Games on iOS definitely have a future, but what about their past?

I downloaded a bit of history last night. Do you remember Trism? Trism is a sliding tile puzzler in which you group triangles together. In the first days of the App Store, it was one of the few games that made people think: oh, this could be something. Playing it today, it's still a lot of fun, although the handling is fussy and the UI creaks. That's the point, though: if you're playing Trism today you're after nostalgia as much as anything else, and the fussiness and creakiness are part of the appeal.

The wonderful thing about Trism is that you can still download it at all. It's still there on the App Store. I could not believe it when I saw it. In school my daughter is learning about Mary Anning and dinosaurs, lurking in the earth, waiting to be discovered again. On the sofa at night, here am I, and here is Trism, my very own dinosaur. I've been playing a lot of Apple Arcade this week, and I've been having a wonderful time. I've been transported, as only the best kind of games can transport you. I feel - I think a lot of us feel - a sense of the sheer potential of games again. I feel very good about the future of games on the App Store and Google Play - although I should add that for the last few years I have felt pretty good about it really. What I feel less good about is the App Store's past.

Back in 2012 I helped with a magazine feature about the top 50 iOS games to play. "Three years and hundreds of thousands of apps later, what are the best games on the App Store?" A few months ago - it may have been more like a year or so - I heard that my editors from that time were talking about the piece, and hunting back through the App Store to see how many of those games were still available. I think it was a bit of a bloodbath.

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