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Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

56 points by diasks2 ↗ HN
I developed a game called "Putter King Adventure Golf" for iOS and Android back in the 2010s. It's long since disappeared from the app stores, but my son recently asked if he could play it, which got me thinking about whether it might be recoverable.

I'm wondering if there's any way to find a copy of it somewhere on the web (I assume it was probably pirated at some point during its lifetime). And if I could find it, what would be the best approach to get it running again?

Has anyone here successfully recovered and revived their old mobile apps? I'd appreciate any suggestions on:

* Where to look for archived APKs or IPAs * How to sideload/run old mobile apps on modern devices * Whether emulators might be a viable option

14 comments

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fastball
Where did the source code go?

I have all the code from dumb little games I made (and never released) from almost 20 years ago.

jimkleiber
I'm not sure where to find the APKs/IPAs, but once you do, I wonder if using Claude Code or some other LLM tools could help you update the app (or reverse engineer) for modern OS versions. It's something that I've been thinking to do for my 2012 obsoleted microjournaling app.
mclau157
The Tiger Woods PGA Tour game on IPhone in the 2010s was a full fledged PGA tour game with fun entirely 3D golf courses and a full career of tournaments and points to earn and spend, I consider the best full 3D game ever on IPhone and spent many hours playing it
r0ckarong
You can use Android Studio (or other virtualization / emulation) to set up an older version of Android and then you use one of the various sites that "archive" games:

https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/past-releases/... https://www.mobygames.com/game/54420/putter-king-adventure-g...

I've used Bluestacks to play the entire somewhat recent Monkey Island game on PC because I could not be bothered to play it on my phone but I have no idea how far back their versions go.

pikuseru
How about making a new game with help from your son (even if it’s ideas) and making some new memories? ;-)

The problem I found is that a lot of the stuff I made is tied to the hardware, OS and SDKs I used to make and run it (especially PalmOS and J2ME stuff - although Apple is just as bad.)

Luckily I’ve been able to find an emulator called Cloudpilot Emu to run some of my old PalmOS games in the browser.

I think if I was doing a game now and wanted to be able to look back on it in 10 to 20 years time I’d be doing it in C with SDL or JavaScript - although you’re betting on those being around. Or at least some virtual machine / runtime that could be ported to some new OS / platform.

juris
if you do find an .apk and didn't obfuscate it with proguard (I can't remember if proguard ran default in the release pipeline in Eclipse ADT...which...ew) you can use jadx to decompile your .apk and recover the structure of your source code!

https://github.com/skylot/jadx

claudiulodro
As far as playing it, one of my kids uses BlueStacks[1] a lot to play old/beta/abandoned mobile games. It's like an emulator that lets you run mobile APKs on PC. That would be way easier than trying to find an old phone and actually playing it on a mobile device.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks