EA shuts down Flight Control, Real Racing and other early mobile game hits

This month Electronic Arts abruptly ceased supporting and selling 23 of its older mobile games, including several notable early hits like Flight Control and the original Real Racing.

Games like these may seem ancient in from the perspective of a mobile game developer -- Firemint released them both in 2009, a year after the Apple App Store launched -- but as TouchArcade points out, EA's decision to remove them from the various app stores ensures it will be much more difficult for game designers and historians to study these early success stories.

Back in 2009, the fact that Firemint sold over 700,000 copies of Flight Control in less than two months on the market (it eventually went on to sell millions) was a big deal.

In a 2010 conversation with Gamasutra, Firemint's Alexandra Peters suggested Flight Control was one of the first "casual" games for mobile that was both commercially successful and well-regarded by the game development community.

That success spurred studio to pour what (at the time) it believed to be "the biggest development budget ever for an iPhone game" into what would become Real Racing, and the success of both titles and their spinoffs drove EA to acquire Firemint in 2011.