About Us

This page details the creating of the game-thing.com website and how its staff became associated with the site.

GThing

GThing dates back to October 2004 when the LG U8110 was released in Australia By '3'. I (Ryan) was offered one of these mobiles for a little over AU$100 as an upgrade from my Nec e606. I took the upgrade option even though I was holding out for a SonyEricsson Z1010.

I had always frequented the aussie3g forums and had learnt that it was not possible to upload games onto this phone via USB. I started a little investigation because it seems unlikely that this mobile would have no java upload feature at all.

Initially, just like many others, I found I was able to get LG PhoneManager to list a directory called 'Java' and see some java game related files. It was not possible to upload or download to this directory but this began a long list of experiments that lead to an application that could upload java games to the LG U8110. This program evolved in GThing, the software now available from a need to easily and quickly install games on to the LG U8110.

Over time more mobiles were added to the supported list for GThing. GThing was originally free, but the time and effort required to stop people selling GThing on eBay became unmanageable. I decided that the simplest and probably best option was to charge for GThing. Payments allowed me to devote time and resources to supporting new mobiles and fixing bugs. A true win-win situation for GThing. Not everybody liked that transition from being a free product but when being informed of how much money and time it actually takes to keep GThing going, even the hardened free-software-only people changed their stance.

GThing retains a pay-per-phone policy which has enabled new mobiles to benefit from GThing just as much as the original LG U8110 did.

The original thread detailing the days of when GThing was developed was lost in an attack on the aussie3g forum. Sadly no backups of this thread are known to exist.

game-thing.com website

GThing was originally distributed from a website called ryan.unf.net. That website was always intended to be a temporary home for GThing but ended up being its home for 1.5 years. This was mainly because time spent on GThing was normally expanding to fill all my spare time thus limiting any time that could be devoted to running a website.

I eventually came round a did up a proper site in May 2006 which is now the current game-thing.com site. Initially the site was very plain but over time, a forum, game section, reviews, and some web applications have been added. Still, the original purpose, to serve GThing, has been kept as a focal point.

Ryan

I live on the Gold Coast, Australia, and develop GThing, game-thing.com and its related services in my spare time. I am highly educated (postgraduate) in Computer Science with degrees from multiple universities. I never liked mobile phones and only purchased one because I had a girlfriend that had one. To this day, my mobile bill still averages $4 per-month. I enjoy cycling, DJing (vinyl), drinking beer and wine, and developing software.

Nostalgia

On the right is a picture of how the GThing website looked when GThing v1.0 was released. The entire website was one HTML page created by hand. The original images are missing from this capture and were lost when the webserver the GThing website was on was attacked due to the irc server running on it.

The image below is the original test application from the aussie3g forum experiment. The application still functions today although it could never install java games or even upload files and only worked on the LG U8110.