SkyFighters developer and why you can't buy the games any more

Donald Hill, Jr., was the driving force behind the Skyfighters game and the other games referenced in this wiki. While Don did get help from others with some of the graphics and perhaps a few minor aspects of the games, for the most part he was a one-man-band.

Don passed away in early 2009, very shortly after "Sop vs. Tri" for the iPhone was released. Initially, his family continued to sell licenses for OSX SF1945 and SF1918 through the donsgames.com web site, and "Sop vs. Tri" via the iOS app store after Don's death. However, the release of Mac OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" later in 2009 was incompatible with both OSX SF 1945 and SF1918. The games would crash on startup.

When contacted about the problem, Don's family immediately stopped selling licenses for the two Mac OS games. A SkyFighters player with the call sign of "Cyril", who had some Mac development experience, looked at the crash logs and determined the problem was with loading graphics. He found that converting graphic texture files for the games from JPEG to PNG format resolved the problem (at least for OSX SF 1945; while he stated the same procedure should fix SF1918 as well, other players were unable to make it work).

Players contacted Don's family again, providing them with this information and asking if there was any plan to sell or transfer the game code to another company/developer so they could be fixed and continue to be used. Don's family responded with a polite but firm "The games are broken, we're not selling them any more, please don't contact us about them." They also refused further requests to sell license keys to users who were aware of the problem but either planned to use the workaround or confirmed they knew they could not use the game beyond OS 10.5.

As a result, existing license holders have been able to continue using OSX SF 1945 on later releases, up to and including Mac OS 10.11 "El Capitan", by replacing the texture files as mentioned above. As there is no longer a way to buy new license keys, there's no way for new players to discover and play the game (other than in the 5 minute "demo mode"). As SF1918 did not respond to the same workaround, the game had a very short lifespan. A similar fate befell "Sop vs. Tri", as once the next iOS version was released there was no one to verify to Apple the game still worked and it was pulled from the iOS App Store.

The donsgames.com web site disappeared about a year after Don's death, after the domain registration expired. The domain name fell into the hands of a domain camper for a while, and when last checked seemed to be owned by the GoDaddy domain registration service.