Nokia's E3 Surprise No One's Talking About

N. Evan Van Zelfden notices that Scott Foe is standing outside the convention center in Los Angles. The videogame industry is hosting the E3 summit, but Foe's company, Nokia, isn't there in any official capacity. So Foe, a senior producer, is lurking around.

He takes off his sunglasses and whips out his Nokia phone. A few buttons later and he's playing a new game called Reset Generation. It has all the themes of classic games: princesses to rescue, blocks to stack, and invaders to zap.

As the game's creator, Foe can't help but point out features--beyond solo matches, he can play against up to three friends--who are using either a Nokia N-Gage phone or a networked Windows PC.

When it becomes available to the public on August 4th, Reset Generation will mark the first entry of cross-platform play between mobile phone and personal computers. It's the best-kept secret at E3, since Nokia has no booth and will make no announcements.

It's certainly been discussed before. At E3 in 2006, Microsoft's Bill Gates gave a keynote address about a proposed "Live Anywhere" service. A Microsoft-issued press release said that Gates "wows gamers with unified platform vision." The plan included PCs, mobile phones, and Xbox consoles.

But Microsoft wasn't the first to gush over such a plan. In October of 2005, Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley delivered a keynote at a developers conference, in which he detailed an upcoming massively multiplayer online game that would be played through the PC, Sony's PlayStation, and through mobile phones.

Neither Microsoft nor Sony's plans have come to market yet, and technically speaking, cross-platform play isn't trivial. Foe tells Portfolio.com that Nokia already had the technology framework in place, and that his team simply used that existing work, and focused their efforts on the illusive goal of making the game fun.

"Nokia owns one in seven pockets on the planet," says Scott Foe.  "We want the other six."

-N. Evan Van Zelfden in Los Angeles