In all earnestness, I do not believe there is a more significant example of why mobile games are the way they are now than this. There are several things that factor into it—the success of Clash of Clans and the addictive nature of Flappy Bird; the fact that the law allowed the unwashed, genital-shaped homunculuses posing as humans at King to trademark a single word from the English dictionary and get away with it; the failure many big-name developers ran into trying to translate some of their biggest IPs onto a relatively new platform with an eager audience; I could go on. Among this trash heap of inevitable nostalgia serving as blinds stands Infinity Blade and its two successors. A veritable trilogy of Fantasy epics that took advantage of the hardware instead of trying to accommodate for it, there's a good reason one of the three games in this series was legendary enough to earn a coveted 10/10 from IGN.

At least, in theory.

In all honesty, I have never played any of these games. I know of their status and the nostalgia that many have for them. But even if I wanted to, a roadblock stands in the way: all three games were delisted in 2018. So what? Why don't I just emulate them?

You can't. Perhaps that's putting it into layman's terms; you probably can, but the reason I've never heard of anyone doing it is probably the same reason PS4 emulation only made headlines recently. If you want to, it might be within reach, but with such difficulty that it'd probably be best to avoid it. And this is nothing to say of the fact that, even if you manage to set something like that up, it's likely that it's not something that'll even work out the way you want it to. I'm putting this here just so nobody writes a comment that begins with "Actually,", but I swear to god, I've never seen a single person talk about emulating an iPhone game.

If the game were on Android, this would probably be a different story. Old Android games do have their own fair share of quirks that can make emulating them a pain, but it's been proven that there's a workaround for even the most stubborn of APKs. Spoiler alert: all three of these games are/were Apple exclusive.

Here you have this actual fossil. Maybe it doesn't have as much value as it did back then in our current market, but that's the thing about old games: even if flawed, they help you appreciate the new. Just recently, I turned my Xbox One on for the first time in almost a year to play a game on it, and it was for a game on the Xbox 360 that was made backward compatible. I wound up playing that game, the first Saints Row, Grand Theft Auto IV, and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, and I had somewhat of a good time. Dated in a few ways, timeless in others, kept in between both camps is an appreciation for what I'm able to have now. In a word, it's history. If I hooked up my Xbox to find that ninety percent of the backward-compatible games I bought on there couldn't be played, and that the remaining physical copies of them had mysteriously disintegrated, my perception of Xbox as a brand would suffer significantly. It's not even that it helps brand recognition all that much; if you treat gaming as fast-food, you're more likely to have less regard and appreciation for what it does best.

Apple's decision to lock everything down lest you tinker with everything they've given you behind their backs is utterly dystopic for a multitude of reasons, and that's why I've never had much loyalty for the slop they keep pumping out. But ultimately, it's this that puts a nail in the coffin: they do nothing to preserve their back catalog. Say what you will about the botched ports of games before the iPhone came along; even the jankiest JME games can be played today. Unless you're willing to pay exorbitant fees to play ten-to-twelve-year-old games on devices that have them pre-installed, you just can't play games like Infinity Blade nowadays, and the medium of video games is worse off for it.