The Clickwheel Games Preservation Project Completes Its Efforts to Preserve All 54 iPod Games

Almost a year ago, Federico linked to a story on Ars Technica by Kyle Orland about efforts to preserve iPod games; now, the process has been completed. Yes, iPod games, not iPad. For a brief period of time in the late 2000s, Apple offered a selection of 54 iPod games for sale through the iTunes Store. The collection included titles from notable developers like Square Enix (Crystal Defenders and Song Summoner), Sega (Sonic the Hedgehog), and Namco (Pac-Man). Those games are long since gone, having been removed from the iTunes store in 2011, and are just one of many examples of a part of videogame history becoming inaccessible to fans and researchers due to neglect.

However, thanks to the efforts of the Clickwheel Games Preservation Project led by GitHub user Olsro, every iPod game has been preserved. As Orland explains:

[Olsro] lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project’s launch last October.

After that, though, things got tough:

Getting working access to the final unpreserved game, Real Soccer 2009, was “especially cursed,” Olsro tells Ars. “Multiple [people] came to me during this summer and all attempts failed until a new one from yesterday,” he said. “I even had a situation when someone had an iPod Nano 5G with a playable copy of Real Soccer, but the drive was appearing empty in the Windows Explorer. He tried recovery tools & the iPod NAND just corrupted itself, asking for recovery…”

Not only has the project preserved the entire library of games, but now, they’re available to anyone who still has a working iPod that supports them. Sonic on iPod will never be considered the definitive version of Sega’s classic, but if you ask me, it’s still worth preserving the memories of people like Reddit user Mahboishk for whom, “The iPod version of Sonic the Hedgehog was my introduction to the franchise as a kid, and it got me into speedrunning.” That 2000s version of Sonic is an important link in the story that has helped Sonic endure as a franchise from its ’90s origins to today. Now you too can try your hand at navigating the Green Hill Zone with a click wheel.