The Putter King Chronicles (Part 5 of 5)
Full circle
This is part 5 of a 5-part series.
Part 1: Hope · Part 2: Hustle · Part 3: Crisis · Part 4: Transformation · Part 5: Full circle
Years had passed. I'd changed careers, learned to code, had kids. The person who incorporated a miniature golf company in Tokyo felt like someone I'd read about rather than someone I'd been.
Then my son asked: "Can I play your game?"
He'd heard the stories. The mascot costume at Nikko. The scavenger hunt. The Australian who broke a Guinness record. And now he wanted to see the thing itself, the game that started all of it.
I went looking for it. I knew the iOS version would be a long shot, unless a phone from ten years ago still had it installed and untouched. Android, I wasn’t so sure. Putter King Adventure Golf, the game Tasty Poison Games had finally built after one developer couldn't deliver and another took the money and turned threatening, had itself disappeared.
A phone game from 2011 had no reason to still exist anywhere. But my son had asked, and I wanted to find it.
I posted on Hacker News. Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?"
I explained that I'd developed a game called Putter King Adventure Golf, that my son had recently asked if he could play it, and that it had gotten me thinking about whether it might be recoverable. A small question. The kind that scrolls off the front page by lunch.
Fifty comments.
Strangers offering concrete suggestions. A few people shared their own experiences of digital loss, but mostly it was practical help. Links, tools, workarounds. The thread became something I hadn't expected: a small crowd of people who didn't know me, trying to solve a problem that wasn't theirs.
I found an Android version of your game on 4pda, a Russian forum about devices and apps.
The Internet Archive already has some emulation support. If you're willing to transfer the copyright for $1, I'm happy to facilitate so it has a permanent home.
I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it.
How about making a new game with help from your son and making some new memories?
Someone tracked down a copy on a Russian forum. A few people shared their own stories of lost code and vanished projects. The warmth of the thread came less from shared grief and more from practical generosity, strangers spending their time to help a father recover something small.
Then Brandon Galbraith showed up.
He worked with the Internet Archive, the digital library that preserves the web one snapshot at a time. He saw the thread, found an APK, and archived it*. A nice gesture he didn't need to do.
My mom had an old iPhone.
One of the early ones, the kind I'd been carrying when the idea first hit me on the Yamanote line. She'd kept it in a drawer the way parents keep things, not because they're useful but because they're connected to a time and a person they don't want to forget.
My dad brought it with him on a recent trip to visit. I held the power button, and waited. The screen lit up with that old Apple logo, slow and deliberate, like a machine remembering how to be itself.
The home screen loaded. Old icons, old wallpaper, old everything. And there, in a folder labeled "Games," was Putter King Adventure Golf.
I tapped it. The splash screen appeared. Patrick's mascot, the little character with the crown and the putter, grinning that earnest grin. The menu loaded. The holes were all there. The physics worked. The ball rolled through ramps and past windmills exactly the way I'd drawn it in Google SketchUp in a different life.
A literal time capsule. A physical object containing a preserved moment from 2011, playable on a screen the size of a playing card.
My kids found me playing it.
"What's that?"
"A game I made. A long time ago."
I handed them the phone. They took turns putting. They laughed at the Sumo hole and got frustrated when the ball flew off on the Grand Canyon hole.
Watching them was its own kind of archaeology. These children, who didn't exist when I designed these holes, playing a game that was older than they were, on a phone that was older than they were, in a house that was nowhere near the apartment in Tochigi or the train between Osaki and Kanda.
"This is actually fun," my son said, with the tone of someone who hadn't expected it to be.
"Thanks," I said. "I think."
They played for an hour. Maybe longer. They were doing exactly what I'd wanted someone to do fourteen years ago: having fun with something I'd made.
The next morning, the phone was dead.
The battery had swelled overnight, that thing old lithium-ion batteries do when they've been stored too long, expanding like a slow breath that never exhales. The screen wouldn't light up. The home button did nothing. The phone that had been a time capsule the day before was now just a small rectangle of glass and metal.
Luckily my dad never met a project too hard. And by the end of the week he had swapped out the battery and the kids were playing it again.
In the years between making Putter King and my son's question, I'd built a narrative in my head about the project. A cautionary tale. The failed developers, the lost money, the countertop conversations with my dad. The app that barely sold. The marketing campaign that didn't move units. A story about youthful ambition meeting adult reality.
That narrative was true. But it wasn't complete.
Because here, fourteen years later, the thing I'd built was preserved in a library, remembered by strangers, and played by children who hadn't been born when I designed it. The mascot Patrick drew still grinned from a splash screen. The holes I sketched on the Yamanote line still worked, the physics still rolled, the windmill still spun.
I'd spent years calling it a failure, but I'd been measuring the wrong thing.
I still probably have the notebook somewhere. The Moleskine full of hole designs and business plans and the handwriting of a younger person who believed the world was waiting for a miniature golf game.
Maybe it was. Just not in the way he expected.
The notebook that started with franchise blueprints became app designs. The app designs became scavenger hunt tasks. The scavenger hunt taught me that the best things I'd build wouldn't fit in a spreadsheet. And when the app disappeared from the storefronts and the franchise never materialized, the notebook filled with something else entirely: code. The beginning of a different kind of building.
I spent years asking whether Putter King worked. I should have been asking what it became.
It's the reason I learned to build things myself. A community of strangers found meaning in something absurd because of it. A person I never met preserved it in a library that will outlast us both. And my son asked to play it, and my kids spent an afternoon laughing at a ball flying off a ramp on a phone older than they were.
The Yamanote line makes a loop. You always end up back where you started.
But sometimes, when you come back around, your son is sitting next to you. And he's playing the game you drew in the notebook. And for one afternoon, before the battery dies, everything you built is exactly enough.
This is part 5 of a 5-part series.
Part 1: Hope · Part 2: Hustle · Part 3: Crisis · Part 4: Transformation · Part 5: Full circle