Even the bad click wheel iPod games like Sega are almost impossible to control Sonic the hedgehog port – could find their own idiosyncratic audience among gaming sub-communities, Olsro argued. “A [person] beat Dark souls using DK bongos, so I wouldn't be surprised if the speedrun community could try to speedrun some of those strange games.”
However, Olsro said that in addition to entertainment, there is also a lot of historical interest to be gleaned from this strange pre-iPhone period in Apple's gaming history. “The clickwheel games were a reflection[ion] of that gaming era of premium games,” Olsro said. 'Without ads, nonsense and microtransactions and completely playable offline from start to finish… Then the market evolved. [on iOS] with cheaper premium games like Angry birds before we're inundated with ads and aggressive revenue streams everywhere…”
The iPod may not be the ideal device for playing Sonic the hedgehogbut you can do it!
The iPod may not be the ideal device for playing Sonic the hedgehogbut you can do it!
Credit: Reddit/ajgogo
While Olsro said he's happy with the 47 games he's kept (and especially enjoys playing Asphalt 4 Again), he won't be fully satisfied until his iTunes Virtual Machine has saved all 54 clickwheel titles for posterity. He likened the effort to completing sets of classic game console ROMs “that you can archive somewhere to make sure you can play (or research) any game you want in the future… Obtaining the full set is also addictive in collecting terms, just like any other kind of collectible.”
But Olsro's conservation efforts may have a built-in time limit. If Apple ever disables the iTunes reauthorization servers for Clickwheel iPods, it will no longer be able to add new games to its Master Clickwheel iPod library. “Apple is now notorious for not being concerned about shutting down legacy servers,” Olsro said. “If that version of iTunes dies tomorrow, this preservation project will be halted. No new games will ever be added.”
“We don't know how much time we have left to make this happen, so there's no time to waste,” Olsro wrote on Reddit. iPod gamers who want to help can contact him through his Discord account, inurayama.
