It's game time.

Across the rainy streets of San Jose, CA, scruffy guys with laminated badges flapping on their T-shirts scurry into the city's convention center. The occasion is the annual Game Developer's Conference: Mecca for the programmers, artists and technological dreamers who design and code virtual worlds. The annual event is always the place to be for anyone who's anyone in this multibillion-dollar industry. But on this Saturday morning, the buzz is even greater than usual. After a few days discussing vector units, quaternions and 3-D fluid simulation, they're racing to talk about something truly heady, the birth of a new medium: wireless games.

Inside the conference room, a standing-room-only crowd has assembled for the "Wireless Game Summit," a marathon exploration of the first new gaming platform in three decades. Among the development companies attending is one launched by the legendary John Romero. Way back in the 20th century, Romero was cocreator of three fast-action video games that radically transformed the industry. Romero's violent "first-person shooters"-Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and Quake-let the player see through the eyes of a weapons-wielding character. With their mesmerizing 3-D graphics and over-the-Internet competition, these three games rapidly became among the bestselling offerings in video game history. Now Romero has started Monkeystone Games in Quinlan, TX, to focus on what he thinks is the next great unconquered space for gaming. "Everyone has a cell phone," he says, "and everyone's going to want to play games."