Wednesday 23 April; 18.30
The Princess Anne Theatre
BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly, London
In Playing Away, the first event in the new Creative Alchemy season at BAFTA, developers from leading UK wireless games companies alongside speakers from Vodaphone and Digital Bridges will consider the range of current mobile games which try to predict the impact of 3G and java-enabled handsets on the next generation of offerings.
All industry forecasts indicate that the mobile gaming market is about to go wild - inspired by GPRS enabled phones, the looming potential of 3G and armies of enthusiastic, tech-hungry consumers. As the gaming industry braces itself for massive expansion some analysts are predicting that the global market for wireless entertainment could reach $17.5bn by 2006, while another research report calculates that there were already 43m regular users of such services worldwide in 2001 and expects this figure will increase to 850m in 2003.
John Abbott, MD of Hailstorm will present a case study on the evolution of their very successful game Trapped! which started of as a wap product and evolved into a full on colour arcade game on TTPCom's platform.
Balbir Blugan, Business Development Manager at Kuju Entertainment, will talk about the development of their wireless game of the BBC's Weakest Link series and consider the issues arising when three different industries: games, telecoms and television are required to work collaboratively to create and produce content suitable for the mobile experience from a TV format.
The panel will be chaired by John Chasey, Managing Director of iomo ltd, a founding Director of TIGA (the Independent Game Developers' Association) and representative on its Mobile SIG, "TIGA Mobile".
Panellists include Tim Harrison, Head of Mobile Games at Vodafone Global Content Services and Paul Maglione, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Digital Bridges.
Produced by Stephen Jeffery-Poulter, Convergence Programme Consultant
Supported by Business Link for London (www.bl4london.com)
BAFTA Members Free
Non-members £20
If you would like to book tickets for this event please email events@bafta.org. Tickets can be paid for by cash or cheque on the door