyone made a killing in J2ME directly (Gameloft gave the impression of making most money, not entirely undeservedly), and many absolutely struggled, but it did provide the crucible for a lot of what came later.

One of the more curious incidents that stayed with me related to the game "Fatal Force" which had a 64kb build that was incredibly tight. We were mystified to discover a Chinese pirate was distributing a Chinese build of the game, still within 64kb limits. He had decompiled it, reverse engineered it, added more compression so he could fit in localized assets, and released it. The last I heard on the subject there was an effort to pay him for it.

The other was when a game of a game show was advertised in Germany, during the game show, it would generate such a traffic spike that the servers selling the game got knocked out, leading to requiring outsourcing that function to a more scalable competitor, a lesson that was not forgotten for the next company.

Ah, the good old days of browsing wap sites to download "apps". Installing some of them only to find that my budget phone doesn't support the j2me profile required to run them.

The java ecosystem of those days had similar terms like the servlet (still surviving), applet & midlet. Is there a significance of the suffix "let" or somebody thought let's add "let" to everything.

I remember creating a J2ME game back at uni, where the theme was to pour a beer exactly right.

Tested of course on the latest SonyEricsson of the time!

Maybe i can dig that out again and run it somewhere.

Oh, TIL! Thank you.