Shooting zombies? There's an app for that!
*Games (and similar apps) that can be played on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. A subset of
Mobile Phone Games.
Here divided into three categories:
- Relatively new games that were made for the smartphones, taking advantage of their interface.
- Really old games that have made a comeback on the smartphones.
- Games originally designed for an entirely different system that are released in full or as a mini-version for iPhone. Quality varies wildly throughout this category: on one end of the spectrum, there's Ghost Trick, which looks and plays beautifully across all "i" devices. And then there's that one release.
This index is for the iPhone platform only, because iOS users want to be able to use it to find games they can play. A game must have an iPhone/iOS version to belong on this list. Games that are only or also for Android belong on
Android Games. For games on other smartphone systems, please create an index for that platform and replace this message with a link to the new index.
Most iOS devices (at least after the second generation iPod touch) share several characteristics: the most important are the accelerometer/tilt sensor and the touch screen. Many games for the platform are designed to use the accelerometer as a primary control. For example, driving games such as
Pole Position Remix often have the player tilt the entire unit in lieu of providing a steering wheel, and other games use it to control an object's movement around the screen, such as a marble in a maze. The touchscreen also makes games involving tracing pathways (similar to many
Nintendo DS games) possible alongside old-school PDA tap-and-drag games. The system's API (Cocoa Touch) is similar but not identical to the Cocoa toolkit used on
Mac OSX, and uses the same XCode environment as Mac developers use.
Apple traditionally has somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the gaming community, going back to the first
Mac and Steve Jobs' insistence that it be treated as a
serious business machine. Though the Mac game market flourished in spite of Apple's ambivalence, games like
Marathon and
Glider that should have been world-shaking... weren't. For years, Apple's half-assed
Pippin console was their only real attempt to court the game market...until the second generation iPod Touch came out. At this point, Apple decided to start leveraging the accelerometers they'd built into late-model MacBooks, which people had subsequently hacked into game controllers. Apple gave the Touch, followed by the next generation of iPhone, similar accelerometers, and positioned the Touch explicitly as a gaming system. Unrestricted by the licensing and hardware barriers of the
Nintendo DS and
Playstation Portable, game developers (especially small ones) responded in droves, making an Apple platform a serious contender in the gaming world for the first time since the
Apple II line wound down.
What role, if any, iOS gaming will play in the next generation of console wars is unclear. Whether casual gamers play iOS (or other smartphone games) exclusively or overlap with other, already-identified groups —
or if casual players transition to console games after becoming addicted via an iOS port or mini-game — is the major question of the smartphone gaming market. With the release of the third-generation iPad and improvements in graphics across the entire "i"-product line, some publishers have begun testing the market for "serious games" via the App Store (
The World Ends with You being one prominent example). Apple now
spotlights these releases, in a bit of historical irony, but whether or not i-gaming makes you a "gamer" is
a question beyond the scope of TVTropes.
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New Full Games
Retro Games
Games With Port or Mini-Version for i Phone
Notable iOS Game Makers
