s u m e a | studio

Sumea is an internal game development studio of Digital Chocolate, specialising in premium quality downloadable mobile games. Sumea is located in Digital Chocolate's office in Helsinki, Finland. The friendly Sumea people have a real passion for quality gaming and are working every day to improve the future of mobile games.

Sumea's mission is to give new meaning to mobile gaming — we create new mobile game franchises, characters and universes. As an internal studio, we are able to concentrate 100% on creating new things, while the rest of the Digital Chocolate organization handles the extensive distribution network that takes our games to the biggest cell phone operators all over the world — Sprint in the US, Vodafone in Europe and China Telecom in, well, China, being just a few examples.

Sumea wants to make hit mobile games — and by definition, a hit game is a game that sells phenomenally well. This is clearly a goal that can only be reached by working together with post-production, marketing, and sales. That's why Sumea has a policy of open doors and active co-operation — we are happy to work daily across the departments and help in any way we can because we believe that is the true road to success.

If you want to have a glimpse of how we work, please read our Tower Bloxx Postmortem on Gamasutra.com.

A Very Sumea History

1996 | “Sumea” demo by Finnish Amiga demo group Virtual Dreams wins the Assembly '96 demo competition. The legendary name that survives to this day was born. But why “Sumea”? Well, the name needed to be short, pronouncable in any language and of course it had to look cool.

1999 | Sumea as a company was founded. The team had gotten well-deserved attention with their web-based 3-D Java applets. Check out these things from the past. The vision was not rock solid, but the spirit and drive were strong! Quality and the user experience were the most important issues.

2000 | The size of the company quadrupled in 2000: From 2 to 8. Having witnessed the success of i-mode in Japan, and foreseeing the rest of the world to follow the same trend, Sumea decided to focus on downloadable mobile games. The bearings were taken, the sails were up, and the team was ready to rock'n'roll!

2001 | The first Java enabled mobile phones, which actually looked like mobile phones people were used to, were launched in Europe. Sumea was making steady progress, even though being self-funded was not all the time just glamorous and fun. Nowadays world famous Racing Fever™ franchise was born just before the end of the year, making a perfect Christmas gift for the team.

2002 | More and more Java enabled mobile phones were announced: Practically all the major mobile manufacturers were behind the standard. Carriers were launching mobile games services, and Sumea was one of their first partners. There were two kinds of approaches to mobile game development: Some companies believed in the power of big portfolio of games. Others, like Sumea, believed in the other approach: To quote one of the board meeting memos, “the company will continue to focus on quality, not quantity of games”. In summer 2002 it was clear: The mobile market had really born in Europe and the US, and Sumea had become one of the key players in that field.

2003 | Strong growth continued for Sumea through-out the whole year 2003. The technology was taking huge steps, and from Sumea's point of view, mobile phones with black-and-white screens had already been forgotten by early 2003. Sumea continued pushing the limits in every aspect. An example of this is Extreme Air Snowboarding™, a ground-breaking game released in the second half of 2003: A 3-D game in a 2-D phone! The competition was getting tougher and tougher, and it was clear that the industry would look quite different by the end of 2004.

2004 | On the fast growing market, rapid expansion and a stronger, more scalable organization became the themes for the new year. As the game was getting really big and international, Sumea decided to join forces with Digital Chocolate, a US mobile game company founded by Trip Hawkins. “Sumea” was repositioned as the name for the internal studio, while the QA, post-production, publishing and sales functions were branded “Digital Chocolate Europe”. Sumea kept going from strength to strength, with great game reviews. Even better, Sumea's games made frequent appearances on the newly launched ELSPA UK Top-10 chart.

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