Macrospace

» see macrospace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The phone I carried through university played Java games, and so did everyone else's. They came off the operator's menu or off a friend's handset over Bluetooth. They were tiny and nobody ever asked who made them. Somebody did, though, and for a few years a good share of the ones that reached Europe came out of a London office with twenty-five people in it.

The register tells the story flatly. Company 04223253 was incorporated on 25 May 2001 under the name Coprob Limited, a shelf company with no business in it, and on 28 June 2001 it became Macrospace Limited. On 15 June 2005 the same registration was renamed again, to Glu Mobile Limited. Four years minus thirteen days is the whole life of the name.

What Macrospace sold was closer to plumbing than to games. Java was the main target, and the company also built for BREW and Symbian, plus two platforms now entirely gone: NTT DoCoMo's DoJa and the Swedish Mophun. Above the games sat the services. EmuX and ConnectX let a network operator or a handset maker launch a branded mobile gaming service without building any of it. Its own corporate page described Cannons Tournament as the first commercially available multiplayer mobile game in Europe, with real-time high scores and in-game billing attached.

In December 2004 the American publisher Sorrent bought the company. The two halves stayed under their own names for another six months, then unveiled a single brand at the BREW 2005 conference, announced on 2 June. The combined company sat in San Mateo with offices in London and Singapore, and its chief executive Greg Ballard explained the rebrand as two publishers "coming together under a single global identity". The register change followed on 15 June and Macrospace was gone from the paperwork.

~ the case file ~

~ the deck ~

Before app stores there was the deck: a menu buried in the phone, run by the carrier, where a handful of games sat in a list the carrier had negotiated. You paid for the download and you often paid for the kilobytes that carried it, and the game you got was a file small enough to be embarrassing today. This was a wholesale business. The money came from operators and handset makers, which is why Macrospace never needed a consumer name and never built one.

The hard part was that there was no single phone. A publisher shipping one game had to produce it for hundreds of handsets, each with its own screen size and its own idea of how much memory a game was allowed to use. EmuX existed to industrialize that work. Nearly every company in this business died of the same thing eventually, which was the arrival of two platforms that mattered more than the other hundreds.

~ what got buried with it ~

Glu kept going and did well for a long time, so what killed the Macrospace name was somebody's success rather than anybody's failure. The British registration carried on under the Glu name for almost thirteen more years from an address in Reading, filed its last accounts to 31 December 2014, and was dissolved on 13 March 2018.

macrospace.com still has an address attached to it and nothing listening at the other end, so the connection times out rather than failing cleanly. The Internet Archive has the 2003 corporate site, which reads like a pitch deck in HTML and asks where your company sits in the mobile ecosystem, several years before everyone else got to that word.

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