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.

> data plans were expensive

Hard to overstate how expensive data was! This was also before widespread wifi.

If you want a look at the way the world worked in 2005, check this out: https://www.consumer-action.org/news/articles/2005_interstat...

Topics included:

- calling cards

- voip

- collect calls!

- international rates

Startup I used to work at fueled Cingular's mobile storefront and distributed those J2ME games along with ringtones and graphics. Those were the days...

And yet there were still some amazing games that today would be considered on the same league of the "impossible ports" for the Nintendo Switch.