Babel Media, a Hove-based outsourcing specialist, is going back to the laboratory to capitalise on the growth of wireless entertainment.
The company has launched a hand-held compatiblity lab to meet the lucrative games industry's requirements for moving to wireless and hand-held devices.
Babel was approached by games publisher Eidos, which wanted to take advantage of opportunities in the hand-held market.
Business development director Ben Wibberley said: "It is essential publishers are confident their games are compatible over the entire range of hand-held devices. We can provide them with this confidence.
"In the past, games were all about PCs, PlayStations and the like but mobile gaming has grown into a mass market.
"Many games companies don't understand how best to take advantage of this trend and that's where we come in."
The lab is being used to test popular titles, such as Eidos' Tomb Raider and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Mr Wibberley said: "We've been running Tomb Raider on a pocket PC and it looks and plays just like the PlayStation version."
But mobile gaming was about more than action-adventures.
He said: "We're moving away from shoot-'em-ups and role-playing to mass market entertainment games such as Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire? The possibilities are endless."
Babel is convinced it has stolen a lead on other companies in the field with its new testing services.
Mr Wibberley said: "Because we aren't coming so much from a technical side but are focusing more on a game's content, there is nothing else like this on the market."
The company had received further inquiries about the lab after putting details on the industry web site Gamasutra.
According to research experts Ovum, the global wireless gaming market will be worth £710 million by 2004, rising to £3 billion by 2006, with 53 million wireless gamers worldwide.
Wireless gaming is attractive to companies across the telecoms and videogames sectors.
For network operators, it brings the promise of longer airtime to help them offset heavy investments in next-generation mobile telecoms networks.
Mr Wibberley said the development of wireless gaming had been compared to the emergence of radio entertainment.
He said: "Even though radio wasn't originally invented for entertainment, once everyone had one it was the perfect entertainment medium. That's similar to what's happening here.
"Although the new technology has not been perfected, the promise is there."
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