From Taco to Turbo Fans: The Strange, Brave History of Gaming Phones

In October 2003, Nokia launched a phone that you could not hold to your ear properly. To make a call on the N-Gage, you had to turn it on its edge and press the narrow side against your face, a pose so odd that people nicknamed it "sidetalking" and the phone itself "the taco". To change games, early owners had to take off the back cover and remove the battery.

The N-Gage did not take over the world. But it started a two-decade experiment that is still running: can you build a phone that is also a proper games machine? Since then, Sony has tried, Razer has tried, ASUS has built a whole brand around it, and Chinese makers have added cooling fans to handsets. Here is the story of the gaming phone, and why its biggest legacy may be what it taught every ordinary phone.

Before the taco: Snake and Java

Phones were playing games well before anyone built a phone for games. Nokia preloaded Snake on its handsets from 1997, and in the early 2000s, phones that supported Java turned downloadable games into a business, sold through carriers' portals. Publishers such as Gameloft built empires on tiny Java versions of console-style games.

Korea went its own way. From the mid-2000s the government required phones sold in the country to support a home-grown mobile platform called WIPI, so Korean phone games were built for a different standard from most of the world until the rule was dropped in 2009, the same year the iPhone finally launched in Korea.

Nokia's bold taco

By the early 2000s Nokia was the world's biggest phone maker, and games such as Snake had already shown that people would happily play on a handset. The N-Gage, released in October 2003, aimed higher: it was meant to take on Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, with a directional pad, game cards and real 3D titles such as a version of Tomb Raider and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Critics and players found plenty to laugh at, from the sidetalking to the battery swap. Nokia quickly released the N-Gage QD in 2004, which fixed the card slot and the speaker placement, but the device never escaped its reputation. Nokia later turned N-Gage into a games service for its regular smartphones, before closing it at the start of the 2010s as iPhone and Android took over.

Sony's PlayStation phone

The next big swing came from Sony Ericsson. The Xperia Play, announced in February 2011, looked like an ordinary Android phone until you slid the screen up to reveal a full game pad: a directional pad, the PlayStation face buttons (circle, cross, square and triangle), shoulder buttons and two touch-sensitive pads in place of analogue sticks. The press called it "the PlayStation phone", and it was PlayStation Certified to run a small catalogue of classic PlayStation games.

The hardware was clever, but the timing was cruel. Touch-screen games such as Angry Birds were exploding, developers had little reason to support a single device's buttons, and Sony Ericsson did not make a sequel.

Razer and the 120Hz moment

For six years after the Xperia Play, no major brand built a dedicated gaming phone. Then in November 2017 Razer, a gaming-peripherals company, unveiled the Razer Phone. Instead of buttons, it bet on a screen: a 120Hz display, twice as fast as the 60Hz standard of the time, plus large front speakers. Razer built it with the team from Nextbit, a phone start-up it had acquired.

The Razer Phone mattered more as an idea than as a product. A Razer Phone 2 followed in 2018, and then Razer quietly left the phone business. But high-refresh screens soon became standard on flagship phones from Samsung, Apple and others.

ASUS and the Android arms race

In 2018 the gaming phone became a category. ASUS announced the first ROG Phone at Computex in Taiwan, under its Republic of Gamers brand, with ultrasonic AirTrigger shoulder buttons built into the frame, a second USB-C port on the side so you could charge while holding the phone sideways, and a clip-on AeroActive Cooler fan. Xiaomi-backed Black Shark and ZTE's nubia Red Magic launched gaming phones the same year, and Lenovo later joined with its Legion phones, one of which put the selfie camera on the side for streamers.

Each generation brought bigger batteries, faster screens and more cooling: Red Magic phones put a spinning fan inside the handset. ASUS kept the ROG line running longest; the ROG Phone 9, launched in November 2024, used Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.

By the numbers

• 2003: Nokia N-Gage launches, the first major phone built mainly for games.
• 2004: N-Gage QD fixes the card slot and the "sidetalking".
• 2011: Sony Ericsson Xperia Play puts a slide-out PlayStation-style pad on Android.
• 120Hz: the Razer Phone's display refresh rate in 2017, double the norm of its day.
• 2018: the year ROG Phone, Black Shark and Red Magic all launched.
• 2: USB-C ports on many ROG Phones, one on the side for landscape play.

What the gaming phone taught everyone else

The dedicated gaming phone remains a niche. Most players simply buy a fast mainstream flagship. But almost everything the niche fought for has gone mainstream: high-refresh screens, stereo front speakers, vapour-chamber cooling, big batteries and fast charging. In 2023, Apple marketed the iPhone 15 Pro partly as a games machine that could run console titles such as Resident Evil Village, something the N-Gage team could only dream of. Within a year, full versions of Death Stranding and Assassin's Creed Mirage had followed onto recent iPhones and iPads, big console games running on the same kind of chip as an ordinary phone.

Buttons, meanwhile, moved off the phone and into accessories. Clip-on controllers such as the Backbone One and Razer Kishi give almost any phone proper sticks and triggers (see our Backbone story and our Razer Kishi guide).

What to watch

• Cooling and battery: as mobile games such as Genshin Impact-style open worlds grow heavier, sustained performance matters more than peak speed.
• Handheld PCs: devices like Steam Deck-style handhelds compete for the same "games in your pocket" buyer.
• Esports gear: mobile tournaments increasingly use standard tournament phones, which pushes makers to chase pro players (see our mobile esports feature).

There is a Korean footnote here, too. Samsung never built a dedicated gaming phone, but its Galaxy flagships became some of the most common devices in mobile esports, and its 2018 Galaxy Note 9 launch was where Fortnite first arrived on Android as a timed exclusive. For many players, the best gaming phone has simply been the best phone, whichever brand happened to make it that year.

Twenty-three years after the taco, the perfect gaming phone still does not quite exist. But every phone in your pocket today is a little more of one than it ever used to be.