A new project is trying to preserve click-wheel iPod games

Gaming on the iPod barely predates the iPhone's arrival in 2007, but fans have launched a project to be sure they can still play the games into the future.

An iPod fan going by the name Quix discovered a small loophole Apple's digital rights management protection (DRM) for iPod games: they could back up their iPod games manually on a second copy of iTunes on a different machine. They then used this method to back up their own 19 iPod clickwheel games.

In discussions about his discovery with a user in France going by Olsro in a iPod fan group on Discord, the pair started the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project. Olsro created a "communitarian virtual machine that anyone can use to sync auth[orized] clickwheel games into their iPod" using the Qemu emulator.

The virtual machine allows anyone who has iPod clickwheel games to "authorize" it to upload the game files from their click-wheel iPod. Because the games cannot be re-downloaded from Apple, user backups are the only way to preserve them.

In effect, anyone who still has working .IPG (iPod Game) files can now protect them from iPod failure if they hadn't previously backed up the games to a Mac or PC. The new project website does not include a way to play any of the games without a user having their own click-wheel iPod, but does make the games shareable to those devices.

Using USB passthrough to sync games to the virtual machine. Image credit: Github / Olsro

Click-wheel iPod gaming

A total of 54 iPod click-wheel games were created, and originally sold for $7.49 each through the iTunes Store. Vendors including Electronic Arts, Sega, and Square Enix were among those who partnered with Apple to create versions of popular games, customized for click-wheel playing.

Among the titles released were Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokemon, pinball emulator Multiball, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, Ms. Pac-Man, Real Soccer 2009, and many more. Currently the preservation project has obtained 42 of the original 54 games.

Apple discontinued selling the games in 2011, removing them from iTunes. However, it still allows users to re-authorize their existing games to their iPods.

That ability to re-authorize the games is the key to the ability of the project to share those games to people with working clickwheel iPods. Apple could, at any time, turn off the server that handles the re-authorization — which Olsro says would bring the preservation project to a halt.

"We do not know how much time we still have to accomplish [preserving copies of all 54 games], so there is no time to lose," Olsro said in a message on Reddit. Those who wish to contribute their games to the preservation project should contact Olsro via the Discord account "inurayama."