8-Kings (Nokia N-Gage) - 2003 Argonaut Games

2003 Argonaut Games

Platform: Nokia N-Gage

As part of the launch and release of The Games That Weren’t book, we are adding assets and content that didn’t make it to print as bonus DLC content to share with you.

Within the book is an in-depth and detailed 10 page story about the unreleased Nokia N-Gage title 8-Kings by Argonaut Games. We spoke to Martin Piper and Oscar Ferrero about the cancelled development.

Argonaut had answered Nokia’s call to create a new game for their upcoming platform, responding with a strategy game that was heavily inspired by Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance. 8-Kings was aiming to appeal though to the more mature gamers that the N-Gage was targeted for, hence the violent Gangster/US Prohibition theme that was chosen.

The full story of what the game was to entail and the trials and tribulations of the development can be read in the book, though whilst doing research into the title – we obtained a number of screenshots and assets which were to be printed, but didn’t quite make the cut. We’ve included some of the screenshots that went to print, but here are also a number of other screens and character assets which you can see below.

Although the team that worked on the game put a lot of love into the production of the game and saw it near completion, the failure of the Nokia N-Gage would see Argonaut cancel production of the promising turn-based title. If only a different platform such as the Game Boy Advance had been chosen as the target, it could well have been the subject of many retrospectives instead.

In early May 2023 – Martin Piper managed to find a few builds of the game, and shared them with the N-Gage community, working with Vanessa Summers to release the game for you to check out. Below are links to the downloads available, which include design documents and more. These have been added with kind permission from Vanessa. If you want to learn more about their N-Gage preservation work, please check out their Discord channel.

With thanks to Martin Piper and Razvan for the amazing work to see the game preserved at last.