CIB Nokia N-GAGE (US)

[Berserker | 32]

    The year was 2004 and I was watching Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim shows. They were advertising a contest to win a Nokia N-Gage QD with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. All you had to do was watch Adult Swim and call the number on the screen when it appears. I called and won, gave them my info and a few weeks later it came in. I toyed around with it quite a bit, but never used it as a phone or experienced N-Gage Arena multiplayer. It was really about what you’d expect from a normal phone at the time, though one unique thing struck a chord with me: The ability to make ringtones in a sheet-music style way.  It felt like I was creating my own 8-bit style tunes. Replaying Tony Hawk wasn’t too bad either. For a game on a handheld that small it was actually pretty impressive. After a few years my N-Gage stopped booting. It seemed the dummy SIM card that came with it died and without it you can’t do anything. Luckily it wasn’t too difficult to replace at the time.
    I hadn’t considered collecting N-Gage games when I got it. It wasn’t until some years later when I was browsing Craigslist and saw a bunch at a good price. There didn’t seem to be that many games so at the time I thought it’d be easy to collect a full set, but of course I was terribly wrong. While there are many games out there for the N-Gage, probably pallets full of sealed ones, the majority of them are worthless and common. However there are quite a few that can fetch high prices and are extremely difficult to come by. I found a bunch more locally but it didn’t take long until I was hunting Ebay. After a while of seeing the same old games I stumbled across a seller who was selling off his N-Gage collection and watched them like a hawk. One of the games, Space Impact, got pulled. I asked the seller why and he said that he had been contacted by another potential buyer. Apparently this buyer was also a collector and he had never come across a working copy of the game and wanted to alert the seller, whom after testing it realized that his copy didn’t work either. I carried on and won a few of the games, but the sparse Ebay listings and little N-Gage information was really getting to me. I reached out to the seller asking him to contact the other buyer and give him my email address in hopes I could learn more.
    Sometime later I was contacted by him. To my surprise, it was none other than the infamous collector Ahans! (For those who don’t know he’s the man who caused quite a stir a while back by completing a sealed PlayStation 2 collection! He said had two complete N-Gage collections, sealed and CIB.) We talked about Space Impact and other N-Gage related things. I shared with him what games I was missing and asked if he had any extras he would be willing to sell me. In an extreme act of generosity he sent me a copy of X-Men Legends 2 for free! Not long after I took a short break from collecting, buying a house and having my second kid. I eventually got back to searching Ebay regularly and finally completed the set in April of 2014 with the purchase of Civilization, ending my decade long journey of collecting N-Gage games. To this day, I still don’t have the original “taco” model though. I’d like to own it, so if you have one collecting dust, PM me!

• There are 54 physical retail US releases.
• Digital Only: Payload, Snakes, Space Impact
• Other Regions: Flo-Boarding (EU), Sega Rally (AU)
• Unreleased: Alien Front, Virtua Cop
• Most Expensive/Rare: Asphault Urbay GT 2, Atari Masterpieces Vol. 2, Catan, Civilization, Glory in Death, High Seize, Pathway to Glory: Ikusa Islands, Mile High Pinball
• Fun Fact: The only physical console release of the original Call of Duty.
• Yes, I'm dumb and mixed up the Atari games in the picture. Ugh...

Edited January 7, 2021 by Berserker
Details and formatting.

[DoctorEncore | 3,690]

Wow! Great collection and a great story to go with it. Thanks for sharing.

[Strange | 1,700]

This is an awesome thread and story. Thank you for posting!

[croagunk | 798]

I’ve never seen such a collection of these! Thanks for sharing!

[drxandy | 3,225]

Very nice collection dude! I remember my only experience playing ngage was at e3 in 2005, but I followed the internet news of it heavily.

Do you have any of the cartoon network paperwork? Would love to see, that kind of stuff (contest winner paperwork) is always hard to come by and super neat.

[Berserker | 32]

10 hours ago, drxandy said:

Do you have any of the cartoon network paperwork? Would love to see, that kind of stuff (contest winner paperwork) is always hard to come by and super neat.

No, that's long since gone unfortunately.

[FireHazard51 | 2,043]

19 hours ago, Berserker said:

    The year was 2004 and I was watching Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim shows. They were advertising a contest to win a Nokia N-Gage QD with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. All you had to do was watch Adult Swim and call the number on the screen when it appears. I called and won, gave them my info and a few weeks later it came in. I toyed around with it quite a bit, but never used it as a phone or experienced N-Gage Arena multiplayer. It was really about what you’d expect from a normal phone at the time, though one unique thing struck a chord with me: The ability to make ringtones in a sheet-music style way.  It felt like I was creating my own 8-bit style tunes. Replaying Tony Hawk wasn’t too bad either. For a game on a handheld that small it was actually pretty impressive. After a few years my N-Gage stopped booting. It seemed the dummy SIM card that came with it died and without it you can’t do anything. Luckily it wasn’t too difficult to replace at the time.
    I hadn’t considered collecting N-Gage games when I got it. It wasn’t until some years later when I was browsing Craigslist and saw a bunch at a good price. There didn’t seem to be that many games so at the time I thought it’d be easy to collect a full set, but of course I was terribly wrong. While there are many games out there for the N-Gage, probably pallets full of sealed ones, the majority of them are worthless and common. However there are quite a few that can fetch high prices and are extremely difficult to come by. I found a bunch more locally but it didn’t take long until I was hunting Ebay. After a while of seeing the same old games I stumbled across a seller who was selling off his N-Gage collection and watched them like a hawk. One of the games, Space Impact, got pulled. I asked the seller why and he said that he had been contacted by another potential buyer. Apparently this buyer was also a collector and he had never come across a working copy of the game and wanted to alert the seller, whom after testing it realized that his copy didn’t work either. I carried on and won a few of the games, but the sparse Ebay listings and little N-Gage information was really getting to me. I reached out to the seller asking him to contact the other buyer and give him my email address in hopes I could learn more.
    Sometime later I was contacted by him. To my surprise, it was none other than the infamous collector Ahans! (For those who don’t know he’s the man who caused quite a stir a while back by completing a sealed PlayStation 2 collection! He said had two complete N-Gage collections, sealed and CIB.) We talked about Space Impact and other N-Gage related things. I shared with him what games I was missing and asked if he had any extras he would be willing to sell me. In an extreme act of generosity he sent me a copy of X-Men Legends 2 for free! Not long after I took a short break from collecting, buying a house and having my second kid. I eventually got back to searching Ebay regularly and finally completed the set in April of 2014 with the purchase of Civilization, ending my decade long journey of collecting N-Gage games. To this day, I still don’t have the original “taco” model though. I’d like to own it, so if you have one collecting dust, PM me!

• There are 54 physical retail US releases.
• Digital Only: Payload, Snakes, Space Impact
• Other Regions: Flo-Boarding (EU), Sega Rally (AU)
• Unreleased: Alien Front, Virtua Cop
• Most Expensive/Rare: Asphault Urbay GT 2, Atari Masterpieces Vol. 2, Catan, Civilization, Glory in Death, High Seize, Pathway to Glory: Ikusa Islands, Mile High Pinball
• Fun Fact: The only physical console release of the original Call of Duty.
• Yes, I'm dumb and mixed up the Atari games in the picture. Ugh...

@Glovesgive this man a N-gage bauble 

[DarkTone | 984]

Well done. 

[Guest]

 Very cool collection and great story! 

[MiamiSlice | 3,089]

Excellent story, thank you for sharing!

[Tanooki | 4,929]

Wow that's actually fairly downright impressive.

 

I always thought it was a joke with the whole small screen and tacophone mockery it got, but even yet there was no denying it had some non-garbage unique games and also some solid licensed stuff that was worthy of some time and respect too.  But as you already went into it, you can get what maybe 1/2 of them fairly easy or so and for not much at all, and then it gets nasty.

I wonder if anyone has ever bothered making an accurate(or at all really) emulator for it as I'm sure the ROMs can't be that hard to come by and it would be fairly interesting to at least browse that screwball odd piece of history.  There was so much going on there in that thing before apple and google(android) stepped in and basically stomped everyone else out.