I was having a conversation the other day about iPod socks and how the idea of storing our phones in a sock these days would have been mad. And it got me thinking about digging my own iPod out and checking out some of the games that were on there. It led me to discover that all 54 of the iPod's clickwheel games have now been preserved by a GitHub community project.
According to Ars Technica, the last game to come to the fold after a lot of trial and tribulation was Real Soccer 2009 which finished the full collection of 54 games on September 7th, and now users can sync the games to their iPods through both GitHub and the Internet Archive.
The year-long project was led by a GitHub user named Olsro and is a major win for the game preservation movement. It's no secret that Apple's Digital Rights Management policies have caused lots of bother over the years, which has meant that preserving these games has been a tedious process. When Olsro started, people would have to send in their own iPods for the preservation effort, but the whole thing became a lot easier after he found a way to make a virtual machine system so that he could tell people how to upload them remotely.
It's a great day for game preservation, and I'm glad that people like Olsro are taking the time to keep these collections alive, if only for prosperity reasons for guys like me who grew up glued to their iPods. If you've still got your iPod kicking around and it's formatted to a Windows computer, then it's definitely worth checking out the collection and taking a walk down memory lane with these games!
