BotFighters

BotFighters
Developer(s)It's Alive Mobile Games AB!
Platform(s)Mobile phone (Java ME)
Release
    • EU: March 14, 2001

BotFighters is a location-based mobile game and a pervasive game,[1] developed by It's Alive Mobile Games AB![2][3] (acquired by Digiment[4] in 2007) designed to be a MMORPG[5] played in an urban environment.[2] It was possibly the world's first commercial location-based game.[2][6] It was first released in Sweden on 14 March 2001, and later in Russia, Finland, Ireland and China.[2][7][8]

In 2002, it was awarded with an Award of Distinction, Net Vision category in the Prix Ars Electronica.[9]

The mission of the game was to locate and destroy other players. Each player was represented in the game as a robot warrior.[1] Successful battles were rewarded with money which could be traded in, via a website, for armor upgrades and other features for the player's robot. The game was temporally expansive, because there were no safe zones or timeouts; players were always playing. The likeness of the game has been compared to that of Paintball.[2] The game is no longer playable.

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference spacetimeplay was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference digiment was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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  8. ^ Laois Nationalist: Mobile could be playing an expensive game Archived August 11, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ Ars Electronica Archive Archived October 21, 2006, at the Wayback Machine