The N-Gage Classic phone and gaming device that started it all.

Game Guy is crying a little as he writes this. Not because he’s sad that Nokia finally put N-Gage out of his misery, but that it didn’t happen before now.

The mobile phone maker has announced it would phase out the mobile gaming service over the next several months, thus ending a chapter of tech history that made people’s eyes roll instead of gleam. N-Gage is expected to breathe its last next September as Nokia turns its focus toward the Ovi Store, an app source like iTunes but for Nokia’s phones.

“It’s much more convenient to have one place to get all your mobile games, and this is what Ovi Store provides,” the N-Gage announcement reads. “Mobile gaming is one of the most popular activities in the Ovi Store, with games being the No. 2 most downloaded category for premium content.”

Good thing, too, because N-Gage struggled almost from Day One, when it started out in 2003 as a taco-shaped gaming-and-phone-and-music-playing device that did none of those things well. The Symbian-based games in particular were considered inferior to those offered by Nintendo for the competing Game Boy Advance handheld system, and the device suffered from frequent “white screen” crashes that locked up every feature.

On top of all that, N-Gages were priced at a stultifying $300 each.

Within days of its debut though, retailers were offering steep discounts just to get N-Gage off their shelves, to no avail; Game Boy Advance sales remained way ahead and never relented.

The N-Gage QD, successor to the Classic.

N-Gage was redesigned in 2004, and some later game titles such as “Pocket Kingdom: Own the World” received favorable reviews. However, neither was enough to blunt people’s first bad impressions of the device. Soon afterward, Sony introduced its PlayStation Portable and Nintendo its DS systems, which quickly swept up the handheld gaming market. They also swept up Game Guy, who never much picked up his N-Gage again after they arrived.

Last year, N-Gage became chiefly a mobile gaming service for Nokia smart phones. It now has about 50 titles in its inventory; many more were in development.

N-Gage was Nokia’s best chance to grab a portion of the growing casual gaming market and run away with it before Sony and Nintendo gained traction. (Sony’s PSP even mimicked N-Gage’s design somewhat regarding button placement.) But by creating a device that on one hand looked too much like a toy to be taken seriously as a phone, and on the other hand was too much of a phone to be an effective gaming platform, Nokia missed that opportunity and instead starred in a cautionary tale for other smart-phone makers to study.

And the lesson? Don’t go half way when it comes to gaming — because the marketplace may not want to follow even that far.