Clickwheel Games

About

Click Wheel games were games you could play on your iPod. These games were unique in that they are not able to be played on devices other than iPods. There were pre-installed games, and then there were extra games that could be bought and installed from the Click Wheel games store found within iTunes. The Click Wheel games store was closed in 2011, thus preventing any new purchases of these games.Most of these extra (not pre-installed) game files have been lost to time, and this page serves to help give the current status of what is lost and what is found. It also list what games have been cracked. Back in (date required) a group of iPod Modders successfully cracked a portion of the available click wheel games that were able to be played with the use of a custom version 1.2 firmware for the 5th and 5.5 generation iPod Video.

Any users who have the original email and copies for games they may have bought can still sign them within iTunes and sync them to any compatible iPods. Games can also be extracted from iPods using the restore purchases function when an iPod with the game files is plugged in. Unfortunately, only versions of iTunes 12 that are below 12.7 will still allow users to add new authorizations for game owning accounts as older versions no longer allow use of the iTunes store. Users can bypass the 5 machine authing limit with use of the iCrack Method.

It is currently not fully known how the original 20 games were cracked for the iPod Video and efforts are ongoing to replicate the cracked firmware's functionality. As of writing this Click Wheel games rely on having game files present along with the file named IC-Info.sidb which can be found inside the hidden folder iPod_Control/iTunes found in any iPod. When attempting to run the games the serial number of the iPod is checked (and sometimes a currently unknown second value). A full disc clone alongside a rom serial swap has been proven to allow games signed on one iPod to work on another, but rom editing is highly advised against due to the current unstable state of it and the ability to brick an iPod instead of writing data.

At the end of this wiki entry are some resources for further reading and watching.