So here’s a bit of funny news for you. Apparently Nokia, the bastion of good business sense in the mobile industry for the past 5 years (sarcasm!), has awarded its “Calling All Innovators” game prize of $250,000 to independent game company 10tons for creating mobile game Sparkle. Cool right? Except that Sparkle is not innovative at all.

As many of you should know by now, I’m not adverse to clones or copying features. It’s a natural step in the gaming evolutionary system. So I have no problem that 10tons created a Puzz Loop clone (probably more popularly known as Zuma) and released it under the name Sparkle. In fact the game has been cloned so many times at this point who cares? It’s a fun mobile game. That said, I do think it’s funny that Nokia thinks it’s innovative because it’s not. Not by a long, long shot.

My first thought was that there must have been some other game/developer who really strived to create something unique and innovative, at which point I was angry. But then I thought… it’s Nokia. The contest itself must have been pretty sparse in the first place. Perhaps Sparkle was simply the best they could have chosen.

Oh and the really, really funny part? Sparkle isn’t even exclusive to Nokia’s Symbian mobile OS. It’s available on damn near every OS: Windows, OSX, iOS (iPhone and iPad) Android, Bada (Samsung’s thing), WebOS (including the TouchPad). In fact, it appears that these versions even came FIRST. 10tons essentially just flushed a new version down the drain to Nokia and walked home with a quarter million dollars.

Oh Nokia… oh sweet, innocent Nokia. If you’re going to spend $250,000 on a clone, at least make sure it’s a clone that’s going to be exclusive to your platform.

[Nokia]