The Apple Store Time Machine is a really fun way to revisit four of Apple’s retail stores as they looked the day they opened

Part game, part digital museum, this is a must-have app for fans of Apple and Apple Retail.

“Surprise and delight” is one of the guiding principles of Apple Retail, and I was indeed both surprised and delighted by the launch of a new Mac app by Michael Steeber which lets you revisit four iconic Apple stores in a digital, interactive experience. Called The Apple Store Time Machine, this app is available for free from Steeber’s website, but you can also donate to support his work there. As a former Apple Retail employee, this is a particularly fun app for me, and I think it would be for any Apple fan.

The app works a bit like a first-person shooter video game, only without the shooting part. But if you’re familiar with any first person video game, the controls for moving around the environment will be familiar. Mouse/trackpad to look around, WASD or arrow keys for moving, Shift to run, C to crouch, and E to interact with items. There’s no actual game component though. Instead this acts as a lovingly replicated historic recreation of these Apple Stores: Tysons Corner (the first ever Apple Store), Stanford Shopping Center (one of Apple’s old mini stores), Fifth Avenue (the iconic underground store with a glass cube atop it in New York City), and Infinite Loop (the Apple Store located at Apple’s former main campus at 1 Infinite Loop in California). Incidentally, I visited the Infinite Loop location back when it was known as the Company Store when I spent two weeks in Cupertino in 2007 for training. Somewhere I still have my “I Visited The Mother Ship” tshirt, and this was well before the announcement of Apple Park, which actually looks like a space ship!

Walking virtually through these stores is a really neat experience. It brought back so many memories seeing the software titles that are on the shelves. (Remember buying boxed software in a retail store?) I began my Apple retail career in 2005, and the stores then still had a similar layout to Tyson’s Corner, complete with the white corian counters. Apple Fifth Avenue opened about a year after I started with Apple, and seeing all of the third-party products on the shelves in the app was a fun stroll down memory lane.

There are lots of fun little touches throughout the app. The menus are done in Mac OS X’s original Aqua style, and in the Tyson’s Corner store, you can actually walk up to a G3 iMac and boot up Mac OS X version 10.0!

I first became familiar with Steeber’s work when he was writing about Apple Retail for 9to5Mac. His coverage was fantastic, and filled a void in Apple Retail writing left by the passing of Gary Allen of ifo Apple Store. Steeber left 9to5Mac last year, but I just discovered that he has a newsletter dedicated to coverage of Apple Retail, and I immediately signed up.

I mentioned to him on Twitter that I’d love to have a virtual version of my old Apple Store (Apple Green Hills) as it appeared when it opened in June 2005. (I was part of the team that brought Apple Retail to Nashville, Tennessee.) He replied that he’d love to do more, but that the work on these creations comes out to about 1.75 months per store! I do hope more stores get added in the future, but as-is this is an amazing treat for Apple fans.

Download The Apple Store Time Machine here.