IOMO


IOMO was a pioneering European mobile game developer and publisher based in Hampshire, England. IOMO was founded by John Chasey, Glenn Broadway and Andrew Bain in 2000. Initially a developer, the company was very successful in the early stages of the mobile game industry and worked with the majority of mobile technologies and customers across the whole value chain. This ranged from pre-installed titles developed for handset manufacturers and carriers, creation of branded titles for mobile games publishers and self-published original titles.

History

The first public announcement mentioning IOMO is in May 2001 when Nokia announced development of seven WAP titles by IOMO for the Nokia Mobile Entertainment service, one of the first platforms designed for carriers to be able to host and bill for games content. IOMO also worked on SMS titles including TxtDating which launched on O2 in the UK.
As the industry moved away from WAP and SMS to Java ME titles, in May 2003 IOMO acquired mobile game studio Covert Operations Ltd for an undisclosed sum.
The peak of IOMO's success came in 2004 when in addition to winning the Develop Industry Excellence award for the second year running, IOMO were developers of half the games in the Top 10 charts for two different UK operators.
January 2004, the Vodafone Top 10 games charts included five titles developed by IOMO; Tomb Raider: The Quest for Cinnabar, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf, Pub Pool, Tomb Raider: The Osiris Codex and Monopoly.
November 2004, the Orange UK Top 10 games charts included five titles developed by IOMO; Pub Fruity, Colin McRae Rally 2005, Monopoly, Golf Club and Pub Darts.
In March 2004, IOMO partnered with Kayak Interactive to demonstrate the first live multiplayer pool tournament between Java ME and BREW handsets on at the GDC Mobile day of the 2004 Game Developers Conference.
This success culminated on 1 December 2004 when it was announced that InfoSpace had acquired IOMO for approximately $15 million in cash.
In January 2005, an N-Gage version of the classic Snakes, developed by IOMO was launched. The title had universally positive reviews averaging a Metacritic score of 85.
As a studio within the InfoSpace group, IOMO games were published under the InfoSpace brand. However, on 25 January 2007, InfoSpace announced it was exiting the content space and had sold its US games studio to Twistbox Games with IOMO to follow.
On 6 August 2007, IOMO was closed and staff from IOMO formed a new mobile game developer, FinBlade, and a new mobile middleware developer, Metismo.

Awards