Has iOS been around long enough now to start talking about some of its earlier releases as classics? If so, Redshift’s early 2009 port of their Pocket PC RPG The Quest ($4.99) surely must qualify. The initial release alone offered dozens of hours of exploration, solving quests, navigating treacherous dungeons, and battling deadly creatures. If that wasn’t enough to slake your thirst for adventure, the game also received 16 expansions, each one giving you another 30+ hours of fun. The Quest in its entirety is likely one of the biggest RPGs on the App Store, and it’s just as much fun today as it was several years ago. In short, this is the kind of game that is worth preserving and curating as our young branch of the hobby continues to grow. With that in mind, it’s scary how close we came to losing it recently.
The mobile gaming industry has changed a lot since 2009. Paid games are no longer the lords of the manor, and while even in better days a game’s sales tended to be front-loaded, it’s become even worse as time has passed. There are so many games released on a regular basis, and enough of them worth playing, that iOS gamers are basically trying to drink from a fire hose each week. Games tend to fall off pretty quickly, and without a constant promotional effort, it’s not unusual for older games to stop making up the cost of keeping them around.
For a long time, The Quest kept relevant through the frequent release of expansions. Those were mostly done not by Redshift but by another developer called Zarista Games. Perhaps inevitably, things reached a point where it made more sense for Zarista to work on their own RPGs like the recently-released Omber ($0.99), leaving The Quest to sell on its own legacy. Publisher Chillingo seems to have felt the game and its expansions were no longer earning their keep, and informed Redshift that they would be pulling the games in May of 2015.
Well, it’s July of 2015, and as you can see by checking the App Store, The Quest and its expansions are still there. They’re now published by Redshift, but it’s a proper transfer, so if you bought them from Chillingo, you’ll still own them with Redshift. We’ve heard rumblings of a proper sequel to The Quest for a while, but by the sounds of things, they need to finish their current project before they can really get going on it. This whole mess has left them in a minor pinch, so if you’ve been considering picking up The Quest or any of its expansions, this might be a feel-good time to do it.
If you want more information on the game, I covered it in RPG Reload File 004 just under a year ago. While it often shows its age visually, it’s as compelling to play as it ever was, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to any RPG fan. Hopefully we’ll hear more on The Quest 2 soon, but for now, let’s wipe our collective brows in relief at this particular dodged bullet.
