Space Impact

Space Impact was another of the games Nokia bundled directly into its phones at the turn of the millennium, this time in the style of a horizontal space shooter inspired by older arcade machines. The player controlled a small ship moving up and down along an axis, dodging enemy fire and blasting waves of alien ships as well as larger bosses at the end of levels, with new enemy types and a faster pace being added as the game progressed. The simple keypad of the time could handle the controls just fine, yet the game still offered a surprisingly decent sense of action and gradually escalating difficulty, which made it worth replaying to try to get further than last time.

On the monochrome displays of phones at the time, it was one of the visually most ambitious titles — ship sprites and explosion effects were readable even on the small screen, and the music and sound effects gave the gameplay an atmosphere few would expect from such hardware. Like Snake, this game too was pre-installed for free, so practically every owner of a supported model tried it without having to download or pay for anything, and it became another shared experience for an entire generation of Nokia phone users.

Space Impact showed that even a phone with limited hardware could handle a genre that had until then been the domain of game consoles and arcade machines, and together with other titles it helped Nokia establish the idea of the phone as a gaming device. Today the game is inseparably tied to period devices, as it never made an official transition to modern phones.

Why play it: fans of old phones and shoot-em-ups who want to see how far an action game could be pushed on a phone without a color display or touch controls will appreciate it.