Talking about their upcoming ultra-weird game/phone hybrid, the N-Gage, Nokia boss Ilkka Raiskinen said "Game Boy is for 10-year-olds. If you're 20 or 25 years old, it's probably not a good idea to draw a Game Boy out of your pocket on a Friday night in a public place."

This quote has been up and down the gaming website world, notably trashed on Slashdot Games and Penny Arcade. Mid-'20s Game Boy players have had no trouble speaking out against the insult, offering up example after example of bringing out their GBAs in public locations. The N-Gage is doomed.

The N-Gage has some classic hardware problems. Confusing button layout, small screen... and to insert a new game cartridge, you actually have to remove the unit's battery. But the marketing problems are only now coming to light, as shown inside Ilkka's misguided quote.

Ilkka's tact here is to demean the competition. Nothing new about that. But his statement begs the question, Why would a 25 year old pulling out an N-Gage be any cooler than a GBA? He can't be saying that playing video games is uncool for 25 year olds, since that's the whole point of the N-Gage. He can't be saying that the GBA plays immature kiddie games since the N-Gage's lineup includes much of the same stuff: Sonic and Super Monkey Ball, to start. Hardly M-rated material. No, the N-Gage is cooler simply because it isn't a Game Boy.

Despite the apparant interest in the 20-25 demographic, Ilkka's quote (and the N-Gage's atrocious, cliched marketing) are positioned directly at pre-teen males.

Pre-teen males are one of the easiest groups to market towards. All you have to do is make your product look better than what their kid siblings are using. There isn't a 12 year old boy in the country right now who wouldn't rather have an Xbox than a Nintendo, and it's because of the perception that "Nintendo was what I played when I was a kid. Now I need to play what the big boys play." This is why Super Soakers keep getting bigger and bigger, why Yu-Gi-Oh is currently riding atop Pokemon in both card games and video games, and why Burger King and McDonald's now both offer "Big Kids" meals.

Real 20-25 year olds aren't fooled by sexy pictures of Rad Skater Dudes playing an N-Gage in an Extreme fashion. Hell, 16-20 year olds aren't fooled. But 12 year olds are. I'm generalizing, obviously - there are plenty of sophisticated 12 year olds and sheeplike 20 year olds out there. But by and large, a generation raised on Simpsons-era sarcasm just isn't buying stock photography of uber hipsters who grind *and* game to the max. We know when we're being falsely marketed to. Our younger friends aren't so savvy.

And since 12 year olds don't buy $300 cell phones, you're left with the N-Gage failing mightily. In future editions of Cell Phone History, you might well see a sentence like "Nokia gambled millions on the multi-purpose N-Gage... and lost it all."

In their defense, this is precisely what happened between Sony and Nintendo circa 1994. Nintendo was unbeatable; a new console would never work; Sega is barely hanging on. But Sony rode the better system (PS1 vs. SNES) into a huge lead, and when Nintendo finally got to the field with the N64 it had already lost the game. So Nokia is likely expecting to repeat history by rallying gamers against Nintendo's image... except they don't have the hardware to back it up (Jackass of all trades, master of none.) Sony's PSP might, but we won't know until they get around to actually building the damn thing. And Nintendo is already getting ready for a major handheld battle - shopping around a new FX chip for the GBA - so it will not be a pretty fight.

Ironically, it is inevitable that a future phone/game device will work. That's just technology progressing. So you could call the N-Gage ahead of its time... it's just so poorly designed that it will never get the chance to make an impact.