All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity

Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

All at once, then slowly

GitHub user Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he 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. That includes one YouTuber who had purchased and maintained copies of 39 distinct games, even repurchasing some of the upgraded versions Apple sold separately for later iPod models.

Ars' story on the project shook out a few more iPod owners with syncable iPod game libraries, and subsequent updates in the following days left just a handful of titles unpreserved. But that's when the project stalled, Olsro said, with months wasted on false leads and technical issues that hampered the effort to get a complete library.

"I've put a lot of time into coaching people that [had problems] transferring the files and authorizing the account once with me on the [Virtual Machine]," Olsro told Ars. "But I kept motivation to continue coaching anyone else coming to me (by mail/Discord) and making regular posts to increase awareness until I could find finally someone that could, this time, go with me through all the steps of the preservation process," he added on Reddit.

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..."

That kind of problem highlights the race against time that Olsro and the iPod community was facing here. "I was... worried about people losing their Apple ID or their games files, or about how mechanical hard drives that are storing the games are all dying," Olsro said. "There was always something wrong or an unexpected disaster preventing us to complete the process," he noted on Reddit. "1 mac HDD + 2 iPod HDDs died when the [people] were trying to back up the game files."

The classic iPod community also faced an indeterminate deadline from Apple, which could have shut off the servers needed to authorize new games to the VM's "master library" at any time. Luckily, Olsro said, the aging version of iTunes 12 they use for their Virtual Machine "is also important because it also supports downloading iOS apps. It's known that some businesses still needs it to manage their apps. But that iTunes version is from 2018 so I don't expect it to pass 2030."

Together forever

Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein.

To Olsro, completing the project "means this whole part from the early 2000s will remain with us forever." He also expressed hope that "this Virtual Machine can also be useful towards any security [or] archeologist researcher who want to understand how the DRM worked."

However, for gamers who grew up during this weird time of Apple gaming history, the project has also provided some immediate and direct nostalgic value. "The iPod version of Sonic the Hedgehog was my introduction to the franchise as a kid, and it got me into speedrunning," Reddit user Mahboishk wrote in praising the preservation effort. "To this day, it's the easiest version of the game for me to play due to the ingrained muscle memory."