Community completes preservation of iPod clickwheel games

Once thought lost to time, Apple’s collection of iPod clickwheel games now has a permanent home thanks to a community-led preservation project.

The community-led iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project has successfully compiled a complete collection of all 54 titles that Apple once sold in the late 2000s. For the first time, the games are accessible together in a format that works across supported iPod models.

The effort, spearheaded by GitHub user Olsro, began in 2024, thirteen years after Apple removed the clickwheel games from the iTunes store. While there were archives of the IPG files out there, they weren’t particularly useful, as Apple’s FairPlay DRM rendered them unplayable.

Previous attempts at creating a shareable library had been made. Unfortunately, they required a donor to be willing to ship their physical iPod to whoever was creating the library.

As ArsTechnica reported in November 2024, Olsro had come up with a workaround. He found that he could create a virtual machine that allowed donors to transfer games without sending their beloved devices to Olsro’s home country of France.

This meant that he also needed to coach donors through the multi-step process of transferring files and authorizing the accounts. But, once completed, the “master library” could authorize and preserve original purchases, making them playable on other devices indefinitely.

Progress came quickly at first, with contributors offering large personal collections that filled much of the archive. However, as archival projects are wont to do, the project stalled as he struggled to locate and transfer the remaining unarchived titles.

The final missing game, Real Soccer 2009, was especially difficult to preserve due to technical failures and corrupted drives. It was only secured on September 7, after multiple unsuccessful attempts earlier this summer.

With the collection now complete, users with iPod 5G and iPod Nano 3G and newer devices can sync the full game library offline. Instructions and resources are available through GitHub and the Internet Archive.

According to the GitHub project page, the game library cannot be added to a Mac-formatted iPod. At this time, they only appear to work on Windows-formatted compatible devices.

A prime example of digital preservation

While the project may only be deemed worthwhile to a certain subset of iPod fans, it highlights the fragility of digital media and reliance on outdated hardware. This problem exists with all digital data, but is exacerbated with “niche” devices, software, or when DRM is present.

Had no one stepped forward to donate the games, failing hardware could have made recovery fully impossible. Now, thanks to the efforts of Olsro and his donors, the games will live to see another day.

For fans, the preservation effort represents a way to revisit a distinct chapter of Apple’s history. For digital archivists, it proves that crowdsourcing may be the only way to preserve some types of data.