Happy birthday to us, Pocket Gamer is 15 years old

15 years is quite a long time, but it's an especially long time when it comes to computer games. It's an even longer time when it comes to mobile games though, phew. When Pocket Gamer first started out, back in 2006, mobile gaming was nothing like it is today - there were no smartphones, there was no AppStore, there was no Google Play Store.

Nope, back then writing about mobile games meant that we were writing about games running on Java. But, the site was more than that, we were also dedicated to any game that could be played on a device that (could possibly) fit in your pocket. That meant that we spent a lot of time chatting about the original DS and the PSP.

We attempted to use our Steel Media Ltd Time Machine (Patent Pending) to reach out to the team behind the original launch, but all we could hear were grunts, beeps and distant voices muttering about Nokia and Samsung. 2006 was, after all, the year of the Motorola Fone, the Samsung BlackJack and the Nokia E70.

It was, apparently, also the year of ironic typos, naming phones after card games, and... isn't E70 a food colouring used in sweets? Maybe not, but it was a folding phone where you could lift the dial buttons off of the phone, folding it over the screen to serve as a full QWERTY keyboard split around the device - phew. Thank goodness we have touchscreens now.

A weird and wonderful time, no doubt. and it all seems so long ago considering that we now have games like Call of Duty Mobile, Genshin Impact and Pascal's Wager on mobile - all running with nigh-zero issues on a device we also, sometimes, use for communicating with people. 

Our 15-year old archives now include over 69.5k posts, and in the long year since we wrote about our last birthday, we've been keeping busy by running three Pocket Gamer LaunchPads and hosting an amazing award ceremony. Between the eight LaunchPad streams and the Pocket Gamer Awards ceremony, we had over 8.7million views - that would put us as the 100th most populous country in the world, over nations like Israel, Bulgaria, Norway and Ireland. Wow, and that's just from our streaming efforts.

So, with 15 years down, we here at Pocket Gamer are looking forward to another record year ahead.... and, next year we're sixteen years old. That means we can finally buy an energy drink in the UK, or get a driving permit in certain states of the US.