Ten years ago this week—on June 29, 2007 —many waited (in line or online) for the first iPhone's formal release. Steve Jobs revealed what he promised would be a game-changing device months earlier, providing plenty of time for the lofty dreams, predictions, and excitement to build. The decade since has largely justified the hype. Apple's now-signature product has made a lasting mark not only on our communications, but on many unexpected walks of life. So this week as the iPhone celebrates its 10th anniversary, we'll be examining its impact and revisiting the device that changed it all.

In the heart of Stockholm, Sweden, mobile games developer King has built its own forest. Alongside Earth-toned carpeting and plywood trees are walls coated in Norwegian lichen. Instead of the harsh glow of a fluorescent strip, there are ambient lights that change hue with the seasons. Instead of chairs there are ceiling-hung wicker baskets and long maple desks with multicoloured stools. Along the floor is an artificial stream that scans the footsteps of employees, allowing them to interact with virtual fish and insects. In the winter, the stream freezes over, lending an audible crunch to each footstep.

Such extravagance is hardly extraordinary for the startups and venture capitalists that have spread across California's so-called Silicon Valley (Airbnb has its own makeshift forest, complete with taxidermied raccoon). But for the companies that build their fortunes on the fickle market of mobile games, success is far from guaranteed. King is one of the lucky ones. It has, in its finer moments, raked in profits of half a billion dollars in a single year. So compelling were its profits that publishing giant Activision Blizzard swallowed it up for $5.9 billion in 2015.

Few could have predicted the meteoric rise of King, which began life in 2003 creating middling browser-based video games. Like others that had struggled to develop a foothold in the industry—Rovio, Chillingo, and Supercell, to name but a few—King's fortunes changed when Apple, having released the first iPhone in 2007, finally caved to pressure from developers and released a native software development kit one year later.

Steve Jobs' dreams of a Web-based app future notwithstanding, the SDK transformed the iPhone into a fully fledged platform, complete with its own storefront dubbed the App Store.

In the beginning, there was Touch Fighter

While commonplace now, the launch of a unified digital storefront alongside a native SDK was revolutionary. Finding apps for Symbian, Nokia's dominant smartphone operating system at the time, meant navigating a mess of nondescript Web portals and downloading suspect zip files. Games, if you could find them, were typically programmed in Java and were either simple 2D affairs (Snake, ftw!), or ran at sluggish frame rates due to a lack of optimisation for the hardware.

The first native game for the iPhone came from Apple. Touch Fighter, unveiled alongside the SDK, might have been a mere tech demo, but the OpenGL graphics and touch and motion controls it pioneered became a blueprint for third-party developers. "I don't have a joystick on here or a four-button toggle control. How do I steer?" asked Apple's Scott Forstall during the demo. "We've got a three-axis accelerometer built in, so all I have to do is move the phone around!"

Third-party developers soon followed. Sega unveiled a version of Super Monkeyball, which used the iPhone's accelerometer to guide the titular monkey-in-a-ball around platforms like a modern-day Labyrinth. Electronic Arts created a touch-controlled version of Spore, an odd creature creator from Sim City developer Will Wright. The best of the bunch was Pangea Software's Enigmo, a clever physics-based puzzle game that flaunted the power of the iPhone's 32-bit ARM CPU.

Further Reading Intelligently designed? Ars reviews Spore

The speed with which developers could create compelling games for the iPhone contrast with increasingly complex console games, which could take upwards of three years to produce and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But it wasn't the speed of development or the apparent quality of the games that had a lasting impact—it was Apple's business model. Instead of working with third-party publishers, Apple would instead publish every game and every application on the App Store itself.

Revenues were split, with 70 percent going to the developer and 30 percent going to Apple. There were no credit card fees, or hosting fees, or marketing fees, and developers would be paid monthly. Most importantly, there was no set price. Developers were free to price their apps as they saw fit, with only a lower threshold of 59p/99c to adhere to. They could even opt to give away their apps for free, although few did.

Both Super Monkeyball and Enigmo launched at £5.99—significantly less than the £50 of a full-priced console release and even less than the smaller indie titles of Xbox Live Arcade and Steam. Yet this was more than enough to support the small development teams behind the games. The App Store launched with just 500 apps, which ballooned to more than 3,000 after just three months. Downloads hit a remarkable 100 million, far exceeding even the most bullish of analyst expectations. By the end of 2008, there were well over 5,000 apps. In April 2009, Apple had already reached one billion downloads.

Listing image by Mark Walton