Reviving House of the Lost: How We Brought Our 2012 Roguelike Back from the Dead

We shipped House of the Lost in October 2012 and it was one of the first roguelikes on mobile. In 2019 it stopped working with newer version of iOS and was pulled from the store. This post is the story of rebuilding it for modern devices and shipping it again last week.

TLDR: Game preservation takes work, whether by the original dev or the community at large. Mobile is a somewhat special case because most people don't collect old hardware at certain OS versions that can run older games so the code has to be kept up to date. Most of the games that have been removed over the years won't get the rebuild treatment. Mine only did because I couldn't let it go.