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Last of the lost iPod clickwheel games preserved [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-09-10
The iPod and its innovative clickwheel are history, and with it in the dustbin went dozens of downloadable games that Apple briefly made available in the 2000s. Thanks to the company's DRM system, the age of the hardware and sheer rarity of some titles, it took a well-organized effort to preserve them all. With the discovery of an iPod containing Real Soccer 2009, the last of the 54 titles has been preserved, reports Kyle Orland.
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. … 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…"
Watching videos of these games is bizarre. One one hand, it's still striking that a music player had the latent power to run mobile games (though there was never an official port of Doom, of course it runs). On the other hand, the clickwheel was not good for controlling games, so that it was ever an official thing representes a real curiosity in Apple's history.
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