Preserving the history of games on iOS has been unlike any other platform out there. From even the earliest consoles and computers there’s always original hardware and original game cartridges that you can track down and play in physical form, and there’s also no shortage of emulators for basically any platform you can think of that allow you to play classic games digitally. So if a gamer who didn’t grow up in the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s wanted to go back and see the roots of the hobby they so enjoyed, it’s not especially difficult to do so. With iOS games that’s just not the case. Over the years Apple’s new hardware revisions and especially the new operating system revisions have wreaked havoc on developers, requiring near-constant maintenance to keep games and apps running properly through all those revisions.
With the race-to-the-bottom pricing of mobile software it often doesn’t make any sort of sense for a developer to go out of their way to make sometimes massive changes to an app they sold for a buck or two many years back just to keep it alive and kicking in today’s iOS landscape. And outside of hanging on to a bunch of older iOS devices running various old versions of software, or maintaining some sort of jailbreak device that can access a bunch of games that are no longer on the App Store, there’s no real easy or official way for your average person to be able to experience many of the great gam...