Today I finally made the difficult decision to remove Chopper and Chopper 2, and all of my other old apps from the iOS and Mac App Stores. The only game I’ll be supporting and keeping available is The Blockheads, which won’t be going away any time soon. And of course my new game Ambience is on the horizon.

Chopper was my first released game, launched for the Mac in 2003, and then for iPhone when the App Store went live in July 2008. Over the past 13 years it has been played by millions of people, been featured multiple times by Apple and the tech press, and totally transformed my life. Chopper for Mac got me off the unemployment benefit by helping to secure me my first software development job. A few years later, Chopper for iPhone allowed me to quit my day job and work on my own games as an indie developer, which I’ve now been doing for near on a decade since.

But for some time now Chopper, Chopper 2, and all of my other older games and apps have been left without updates, and have slowly faded. More and more things have stopped working correctly, so I no longer feel the experience offered to customers is one that I am proud of. I investigated what it would take to bring Chopper 2 up to date, and it would be a major job. Given the potential number of sales and number of current players, my time is better spent elsewhere. I’ve moved on from Chopper and Chopper 2, and so has the landscape of the App Store.

Many thanks to everyone who purchased and played Chopper and Chopper 2 over the years. And also thanks to everyone who played or used some of my smaller experiments like DuckDuckDuck, Sand Pictures and Fluid Noise Generator.

I’m very much looking forward to continuing to work on Ambience and The Blockheads, there’s some exciting stuff ahead.