Last night in our deals forum a TouchArcade community member posted that the fantastic Forget-Me-Not (Free) had gone free for… Mysterious reasons. Well, doing a bit more digging revealed that this originally was a last-change fire sale as Nyarlu Labs wasn’t planning on renewing their Apple developer account. As they put it, “hey =) my iOS app store license thing expires on April 10th and i’m not gonna renew it right away, so my games will disappear – download em now if you want to keep them around!"

They continue to explain that the game hasn’t been updated in years, but should still work on everything. The original plan was that the game might return when the “new one" is finished (which hopefully means a sequel). However, at some point between when I mentally bookmarked this to write about and this morning, the following update had been added to the blog post:

update: a lovely friend has offered to help me pay for the license, so the game will be sticking around after all. cool! it’s staying free forever though.. ’tis an old game now and deserves to live out its days in peace <3

We reviewed Forget-Me-Not back in 2011, and aptly describe it as the “magical lovechild of PAC-Man and Rogue. That description still feels spot on today. It’s cool that the game is sticking around, but the larger issue at hand is still sort of a bummer here- As soon as you don’t feel like paying Apple $99 a year for your developer license, all your iOS games disappear. It leaves paying customers out in the cold, but worse yet, blasts a hole in iOS gaming history. Had Forget-Me-Not not been saved, and you randomly heard of it a few months from now, too bad.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if the various jailbreak repositories that iOS game pirates use won’t eventually end up being unintentional museums for classic iOS gaming? It’s a weird thought, but particularly as Apple has moved further and further from abstracting being able to back any individual things up, it’s strangely leaving things like that as the only remaining viable option when it comes to playing iOS “abandonware." …Although, even calling something that came out a few years ago abandonware feels weird. But, I digress.

Consider this a fantastic reminder to download Forget-Me-Not, and to whoever tossed out the Benjamin to keep the game on the App Store for another year, you’re the best.