chapotraphouse

The games people get nostalgic about and remember are determined by a mix of actual quality, how many people played them new, current availability, and whether they're tied to any ongoing franchises.

Everybody remembers the old Mario games because they were actually good, they were the most produced NES carts, Nintendo keeps re-releasing them, and Nintendo keeps making more Mario games which openly advertise 8-bit Mario. A lot fewer people remember The Guardian Legend (which owned btw) because it had a smaller distribution and has no franchise or rereleases and its parent company spends all its time barely managing to market Puyo. Nobody remembers the Adventure Island series, even though there were five thousand of them, because they were just kind of bad. If you go to my personal nostalgia mines of late 90s mac shareware, nobody remembers any of this, because approximately nobody played these, none of the companies stuck around, and it's a pain in the ass to set up the emulators (Bumbler Bee-Luxe is great, Escape Velocity Nova is great and also available outside a horrible mac emulator).

So for old mobile game nostalgia, I think it's going to run into a wall. There's a trillion of them and everybody played different ones, so there's no critical mass for the Tiny Wings nostalgia fandom. They were made by tiny companies, or just one random developer, who eventually abandon them (either because they move on, or because they don't want to have the old version compete against more predatory sequels). And the app stores constantly change standards and require apps to be updated, so the apps eventually stop being listed in the store.