u/mussyg

Delisted 2009 promo game, Unity iPhone 1.0.2f4, armv6, no emulator runs it, 32-bit iOS is dead. Reimplemented as C++17/SDL2 for Linux/Windows/Android/iOS. To be precise: not a matching decomp and not a recomp — a new engine, with the decompiled C# as ground truth.

The fun parts: serialized file format v6 has no type trees — field order recovered from the field-name strings in the shipped Mach-O, field widths constraint-solved against invariants (exact object consumption, power-of-two textures, unit normals). 1,354 objects, 0 failures. The write-up covers the method-level fidelity audit and what treating decompiled output as a spec gets wrong.

Full story: https://adamlovattdevops.github.io/relapse-resistance/

Repo (tools + engine only, BYO IPA, alpha): https://github.com/AdamLovattDevOps/relapse-resistance

Some of you will have seen the youtube video about the 15-year hunt for Relapse: Resistance — the official iPhone game Shady Games put out alongside the album in May 2009, where Em fights his way out of Popsomp Hills. It was $2.99, it got pulled from the App Store not long after launch, the one review it got at the time, from The Koalition, called it "literally the worst game I have ever been subjected to in my entire life." and for fifteen years it was lost media until the IPA surfaced on archive.org in 2024.

The catch with the recovery (pun unintended): the game is 32-bit, Apple killed 32-bit apps in iOS 11, and no emulator can run it. The only way to play it has been original hardware on iOS 9 or earlier — old iPhones and iPads that are slowly dying. When the last one goes, so does the game.

So I took it further: tore the IPA down to its raw assets and code, and rebuilt the whole thing as a native port. It now runs on Windows, Linux, Android and (funnily enough) modern iOS. All six levels, original music and sounds, the will power points, the weapon drops, the "TO BE CONTINUED…" ending that never got continued. Even the moonwalk works.

Important: I'm not distributing the game itself — the code, art and music still belong to Shady Games / DS Media Labs. My repo has the tools and the engine only; you grab the IPA from the archive.org upload yourself and the tools rebuild the data on your machine. Fair warning it's alpha and there may be bugs.

Write-up (the full teardown story): https://adamlovattdevops.github.io/relapse-resistance/
Code + downloads: https://github.com/AdamLovattDevOps/relapse-resistance
The documentary that started it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6y-zlXtlg

P.S were there any other shady games I should look at?

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