By Apple’s iconic music-player era birthed a brief gaming scene that flashed by during the gadget’s twenty-year run. Fifty-four click-wheel titles were produced; without archivists they would have vanished. Piecing the full set back together was laborious, yet every iPod click-wheel release is now safeguarded.
Ars Technica notes that Olsro, curator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, finally secured a copy of Real Soccer 2009 to finish the library. Rescue involved locating owners whose devices still held the files, then mirroring them into a Virtual Machine archive fellow iPod fans can dip into at will. Olsro calls the milestone “comforting—this slice of the early 2000s won’t disappear.”
The VM collection works with iPod Classic 5G, 5.5G, 6G, 6.5G, 7G, Nano 3G, Nano 4G and Nano 5G. Step-by-step setup directions live on GitHub; follow them and the games run on your own player.
Every preserved click-wheel release appears underneath, spanning classics such as Bomberman, Ms. Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog.
- Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
- Bejeweled
- Block Breaker Deluxe
- Bomberman
- Brain Challenge
- Bubble Bash
- Cake Mania 3
- Chalkboard Sports Baseball
- Chess & Backgammon Classics
- Chinese Checkers
- CRYSTAL DEFENDERS
- CSI Miami
- Cubis 2
- iQuiz (NOT THE PRE-INSTALLED VERSION)
- Lode Runner
- LOST
- Mahjong
- Mini Golf
- Monopoly
- Ms. PAC-MAN
- Ms. PAC-MAN Demo
- musika
- Mystery Mansion Pinball
- Naval Battle
- PAC-MAN
- Peggle
- Phase
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Aegir’s Fire
- Pole Position Remix
- Real Soccer 2009
- Reversi
- Royal Solitaire
- SAT Prep Mathematics – 2008
- SAT Prep Reading – 2008
- SAT Prep Writing – 2008
- Scrabble
- Slyder Adventures
- Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- Spore Origins
- Star Trigon
- Sudoku
- Tamagotchi ‘Round the World
- Tetris
- Texas Hold’em
- The Sims Bowling
- The Sims DJ
- The Sims Pool
- Tiger Woods PGA TOUR
- Trivial Pursuit
- UNO
- Vortex
- Wonder Blocks
- Yahtzee
- Zuma
Tap the button underneath to mark GameSpot as a preferred Google news source.
Need to reach us with a scoop? Drop a line to news@gamespot.com