I was seated in a quiet room in the Disney booth with a handful of international journalists waiting on an appointment when I opened up my laptop.
The man next to me craned his neck over when he saw my wallpaper - a stylized version of The Legend of Zelda's triforce - and clicked the home button on his iPad to wake it up. His background was the cast of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
He smiled at me and, with a thick, Slavic accent said, "Legend of Zelda! Cool!"
I smiled and nodded back, knowing that we probably couldn't communicate much past this basic interest - but it was enough to get me thinking.
Will mobile games ever produce characters that will stand the test of time like Link, Pac Man, Sonic, or Mario?
Character witness
Certainly, there's evidence that - in the short term - mobile games are capable of creating memorable characters.
You'd need to live in a very rural part of the world to have not seen some form of Angry Birds branding in your local shops - and that will change once the movie will land in theatres in 2016.
But with the exception of Rovio's birds and possibly Cut the Rope's Om Nom, mobile games just aren't creating enduring or even identifiable characters.
Angry Birds' cast of characters has gained universal appeal
When you look at some of the top games in the global market now - Supercell's Clash of Clans or GungHo's Puzzle and Dragons - there's nothing much in the way of a signature, franchise-defining character that will be remembered by gamers five years from now.
Sure, these games are making hundreds of millions of dollars now but will they be remembered in the long-term for anything other than their success?
Without iconic characters, one can only wonder at this what the influence these now-popular games will hold in a few year's time.It's puzzling
If you broaden the scope a bit further to include games like Bejeweled and Candy Crush Saga, things become even more interesting: these titanic titles have enjoyed success without a flagship character of any kind.
Clearly, mobile games don't need to create memorable characters if they want to be successful... but should they?
Bejeweled's most recognisable feature is the gems themselves
Put another way, will the money spent into concept art, meetings, and 3D rendering of characters be worth the investment?
If the developers want to create a game to be remembered two or three smartphone generations from now, then the answer has to be yes.
Yet with money rolling in faster than most lucky developers can count, it's easy to lose sight of this bigger picture - especially if, as my colleague Jon Jordan argues, the mobile landscape really has changed to the point that it "measures success by your past month's active players, not your past decade's history."
To this end, there's really no quantifiable need for mobile developers to create iconic characters that fans can internalise and identify by.
Unless, of course, they want to create something that really resonates with their players.
