All 54 Lost Clickwheel IPod Games Have Been Preserved For Posterity (arstechnica.com)
(Monday September 08, 2025 @11:30PM (BeauHD)
from the together-forever dept.)
- Reference: 0179092530
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/213205/all-54-lost-clickwheel-ipod-games-have-been-preserved-for-posterity
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/09/all-54-lost-clickwheel-ipod-games-have-now-been-preserved-for-posterity/
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
> 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 [1]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 [2]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 [3]today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are [4]now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.
>
> [...] 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 [5]these GitHub instructions or by downloading [6]this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein.
The effort was made possible by GitHub user Olsro, with help from other iPod enthusiasts. To Olsro, completing [7]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."
[1] http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/728B5C4B-0A35-40BE-A2E7-E5464C68B80A.html
[2] https://github.com/Olsro/ipodclickwheelgamespreservationproject/tree/main
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipod/comments/1nb9kvx/comment/nd2dozi/
[4] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/09/all-54-lost-clickwheel-ipod-games-have-now-been-preserved-for-posterity/
[5] https://github.com/Olsro/ipodclickwheelgamespreservationproject/tree/main
[6] https://archive.org/details/icgpp
[7] https://github.com/Olsro/ipodclickwheelgamespreservationproject/tree/main
> 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 [1]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 [2]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 [3]today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are [4]now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.
>
> [...] 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 [5]these GitHub instructions or by downloading [6]this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein.
The effort was made possible by GitHub user Olsro, with help from other iPod enthusiasts. To Olsro, completing [7]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."
[1] http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/728B5C4B-0A35-40BE-A2E7-E5464C68B80A.html
[2] https://github.com/Olsro/ipodclickwheelgamespreservationproject/tree/main
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipod/comments/1nb9kvx/comment/nd2dozi/
[4] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/09/all-54-lost-clickwheel-ipod-games-have-now-been-preserved-for-posterity/
[5] https://github.com/Olsro/ipodclickwheelgamespreservationproject/tree/main
[6] https://archive.org/details/icgpp
[7] https://github.com/Olsro/ipodclickwheelgamespreservationproject/tree/main
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't you think we should preserve our digital history? Because it isn't important to you?
It could very well be important to a lot of people - it's Apple's first real foray into gaming by having a "game console" - and an oddity of the time before we carried app running digital slabs.
And plenty of stuff are trapped on hardware no longer available - lots of J2ME games for example. Often if you're a fan of a franchise, especially a Japanese one, lots of lore may be locked up permanently on those devices. I