I hate the munchkins franchise but between ogre, car wars, illuminati, etc.
Also all those ziplock game companies like task force pocket games
Gamma world
Villians and vigilantes
Iron crown enterprises stuff
gurps, etc.
Ummm…they’re decades-old print games. Why would they be available as apps in the first place?
Those types of games are very often made into apps. I mean, that’s what Solitaire is, after all. And even games still under copyright will have official releases, like Uno, Scrabble, Monopoly, whatever.
Especially since they are apparently still making new games, like the Harry Potter Munchkin game. It seems weird they wouldn’t have a digital version. They have an unboxing video on their website, which is very much a modern thing.
They even have PDF versions of their games that they give out for free. Or even paid digital documents.
It’s a bit weird they’ve not gone into even one app.
Not exactly your point but wasn’t Gamma World TSR?
The only Steve Jackson computer game I can think of off the top of my head is Autoduel (a Car Wars-based adventure/shoot-em-up hybrid of some sort), which was never made for newer computers. There might have been a computer version of Ogre as well, but I’m not 100% sure.
As for the availability of SJG titles online, check out Warehouse 23.
Yes, it was, though, to be fair, the OP did say “and other classics.” The titles that the OP lists are a mix of SJG titles, and ones from other companies.
To BigT’s point about “Those types of games are very often made into apps” – the games that were listed in the OP are a mix of board / miniature games (like OGRE) and role-playing games. I suspect that the former would be a lot easier (and less expensive) to make into apps than the latter would be.
However, I’ll give a couple of WAGs as to why not:
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Intellectual property ownership. Particularly for games from companies that went out of business, or changed hands, ownership of the games themselves may be murky.
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Lack of demand / not enough interest. Relatively few people (in the absolute) are going to remember a second-tier game from 30 or 40 years ago, and I can imagine that the game companies which own those games don’t think that enough people would buy the app versions to justify the programming costs. Publishing PDFs is relatively cheap; writing new code for an app (and keeping it updated as Apple and Samsung update their OSes) is much more expensive.
Even so…I agree, I’m surprised that there isn’t a Munchkin app. 
I wouldn’t mind Ogre and some Avalon Hill games.
FWIW, there’s an official port of OGRE as a computer game for the PC and Mac.
Thanks for the info! I played that game a lot as a kid.
As did I (well, as a teenager, anyway).
Steve Jackson also did a full restage of the OGRE board game a few years ago, including a Kickstarter for a massive boxed set (including 3D Ogres); I got that boxed set, which was something like a year-and-a-half delayed in arriving, due to various production issues.
They’re about to launch a Kickstarter for a similar reboot of Car Wars, as well.
They did make an app for The Fantasy Trip, which was a fantasy game Steve Jackson made.
https://thefantasytrip.game/products/accessories/tft-helper/
I did the Kickstarter for TFT and got the app to go along with the PDFs.
ICE was mostly known for their Middle-Earth Roleplaying stuff, which they no longer have the license to. It appears the company still exists in some form, and still produces the Rolemaster system. Looks like you can get them as PDFs, which is probably as close to an “app” as you’re going to get for them.
Relatively ordinary card games are not that difficult to make into to an app, since you basically just have the app show the cards. They’re still not trivial since the rules of the card game need to be enforced by the application, which takes interpretation and programming. Less ordinary card games are harder to computerize, like Fluxx where the game rules constantly change based on cards that are in play, or games that involve guessing and clues. In any case, they’re not just a matter of ‘take this old card game and put it on the app store’, there’s a significant amount of skilled work to make a functional video game.
Board games are also possible to adapt to card games, but are an even bigger undertaking because their rules are usually vastly more complicated, especially wargame and adventure type games. They’re a very niche market that are even more expensive to properly make into an app, and that’s if you’re just making them for a player to play against a player; adding AI so that they’re single player games is even more work. Some of the old Avalon Hill board games have computer versions, but even converting those into an app is a significant undertaking.
There are a variety of CRPGS based on pen and paper games, but they’re mostly not just an app, and each one is a significant undertaking. They tend to be one or a small number of adventures with some preset or mostly preset characters and not an open-ended game system like Rolemaster or Gamma World. Neverwinter nights ended up being a reasonable open ended conversion of one version of D&D into a CRPG, but it was a large project and required a huge amount of (free) fan labor to get to that point. Turning ‘Gamma World’ into an app is likely to cost a huge amount of moeny for something that doesn’t interest people. And a number of old gaming systems would have copyright or trademark issues at this point, Like Middle-Earth Roleplaying which no longer has the Tolkein license.
Sorcery! was made into a game on iOS.
Munchkin: Quacked Quest is a video game version of Munchkin that was recently released. There’s no mobile version of it (yet) though.
Unboxing videos and PDF copies of the rulebooks might be modern, but they don’t require any particular skillset to make. Anyone could make either of those, and so they might as well.
Computer games, however, do require a skill to make, that most people don’t have. Even though most Steve Jackson games would probably be relatively easy to program (as computer games go), they still probably don’t already have anyone in-house who could do it. They’d have to hire someone just to do that, and it’s a small company. They might not be confident that they’d make enough to justify the cost.