Looking Back At The History of iPod Click Wheel Games

thegamer.com:

Pour one out for the iPod Touch: the era of this portable music player is finally over two decades after it began, with Apple’s recent announcement that the iPod Touch would no longer be in production. Aside from music aficionados and discerning audiophiles, music players haven’t really been used by most listeners anymore, with the growing popularity of streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal. Much less thinkable is the idea of ripping (or, well, downloading) songs onto a separate device and listening to them while on the go today.

But way before the death of iPod devices was the demise of yet another Apple gimmick that never did take off: iPod games. These aren’t the iOS games that you can still download off the app store and play on your iPod Touch, but those that make use of the iPod’s most enduring feature: the click wheel. The very first iPod featured Brick, which was essentially Apple’s version of Breakout, as a hidden easter egg—both of which are developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; you would use the click wheel to steer the paddle left and right in Brick. This click wheel feature would be used in future iPod games, with one of the most well-known titles being Vortex, a free game that was included with the iPod Nano and iPod Classic. It’s a Brick clone that makes full, integrated use of the click wheel to swing the paddle around a cylindrical arena filled with smashable bricks.

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Strangely enough, Apple seemed to have some plans for the iPod as the unlikeliest of game consoles in the mid 2000s. Back in 2005, a developer called Coolgorilla created its first game for the iPod, which is a free-to-play quiz game called Rock