Source: Ars Technica
Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.
At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.
All at once, then slowly
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.
