Zynga launches Mafia Wars Atlantic City for mobile phones

Zynga launched a mobile version of its Mafia Wars Atlantic City game today. The game is the social game company’s first designed for the mobile Web in the HTML5 format, and comes as it’s seeking to show potential investors that it has more tricks up its sleeve than just social games on Facebook’s website.

Using HTML5 means Mafia Wars Atlantic City runs on any smartphone with a browser, including the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and WebOS devices. That’s the beauty of HTML5 as opposed to Flash or native formats which are tied to particular phones. Zynga can create the game once and have it run on multiple platforms.

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The mobile arm of Zynga’s business will be important for its diversification efforts. Zynga makes a bundle of money on Facebook, where it has 245 monthly active users. But the potential of the mobile market is much greater and Zynga has to come up with more hits on that front. It competes head-on in mobile with rivals such as DeNA’s Ngmoco and Glu Mobile.

The new mobile Mafia Wars game game is playable on a mobile web site at m.mafiawars.com or can be downloaded from GetJar’s app store. The Mafia Wars Atlantic City game is cross-platform in that it can access data from the player’s Mafia Wars account on Facebook, where Zynga has 19 million Mafia Wars players. Users can collect from their properties for all Mafia Wars cities, not just Atlantic City, by going to the mobile website.

Zynga is also expected to launch its Zynga Poker game on Android later this week.