Dan Kopycienski, Octopi founder/president, works on a new game. Kopycienski's company, which develops video games, was recently acquired by a Toronto-based firm for $6 million.

Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star

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The world of video games is invading your cell phone, and a Tucson company is among those leading the charge.

Octopi, founded eight years ago by a University of Arizona alumnus, has become a major developer of single-player and multiplayer mobile and online games, with clients including telecom heavyweights Nokia, Sony Ericsson, SBC and T-Mobile.

The company — acquired last week by a Toronto-based game firm in a deal worth $6 million — has a proprietary game-development technology that supports multiple languages, handsets and platforms like personal digital assistants.

Octopi has developed "casual" video games ranging from backgammon and a Texas Hold 'Em poker game for cell phones and is currently developing a complex, multiplayer strategy game.

In the process, Octopi in the past half-year has grown from six employees to 25, said Daniel Kopycien-ski, founder and president of Octopi.

With additional work from its new parent, FUN Technologies PLC, the company is on a steep growth curve and plans to expand its offices at 2096 N. Kolb Road.

"We'll probably double (in size) within the next year," said Kopycienski, a 34-year-old UA grad in fine arts who has stocked his staff mostly with UA computer-science grads.

Driving the company's success in large part is the emergence of "connected" mobile gaming — playing multiplayer video games via wireless networks.

Wireless gaming is on pace to become the single largest wireless data application category in terms of revenue, overtaking ring tones in 2005 and rising to nearly $1.5 billion annually by 2008, according to the research firm IDC of Framingham, Mass.

"It's a lot further along in Europe and Asia right now," Kopycienski said.

Driving online mobile gaming is a move to high-speed wireless data networks and phones that are enabled for Java or other programming languages, an industry analyst said.

"That seems to be the part of the wireless data market that is growing the fastest," said Allyn Hall, director of wireless research for the Scottsdale firm In-Stat.

"With this sort of offering and possibly others like mobile video and mobile music, it's certainly a growing area."

Wireless companies have found a revenue stream from game downloads and air-time charges, Hall said.

Octopi is busy casting its tentacles into the market.

The company's office was bustling with activity this week as Kopycienski and his staff put some finishing touches on its original online game, PoxNora: Battleground of the Immortals.

Featuring 3-D graphics, PoxNora combines the chess-like moves of a turn-based strategy game with "collectible" fantasy characters with specific powers, on the order of popular trading-card games like Yu-Gi-Oh. Besides an online game, Octopi is working on a mobile version.

The company is on board with Nokia to develop 10 games, including a bundle of casino games.

"They've been great to work with," Markus Huttunen, San Francisco-based business development manager for Nokia SNAP Mobile, said of Octopi.

SNAP, which stands for Scalable Network Application Platform, is Nokia's multiplayer gaming platform based on Java programming.

"They're really good with casual games and understand how these games need to be done differently in the mobile platform, where you have limited user input."

Such prowess helped Octopi (www.octopi.com) to a pretax 2005 profit of about $800,000, according to FUN's announcement of its buyout last week.

As a unit of FUN Technologies, Octopi will get additional work supporting games for SkillJam, FUN's skill-based games division, and Fanball, the company's fantasy-sports arm, Kopycienski said.

It's all in a day's work — and play — for Kopycienski, a longtime gamer who gave up a successful career in commercial graphics to launch Octopi in 1998 as an interactive Web design firm.

After Octopi survived the dot-com bust even as some clients went belly-up, Kopycienski said he bought out a former partner and relaunched the company in 2003.

"When I interview people, I tell them, 'Do what you're passionate about, and your quality of life will just go through the roof, and you'll be successful," he said.

TECH FILE