u/TGS963

Prince of Persia: Time Run, the lost 2015 iOS game, is playable again after 10+ years.

We actually found it. After years of this being a dead end for anyone who went looking, Prince of Persia: Time Run runs again.

Quick background for anyone who's never heard of it. Time Run was an endless runner Ubisoft soft launched on the iOS App Store in Australia and New Zealand back in October 2015. Wall running, a time rewind mechanic, flying carpet sections, basically a Prince of Persia coat of paint on a runner. It got a brief wider release and then Ubisoft pulled the plug on May 24, 2016 and yanked it from the store. Under seven months from launch to shutdown. Because it only ever shipped on iOS, once it left the App Store it was just gone. No physical copy, no re-release, nothing. If you didn't have it installed or sitting in a backup, that was it.

A bunch of us have been chasing it since around 2020 with nothing to show for it. The break came this year when u/Persian_of_Interest tracked down Techzamazing, a YouTuber who had added the game to his Apple account while it was still live, and who was willing to work with us to get it back.

That got us a decrypted IPA. Which then refused to launch. The game leans on old SDK calls that modern iOS doesn't answer the same way anymore, so it crashed on startup, and under PlayCover on Apple Silicon the background rendered as a black void. We wrote a few small dynamic libraries to patch around each problem. One for the launch crash, one to kill the dead Game Center and StoreKit sign in prompts, and one to fix the PlayCover graphics. Full writeup of what each fix does is on GitHub: (Link)

So here's where things stand:

• Anyone with an iPhone or an Apple Silicon Mac (through PlayCover) can play it now.
• Patched IPAs and the decrypted original are up on the Internet Archive: (Link)
• Prefer to build your own instead of trusting a random IPA? The archive has the clean decrypted base, and the GitHub scripts let you generate the patches yourself.
• There are optional "everything unlocked" builds too. A lot of the skins were locked behind a Facebook invite link that's been dead for years, so this is the only way to actually see them now.

Heads up: the game was never finished, so there's no proper ending. All the released levels are playable though, as far as we could test.

Huge thanks to u/gpranav25, u/Clovergruff64, u/Persian_of_Interest, and Techzamazing for making this happen. Next we'd love to get it running on other platforms, so if you know the engine or want to help, say so.