From Untitled Goose Game to classic arcade games like Space Invaders, it’s not all that uncommon nowadays to find a video game or two in your local museum. Games are an artform and the value of preserving them is becoming more of a mainstream concern. Over in the European Union, there’s even a growing appetite to force publishers to stop “killing” MMORPGs and other live service games.
However, when you think about what games belong in a museum or deserve to be preserved, you’re probably thinking about genre-defining releases like Tetris, cultural touchstones like World of Warcraft or even historically-inspired titles like Assassin’s Creed or Anno.
Chances are you don’t think about the games released for the Apple iPod. Fortunately, someone else has been. That individual goes by the online handle of ‘Olsro’ and he’s been working to put together an archive of every single game released for Apple's iconic gadget.
Like most fan projects, Olsro’s efforts splintered off from his own interests. Earlier this year, he got back into using an iPod out of a desire to “engage more with my music [rather] than following blindly what algorithms wants me to listen [to]” and growing frustration with the way that music disappears from streaming services like Apple Music.
Eventually, Olsro got his hands on a second hand iPod Video. Unfortunately, this led him to discover a fresh source of frustration. He couldn’t revisit the games that he had played when he was younger, specifically the racing game Asphalt 4. While he did track down the DSiWare version of the game, it wasn’t quite what he was looking for.
“The controls, the visuals and the music (and feel) are so different from what I remembered,” he said.
Olsro’s quest for a way to return to the past eventually led him to a post on reddit. Penned by a user named Quix, it didn’t just expose him to the efforts being made to preserve this platform-specific era of gaming history but sparked a desire to contribute to that endeavor.
“Collecting, documenting, helping the players, organizing the project, doing technical research, interacting with the community, and building something from scratch are engaging things to do for me and this project is all of this,” he explained.
In addition, Olsro felt like it was now or never “since Apple can cut the servers for the last compatible version of iTunes (from 2018) at any time without any warning.”
At this point, it’s worth unpacking the specific technical challenges surrounding the preservation of iPod games and some of the efforts that have been made to combat them. You can’t simply drag and drop the APK file from your computer onto the device in the same way that you can with an Android device. This is because every game released for the iPod comes with a form of digital rights management (DRM).
The real kicker here is that this DRM can only be decrypted using a stored key that’s derived from multiple factors.
According to Olsro, “some kind of iPod genius in a dark forum shared 20 decrypted games for the iPod Videos as a torrent file with a custom firmware to bypass signatures to play those.”
“Before my effort, this was the only way for the masses to get access to some additional games,” he said.
So far as anyone is aware, this specific workaround was only ever shared on a dark web forum. That detail matters because it means that it was never achieved by things like the Wayback Machine. As a result, nobody in the modern iPod modding community knows how to decrypt the games and how to develop any custom firmware for the iPod.
In the absence of a way to break the encryption or DRM on iPod games, the only workarounds were powered by trust.
Quix, the user behind the Reddit post that first exposed Olsro to the world of iPod software preservation, offered a service where anyone could mail them his iPod. He would then load his authenticated games onto that device and then ship it back. This had a number of drawbacks.
Pictured: Bomberman
“Shipping iPods all over the world was clearly very inconvenient, and Quiz also only had a portion of the games to offer,” Olsro said.
It was also, at best, a temporary solution. Changing any part of your iPod’s system info would cause the hardware ID of the device to change. You could get Quix’s dozen or so games onto your iPod but if you tried any funny business you’d quickly lose access to them.
Fortunately, Olsro had an idea for a potential way around this limitation. His idea was deceptively simple and surprisingly altruistic. Rather than ship iPods without games halfway around the world to a stranger with a physical machine capable of re-authoring the games, why not use a virtual one?
Initially, he planned to just create a virtual copy of Quix’s machine but then his ambitions quickly grew. While Apple delisted iPod games back in 2011, the servers it used to do so remained live. You couldn’t buy any new iPod games and you could only ever authenticate those already attached to your Apple ID. Fortunately, there’s one big loophole to this.
If multiple iPods synchronize to the same installation of iTunes, that install would become capable of containing and authenticating games from up to five accounts. Since this account limit can be bypassed and so long as you manage to track down the right people, it would be feasible to turn a single virtual version of iTunes into a master library containing as many games released for the iPod as you could collect.
With this possibility in mind, Olsro reached out to Quix to see if there was any potential for collaboration or resource sharing. After a month or so of waiting, he decided to move forward alone. He posted to Reddit, got approached by someone looking to authenticate a few games, posted proof to the community and opened up a GitHub for the project.
Of course, the process of building this workaround workaround had its own set of “human-related” challenges.
“The project had to convince humans, and humans had to engage with it and trust me to [authenticate] their account on the [virtual machine]. It's a long work of patience and pedagogy, sometimes with people that need to be coached in order to do things like file copying and uploading the games to a file hoster,” Olsro explained.
In some cases, would-be contributors had lost access to their Apple ID or the original .IPG files.
“The only way to recreate a .ipg game file is if the person still have the game installed on one working iPod, by dumping a hidden folder then I need to do extra work to recreate the .ipg,” Olsro explained.
Even the fact that the project’s creator is based in France created some issues, due to the difference timezones involved.
While he mostly works alone when it comes to the technical aspects of the project, Olsro said that he could not have achieved anything without the help of other iPod game owners and those who helped spread word of the project.
“RazorStoj for example did really a lot for the project and was the first to spread it everywhere as much as he could (even on Facebook) to spread awareness and showing the games working on its own personal iPod,” he said.
The documentation and tutorials attached to the project have ended up being both a source of pride and something of a self-inflicted problem for Olsro.
“I wanted to make it as simple and clear as possible, and I am very very happy when I see new people showing up the games running on the social networks which means that they could install everything on their own setup by finding all answers just by reading the documentation that I worked so hard on.”
However, for that reason, the documentation had to be also fully multi-platform and multi-architecture. That comprehensiveness translated into a lot of work.
Pictured: Crystal Defenders
“I really wanted to exclude no one,” Olsro said.
At the time of writing, this archive of iPod games is almost complete. It currently hosts 52 out of the 56 games released for the platform. Cake Mania 3, Real Soccer 2009, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and WonderBlocks are still on the most wanted list.
Upon revisiting them, Olsro found that some of them are surprisingly good.
“Peggle, Phase, Monopoly, Bomberman and Crystal Defenders, and still very fun to play,” he said. Some even offered iPod-specific features. For instance, the Harmonix-developed music game Phase would automatically generate levels based on your music playlists.
Even games that are available on other platforms like Peggle play slightly differently on iPod due to the click wheel controls. Eventually, Olsro plans to make a "final" torrent for the project so as to not depend on GitHub indefinitely.
However, he can do this cleanly only when all games will be preserved. Even once that work is done, he expects to remain active in the iPod modding scene.
“My first iPod was a mini and I was not expecting this whole adventure with mp3 players to be as engaging as it was."
"Building an offline library again and sourcing it is also a lot of useful knowledge to get and fun. I never listened so much to music and get pleasure from it, sometimes I can even forget to take my phone with me when I hang out and still be happy just with my iPod filled with all of my music…”
6 min read
