My dissertation traces the historical origins and early growing pains of the American mobile game industry between the release of Snake in 1997 and the release of the Apple iPhone a decade later. My argument with this project is, like most good arguments, deceptively simple: the early mobile game industry laid the social, technical, and financial infrastructure for today’s mobile media ecosystem. Most histories that engage with mobile games (or even cell phones in general) begin with Apple’s release of the iPhone in 2007 and treat the decade prior as somehow irrelevant or anomalous. My history rejects that thesis, and demonstrates in its place how hundreds of developers, entrepreneurs, and marketers spent over a decade (re)inventing the mobile phone as an entertainment medium before Apple even announced the iPhone. On the way, I demonstrate how mobile games – like computer games before them – were an important force in the spread and normalization of the constant, habitual mobile phone use that continues to concern theorists, policymakers, and parents to this day.