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

56 points by diasks2 266 days ago | 47 comments

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

torunar 266 days ago |

I found an Android version of your game on 4pda, Russian forum about devices and apps: https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=290300#entry102680...

sandreas 265 days ago | |

Amazing! Now you need to find a device that can still run it :-)

toomuchtodo 265 days ago | | |

The Internet Archive already has some emulation support, perhaps Android support is needed? If OP is willing to transfer the copyright to the Archive for $1, I'm happy to facilitate so it has a permanent home.

https://archive.org/details/howtodoupload

(i have archived the APK in Wayback just in case the source in this thread disappears)

vintermann 265 days ago | | |

Probably safest to run it in an emulator with no internet access, given where it was found.

ok123456 265 days ago | | |

jadx can probably disassemble it pretty thoroughly. I think you can give it the APK directly, or just unzip it and give it the classes.dex.

Assuming everything goes smoothly, you could potentially resurrect a compilable project in about a man-week, or two, or three...

ImPrajyoth 265 days ago | | |

Emulator with gen ai tool! That's it! Sanitize it then fix.

r0ckarong 265 days ago |

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.

diasks2 265 days ago | |

Thanks! Looking into this.

I found the apk file and I played around with Android Studio today but was having trouble getting the Nexus device with KittyKat or Lollipop to not crash when trying to open the device. Will keep trying different options.

RobRivera 265 days ago | | |

Based Bluestacks

Podrod 265 days ago | |

Why didn't you just play the PC version of Return to Monkey Island?

0cf8612b2e1e 265 days ago | | |

Available on GOG, DRM free, for years now.

mkl 265 days ago |

Try searching this:

  "Putter King Adventure Golf" "apk"

It brings up a few possibilities, many in other languages. Possibly these, but I haven't actually downloaded it and they seem a bit dodgy:

https://www.dertz.in/games/download-Putter-King-Adventure-Go...

https://apkpure.com/cn/putter-king/com.putterkingllc.putterk...

fastball 265 days ago |

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.

pikuseru 265 days ago |

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.

diasks2 265 days ago | |

Yeah! We did that yesterday. It was a lot of fun: https://go-monkey.vercel.app/

It was what prompted him to ask about this game.

mclau157 265 days ago |

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

fidotron 265 days ago | |

That game was ahead of its time. My team worked on the post launch updates/ports of it, and because it was well optimized for the original dev target it was actually a bit of a pain! (The shadows especially).

It was working on that which caused us to find a certain SoC supplier saying different things to different manufacturers.

jmkni 265 days ago |

Considering the website is on your Github, are you sure the game code isn't there too in a private repo? https://github.com/diasks2/putterking

claudiulodro 265 days ago |

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

juris 265 days ago |

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

jimkleiber 265 days ago |

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.

reactordev 265 days ago | |

They could, but then so can a lot of tools. At least with Android, it’s still Java so you can just emulate the runtime and run the app. To upgrade, just decompile the Java bytecode back into something editable.

I had this same issue with one of my “long lost” games only, it wasn’t a mobile game but a console game, so Ghidra was my only hope.