Opinion: If Nintendo made mobile games...

Nintendo doesn't make mobile games. We should probably start from that bald fact. You can't play Mario Kart on your RAZR phone, and about the only thing the Nokia N95 CAN'T do is catch Pokemon.

Why not? In the past, the reasons have been obvious. As Java gaming evolved, the phone started to look like a potential competitor to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance handheld. Making mobile games would've been as unthinkable a move as releasing The Legend Of Zelda for PlayStation.

Doubt that mobile could be seen as a viable GBA rival? Try playing Glu Mobile's Ancient Empires II, which is as polished an Advance Wars homage as you could hope to find. Or for something even more blatant, check out Mobario, the Super Mario Bros clone that's offered for free on ad-funded mobile games portal Hovr.

Phones have been up to the task of running GBA-quality games for a while now, so it's no surprise Nintendo has seemingly eyed the platform with suspicion.

Meanwhile, the hassles around producing a mobile game – porting it to 100-plus different handsets and trying to make it run equally well on all of them – would have been anathema to Nintendo, whose entire ethos relies upon controlling its own hardware platform and releasing high-quality games that make the most of it.

Or, to put it another way: can you imagine Nintendo releasing Mario Kart Mobile with a marvellous version on expensive phones, and a really rubbish jerkovision port for low-end handsets? Thought not.

Those are the two main reasons that Nintendo has shunned mobile gaming, then. Well, that and the fact that it's had its hands full beavering away on Wii and DS, of course. Yet there's strong evidence that the mobile explosion hasn't entirely passed Nintendo by.

For example, the company has been selling a range of ringtones based on its most popular games through its own websites since 2005, while last February it signed a deal in the US with a firm called Zingy to sell official Pokemon-related ringtones and wallpapers.

Even more intriguingly, last April saw reports in Japan that Nintendo had licensed Pokemon to Square Enix to create not a mobile game, but a communication application called Pokemate – offering Pokemon-themed chat and email features.

So, Nintendo doesn't make mobile games, but it's shown that it's interested in mobile. Here's why the company should expand that interest into mobile games development too.

First, mobiles aren't as direct a competitor with Nintendo's flagship DS handheld as they were with the GBA. Sure, the iPhone and a few other handsets have touchscreens, but really, even we Pocket Gamer zealots wouldn't try to kid anyone that your phone is a direct rival to your DS.

They're two completely different games platforms. Which is why they could be complementary. As GBA fades into the gaming history books, mobile could and should take its place as Nintendo's third gaming platform, alongside Wii and DS. Sony and Microsoft are both quietly increasing their involvement in mobile, so it would make sense for Nintendo to follow suit.

Secondly, if nothing else, current mobiles are easily up to the task of running the classic stuff – the sort of NES-era games you find being sold on the Wii's Virtual Console shop. For proof, run a Google search on 'NES emulator series 60' and check out what can be done with Nokia's smartphones.

If Nintendo wanted to make a few easy quid, it could simply farm out conversions of the Virtual Console games to a mobile firm for porting across mobiles.

What's more, the mobile operators would welcome Nintendo with open arms. It's true that most operators would like to work with less mobile game publishers, not more. But Nintendo is one of the few companies that could walk straight onto most operator portals.

So, back catalogue would be a sensible first move into mobile for Nintendo, perhaps marketing the games as 'Nintendo Classics'. Don't forget, too, that all those games were designed for old-skool digital joypads with four-way D-pads and a couple of buttons, rather than the modern analogue controllers. They'd work beautifully on phones.

But ultimately, mobile shouldn't just be another retro museum for Nintendo. Besides, trying to squeeze Animal Crossing, Mario Kart and more recent Legend Of Zelda games would be almost certain to end in disappointment for gamers (although admittedly five or six publishers apiece have tried to squeeze Nintendogs and Dr Kawashima's Brain Training into phone versions in the last year).

The model for Nintendo in a theoretical sense should come from what Sega and Glu did with Sonic Jump earlier this year, although the quality didn't match the idea. But that idea was good: an original game made for mobile, starring Sonic. Glu tried a similar trick with Super Monkey Ball Tip'n'Tilt.

Nintendo's development wizards are more than capable of taking its stable of marvellous characters – Mario, Pikachu, Link, Wario, Kirby even – and creating all-new mobile games around them. Maybe playing them could earn you unlock codes for their Wii or DS games, for a bit of cross-platform interaction?

If they do a better job than the two merely respectable Sega games mentioned above, they'll sell in their millions. Better still, you can imagine Nintendo looking to make use of mobile's unique aspects, much as it does the Wii's motion sensing or DS' touch-screen. We're thinking the camera particularly, but also potentially communication and location features too.

Yes, this is pie-in-the-sky thinking from us, and explaining why it would make sense for Nintendo to go mobile doesn't correspond to the company actually doing it. Sadly.

Think all this is too wacky a suggestion? How about we finish with a bit of handset speculation? After all, since Apple's iPhone became hard fact rather than feverish rumour, we've been looking for another big-name electronics firm whose handset plans we can gossip about.

The biggest obstacle to Nintendo making mobile games now is the lack of control it has over the hardware platform. And of course, the answer is easy: the NintendoPhone (WiiPhone? MarioPhone?).

Nintendo could make a mobile phone, tweak its settings to the nth degree to work well with its games, including the camera, connectivity and dedicated gaming buttons.

Ridiculous, right? The company was clearly thinking along these lines when it filed a patent for a mobile phone back in 2001. We wouldn't want to bet against the idea being resuscitated in 2007.