When Pocketgaming.de launched in 2004, its young contributors were documenting a groundbraking moment in gaming history, something that everyone laughed at.
Leonid Shmatenko, who co-founded and ran Pocketgaming.de from 2004 to 2008 at just 19 years old. Back then, writing under the handle “The14given,” he covered reviews and news for Pocket PC, Palm OS, and Symbian Series 60 platforms, devices that seem almost quaint now but were the iPhone’s precursors.
“Between 2004 and 2007, I ran ‘Pocketgaming.de,’ a website dedicated to reviewing games for Pocket PC, the precursor to the iPhone,”
Leonid recounted in a recent interview.
“This was my first foray into the gaming world, and it laid the foundation for my enduring interest in this area.”
Victor Roth, the second co-founder, writing as “rotakiwi,” was just 16 in 2008, covering Pocket PC and Symbian UIQ reviews and news while most peers were playing the games rather than critiquing them.
Michel Gerlach, who joined in the first year, known as “Michu,” was 20 and specialized in Pocket PC news, reviews, and notably emulation, the ability to run classic console games on mobile devices, a practice that presaged today’s thriving retro gaming scene.
The platforms they covered: Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian Series 60 and UIQ, all of these OS represented the mobile computing frontier before Apple’s App Store revolutionized distribution in 2008. These were devices with styluses and resistive touchscreens, running games that developers painstakingly optimized for processors measured in megahertz rather than gigahertz. The site documented ports of PC classics, original mobile titles, and the emulation scene that let users play Nintendo and Sega games on their PDAs.
What Pocketgaming.org will cover
The relaunched site will focus primarily on iOS and Android gaming, the platforms that inherited and vastly expanded the mobile gaming vision the original team documented. But Pocketgaming.org’s coverage will extend beyond smartphones to encompass the broader portable gaming ecosystem that has emerged in recent years.
The site will cover emulator devices such as the Anbernic and Retroid handhelds that let enthusiasts play classic games on modern hardware, continuing Michu’s original focus on emulation from the Pocket PC era.
This will also include PC-based handhelds like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Lenovo Legion Go, devices that represent a return to dedicated gaming hardware with the power of desktop PCs.
The expanded scope reflects how “pocket gaming” has evolved beyond a single platform or form factor into a diverse ecosystem spanning mobile apps, cloud gaming services, dedicated handhelds, and retro gaming devices – all united by portability.
Why the relaunch matters now
The decision to resurrect Pocketgaming as Pocketgaming.org reflects both nostalgia and opportunity. Mobile gaming has evolved from a curiosity to the dominant gaming platform globally, yet coverage often focuses narrowly on smartphone titles while neglecting the broader portable gaming renaissance. The Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and similar devices have created a new category of “pocket gaming” that the original site’s name accidentally predicted.
The founding team brings perspectives that purely mobile-focused outlets lack:
- Deep institutional knowledge of how mobile gaming evolved from resistive-touch PDAs to capacitive smartphones
- Professional expertise in gaming’s legal and business infrastructure
- Credibility from having documented the platform before it became an industry juggernaut
- Understanding of emulation and retro gaming that connects past and present
A site that documented the before times
Pocketgaming.de existed in what now seems like gaming’s prehistoric era. In 2006-2008, the site reviewedCall of Duty 2 for Pocket PC, a mobile port that required serious compromises compared to its PC counterpart. Contributors evaluated games on devices like the HP iPAQ and Dell Axim, hardware that has largely vanished from collective memory but represented genuine innovation in portable computing.
The site filled a genuine void in the German-speaking market, providing professional-quality coverage of platforms that mainstream gaming publications ignored. While larger outlets focused on consoles and PC gaming, Pocketgaming.de recognized that portable devices would eventually matter, a bet that proved spectacularly correct.
Our Way Forward
The Pocketgaming.org relaunch represents more than a nostalgic revival. It reunites a team that understood mobile gaming’s potential when the concept barely existed, bringing two decades of professional growth to bear on a market they helped chronicle from infancy.
The site’s return also implicitly argues that mobile gaming coverage needs voices with historical depth—writers who remember what came before the App Store and can contextualize today’s innovations against that foundation. As portable gaming devices blur the lines between phones, handhelds, and PCs, a site originally dedicated to “pocket gaming” in its earliest form may be perfectly positioned to make sense of where the category heads next.
Yours sincerely,
Leonid Shmatenko, Victor Roth, and Michel Gerlach