Restore point
Thousands of iOS games have been consigned to history. One company is working to bring them back
GameClub is working to restore thousands of lost iOS games
They called it the ‘appocalypse’, and it was no overstatement. With the launch of iOS 11 in September 2017, Apple ended support for 32bit software on the App Store, meaning that any legacy app that wasn’t updated to run in 64bit would be rendered obsolete overnight. No one, outside Cupertino at least, knows precisely how many apps were lost that day, but one analysis put the figure at over 200,000 – almost ten per cent of the entire iOS catalogue. The effect on the store’s game library was brutal. In the App Store’s early days, an Edge feature ran down the 50 best games to be had from it. By the start of 2018, only half a dozen of those were
still available. For Eli Hodapp, then-editorin-chief of the mobile gaming website Touch Arcade, the appocalypse was the last straw.
Hodapp had been part of the website since the early days – it launched in 2008 – having seen immediately the promise of a marketplace that so democratised the business of making and releasing games. “Back then people were ridiculing the iPhone,” he tells us. “Everyone remembers the Steve Ballmer video where he’s just unable to compose himself because he’s laughing so much about how expensive the iPhone is. But what was interesting about that time was that you had all these indie developers that, for the very first time, had this unbelievable level of accessibility to a huge customer base. Before the iPhone, if I was some random dude in my bedroom making videogames in my spare time, what method of distribution would I possibly have? The App Store changed everything.”
As the years rolled by, certain games Hodapp and his colleagues had championed in the App Store’s formative years began to disappear. With each new OS or device release, another handful would fall away. To many small developers, the work required to keep an old game compatible with new iOS devices and operating systems was no
longer financially sustainable; in some cases, the studios that made them had closed, or the talent involved moved on. “When I saw those games kind of slowly vanish, it was a point of major personal frustration to be on the editorial side and realise that the extent of the influence I had on these games disappearing was basically just to complain,” Hodapp says. “It feels good when you spend all day working on that really scathing editorial – you get the perfect pull-quotes and the tweet’s amazing and everything. But at best you get a bunch of people nodding in agreement with you as they read. At the end of the day, that sort of stuff isn’t going to bring any of those games back.”
Now he’s tr ying to put that right. Hodapp left the EIC’s chair at Touch Arcade and is now VP of business development for GameClub, a new company whose sole modus operandi is getting dead games back on the App Store. It was co-founded last year by Dan Sherman, a veteran of companies including EA and Tilting Point and the operation’s business brain, and Oliver Pedersen, its tech wizard, formerly the director of engineering at Yahoo Games and CTO of PlayerScale. They, like Hodapp, had tired of seeing amazing, often important games disappear from view. Sherman, meanwhile, remembered his formative gaming experiences on the NES and Atari 2600, and compared them to the pop-up ad barrages and IAP nagging so common in the mobile games his young children played. Enough was enough. Their pitch to developers is simple: give us your source code, and we’ll put it back on the App Store.
Their solution is case by case, bespoke and done by hand by a small team of engineers in Copenhagen (Pedersen is based there, Sherman in New York, and Hodapp in Chicago). Currently, the team is focusing attention on early iOS games, made at a time when there were fewer development technologies available to small shops than there are today; no two games’ problems will be identical, but once GameClub fixes a certain bug in one Cocos2d game, for example, it will be prepared the next time a variant of it comes up. Many of the developers behind those early classics believe their games to be lost causes. Kepa Auwae, creator of the 2D platformer Hook
Champ, firmly believed that his game, released in 2009, could only be made playable for modern devices after a complete rewrite. He would get emails from fans asking him to bring it back. Touch Arcade called for it to be brought back, too. However, Auwae thought it as good as impossible.
“That game was very much a product of its day,” Hodapp says. “When it was made, no one ever thought that there might be an iPhone with a screen size that wasn’t 320x480. The physics engine, the way the game rendered and all this other stuff were all locked to the idea that this is the screen size that everything the game is built on expects; there’s no scaling up or anything like that.” Auwae handed over the source code. Pedersen had it up and running, and 90 per cent functional, within a day-and-a-half.
Hook Champ is GameClub’s first release, going out for free to those who sign up for its early-access programme. Members will be sent a link to the game in TestFlight, the Apple software used for beta-testing games and apps, but eventually Hook Champ and the fixed-up games that follow (one per week, at least initially) will be restored in all their former glory to the App Store. If Hodapp is coy about exactly how that will work – we know nothing about the price, the revenue share, whether previous owners will have to pay again or if, as seems logical, this will ultimately involve a subscription of some kind – he’s honest enough to admit it’s because they don’t even know themselves yet. “I guess it’s kind of a startup-y thing to do: build the product first and make sure everyone likes it, then figure the rest out later. But that’s where we’re at right now. I genuinely believe there’s a huge audience of people that are going to love these games, and as that comes to fruition, I think the rest will just become obvious.”
Early signs are certainly encouraging. When we speak, GameClub is little more than a landing page with a call for email signups, and an op-ed Hodapp wrote for the website gamesindustry.biz. “The interest has vastly exceeded even what I laid out as our best-case scenario for the announcement of the company,” he says. “It’s thrown us for a loop as far as what the ceiling for all this might be because I was expecting dozens of signups, and instead got thousands.”
Hook Champ is a logical starting point for the company, a game Hodapp championed in Touch Arcade’s early years and one its developer thought was beyond saving. The rest of the first wave of games has been tightly curated, if not for their profile or success at the time then for how important they have become since release. There’s Gasketball, co-developed by Greg Wohlwend, better known these days for the likes of Ridiculous Fishing, Tumbleseed and the briefly worldconquering Threes. Before he shot to fame with Monument Valley and then
Florence, Ken Wong made Hackycat, a ‘dork sport’ in which you play keepy-ups with kittens. Incoboto was made by Fluttermind, a developer whose YouTube channel has 26 subscribers. Designed by
Fable co-creator Dene Carter, it was nominated for a Bafta.
This is where Hodapp comes in, using that decade of experience at the reporting coalface to, if all goes to plan, assemble a growing library of lost, forgotten or overlooked App Store classics. GameClub will not undo the appocalypse entirely, but it can at least put some of it right. In doing so, the team hopes, it can also repair the image of mobile gaming, which after such a bright start has come to embody the very worst the medium has to offer. That may not be true, per se, but it is certainly the perception, and by adhering to strict criteria – it must be a paid-for game, have aged well, and have either been successful at the time or have historical importance today – perhaps GameClub can put that right, one loving, hand-made restoration at a time.
“It kills me seeing people just have this blanket attitude of, ‘Well, all mobile games are just shit,’ or at best concede that, like, only one per cent of mobile games are good,” Hodapp says. “But when you look at the numbers of that, there have been so many games released that if you consider one per cent of mobile games to be the ‘good’ ones, that means there are more good mobile games than there are games in the entirety of the PlayStation 2 game library. What we’re excited to raise awareness of is the fact that mobile games can have a beginning, a middle and an end; that really great sense of accomplishment when the credits roll, and all that stuff. Mobile doesn’t have to be what most people know it as, which is these games that are intentionally designed to just be played forever. That’s not the way things have to be.”
“Mobile games can have a beginning, a middle and an end; that really great sense of accomplishment”