Ever since GameClub was announced in March of last year, it’s been a total blast seeing what types of games have been added to the service. It’s not surprising that many of their biggest titles have hit close to home, as our former Editor in Chief Eli Hodapp has been instrumental in bringing specific games to GameClub. It’s why you see more than one of our Game of the Year picks as well as massive fan-favorites from our community, like Rocketcat’s Hook Champ series. And so it’s only natural that this week’s new release is Mikey Shorts. If you haven’t been hanging around TouchArcade for the better part of a decade or so, let me explain.

Mikey Shorts was a game that was literally born on the TouchArcade forums. Both Mike Meade and Mike Gaughen were members of our community and were avid Hook Champ players back in the day. They both had an affinity for speed running the game, and through chit chatting while beta testing Hook Champ’s follow-up Super QuickHook, they also discovered they both had a desire to create a game of their own. It just so happened that Gaughen could code a little bit, and Meade was pretty handy with creating pixel art and designing levels, so they put their talents together and over the next year and a half or so created Mikey Shorts, a platforming game designed with speedrunning in mind.

So you see, everything came full circle. Massive TouchArcade community favorite Hook Champ was the very first game announced for GameClub last year, and now another massive fan-favorite that was a direct product of the love for Hook Champ has now joined GameClub as well. It’s a beautiful thing. Both of these games would have been lost forever had GameClub not stepped in, but instead they have been resurrected with modern features, and not only can existing fans get to relive games they loved all those years ago but brand new players who maybe weren’t around during those Golden Years of mobile gaming can have a chance to see how phenomenal a game like Mikey Shorts is.

As always with any games in the GameClub library, if you owned Mikey Shorts previously you can get the newly updated version for free even if you’re not a subscriber, and if not you can still check out a limited version of the game for free before deciding if you want to subscribe to GameClub or not. I feel like I say this a lot, but Mikey Shorts is one of my all-time favorites, and I absolutely adore the story of how it came to be. I couldn’t be happier to be zipping around its expertly-designed levels once again, and I suggest you do the same. If you need to learn more, check out our original Mikey Shorts review from 2012 or Shaun’s in-depth look back at the game in this Classic Reload from 2017.