Although the game left the Apple App Store five years ago, an anonymous modder ported it to PC, so it’s not lost to the digital graveyard!

Infinity Blade was released on iOS in 2010, and the action RPG was fun. It was an easy to play, visually decent looking game and one of the most impressive creations of the era. It was the fastest growing app on the App Store and a huge success. But time has passed, and Epic Games removed it from the App Store in 2018, leaving a long-standing but unaddressed problem to rear its ugly head. Unless you had an old phone on which you downloaded the app, Infinity Blade was essentially lost.

However, a fan port has popped up on the Infinity Blade subreddit, which even tweaks the textures, adds dynamic shadows to the game, and doesn’t miss out on hotkeys and keybind support. The port also recently received Proton support, making it playable on the Steam Deck, which is fitting since Valve’s portable PC is also… well, a portable platform. The modder created the port to preserve lost media, which is especially important for mobile titles (where archiving is less common and new phones are released much faster; unlike consoles, where re-releases of older titles are less common).

However, Epic Games may request the removal of the Infinity Blade PC port from the Internet Archive, although we rarely hear about this from Tim Sweeney’s company. Epic Games is not on the same level as Nintendo, a Japanese company that usually waits until a fan project is picked up by the press before pulling out the lawyer card.

Game preservation is not to be condemned, and it is something that Nightdive Studios specializes in with its Kex engine, which the studio has also used to port several old games to modern platforms (e.g. Shadow Man Remastered).

Source: PCGamer, Internet Archive