Apple Discontinues iPod, Mobile Gaming Icon, After 22 Years

Pour one particular out for each and every child who a single-strapped a backpack in center faculty, as they’re probably in mourning currently. With Apple’s discontinuation of the 7th-generation iPod Contact, introduced yesterday, it is formal: the iPod is dead.

Ostensibly, the iPod was a songs machine, meant to digitize song libraries and go listeners away from the limits and galactically better seem top quality of actual physical media. (Regardless of whether such a change was great for the tunes sector is, of training course, another tale.) But over its lots of iterations, the iPod also heralded yet another revolution: that of mobile gaming.

Once on a time, cell gaming consisted of enjoying Brick or Snake on your parents’ dusty Nokia. And guaranteed, adhering to its 2001 start, the iPod—which virtually featured a shoddy port of Brick adhering to the device’s 2001 launch—had a equivalent landscape for a though. Above the upcoming couple a long time, the choices grew, but not by significantly. In 2006, EA released iPod variations of minted classics like Sudoku and Solitaire. Kaplan, the for-financial gain educational behemoth, produced a collection of SAT prep analyze classes (to which I can only say: lol). As opposed to other mobile gaming gadgets of the era, like, say, the Nintendo DS, the iPod was barely revolutionary.

Then came the iPod Touch.

First introduced in 2007, the iPod Contact fully reimagined the iPod’s structure. Relatively than a brick with a wonkily managed track wheel, the iPod Touch appeared a good deal like its modern, the Iphone: modern, rectangular, affixed with a glass contact display that coated its full silhouette. Compared with the Iphone, you couldn’t use an iPod Touch to summon and quickly lose the braveness to dial up your crush from algebra. But if you had a Wifi relationship, you could down load a bunch of online games that’d at the very least distract you throughout algebra.

And some of the games of the period were being really exceptional. Fruit Ninja! Faucet Tap Revenge! Terms with Close friends! Temple Run virtually made, or at minimum greatly popularized, a new style, laying the groundwork for truly wonderful countless runners like Alto’s Odyssey. Personally, I experienced a tender place for Doodle Bounce, a platformer that cast you as an elephant (?) carrying a jetpack. The visuals, stylized to glimpse like a lined paper notebook, are inked in memory. But for me, at the very least, it was also an early introduction to the wider entire world of leaderboards.

Some game titles, top quality apart, went on to become legit cultural behemoths. Angry Birds spawned a characteristic movie, along with crossovers with Star Wars and Transformers, and a gazillion other spin-offs. (My grandmother at the time purchased me an Offended Birds bathtub mat, presuming that, observing as I like online video online games, I should like Indignant Birds, the only movie sport.) The affect was undeniable.

And so, news of the iPod’s loss of life established off a spirited wave of nostalgia in Kotaku’s Slack this afternoon.

Staff editor Lisa Marie Segarra shouted out fairly much all of the online games detailed higher than, and even further pointed to the iPod as a catalyst for the indeniable Candy Crush fad. She also praised the tilt controls that came with some video games, which have been “so modern at the time. Or at the very least it felt like it.”

“What a time to be alive,” extra staff members author Zack Zwiezen. “I truly skip the more mature period of the App Retail outlet. … No doubt we have excellent stuff currently, but I can’t support but extended for those less difficult instances when I drank bogus beer and performed with knock-off lightsaber applications.”

The moments are certainly considerably less very simple. Fairly than the handful of have to-enjoy choices, Apple’s gaming ecosystem is even larger than at any time, as key games—everything from blockbusters like XCOM and Genshin Affect to indie sleeper hits like Sayonara Wild Hearts and Baba is You—make their way to the Application Retail outlet. Apple Arcade, a subscription assistance that grants accessibility to a library of games, is gradually getting an important scouting floor for beneath-the-radar gems. (Quite a few Apple Arcade video games at some point make their way to Nintendo Swap or traditional consoles, exactly where they grow to be ‘legitimized’ in the eyes of the hardcore participant, a thing that goes on to obscure mobile sport origins.)

But every time one of these when-critical gadgets gasps its closing breath, I obtain myself struck at the finality—how everything, no matter its apparent staying ability or cultural influence, is ephemeral, a fleeting second you don’t comprehend was fleeting until eventually it is gone. As they say: Would not it be wonderful to realize you are residing in the good occasions when you’re truly residing in the great situations? I believe so.

Anyway, yeah, RIP to the iPod. You had a fantastic run. You’ve still left a very good legacy. And to genuinely get all mid-2000s: Thnks fr th Mmrs.