A 10 × 10 Territory
Tap the board to plant sprouts. They grow in real time, gradually transforming the landscape of your small territory.
In 2001, I created the original Delquiwa for i-mode feature phones in Japan. The entire application had to fit within just 10 KB. Players planted life across a small territory, grew forests and cities, and competed against one another online.
I ran the server from my own home, and the game was available only in Japan. At the time, simply connecting to another person's territory from a mobile phone—and watching an online ranking change—felt new.
The game server was my own personal PC, so it would frequently go down while I was away at university. I simply could not afford to rent a server at the time.
There was another reason online multiplayer mobile games were so rare: mobile data was not available for a flat monthly fee. Users paid ¥0.3 for every 128-byte packet they transferred. Every connection had a visible cost, so an online game had to be designed with both application size and communication volume in mind.
Furthermore, mobile data speeds at the time were only 9.6 kbps. Communication cost money and took time. In an environment like that, creating a networked multiplayer game at all was fairly crazy.
The technology and the devices had changed. The pleasure of filling a tiny territory and competing with someone unknown had not.
Twenty-five years later, I decided not to preserve the game merely as a memory. I wanted to rebuild it in a form that could be played on a modern device.
I bought my first MacBook and began learning Swift. I was only about halfway through learning the language when I noticed an AI tab. I asked the AI a coding question—and was astonished when it simply began writing the code for me.
Even in 2026, I could not leave every part of the project—including the server side—entirely to AI, but development that would probably have taken me about a year was completed in around a month. The experience was exciting, but the speed of the evolution also frightened me. It made me feel that the number of applications in the world was about to grow explosively.