In the early 2010s, rumors circulated that Apple may have been working on an iPhone nano. While not much concrete evidence surface on Apple's front, a new email from Steve Jobs shows that Apple was, at one point, working on this affordable and extremely tiny phone.

Spotted first by The Verge, the email in question was sent from the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which outlines the meeting agenda for a 2011 corporate strategy presentation. Jobs notes at the end of the outline that reads "iPhone nano plan" with accompanying sub-bullets such as one that reads "cost goal" and that former Apple design chief Jony Ive was expected to show off a "model (and/or renderings)" during the meeting.

In the same email, Jobs mentions under the "2011 Strategy" bullet that implies Apple was planning to create a "low cost iPhone model based on iPod touch to replace [iPhone] 3GS." Unfortunately, it is not specified whether or not the late Apple co-founder referred to the iPhone nano or a completely different device.

By the early 2010s, the iPod Nano was still one of Apple's forefront consumer products. In September of that year, Apple announced and released the sixth-generation iPod Nano, which offered a touch screen but ditched the click wheel and had no camera or video playback. Apple would discontinue its portable media player in July 2017 -- roughly two years after the tech giant released new color models for the seventh and final generation of the iPod Nano.

While the iPhone nano never came to fruition, Apple has continued to make smaller devices under the "mini" moniker, such as the iPhone 12 mini and the HomePod mini.

The email itself is one of the hundreds of emails that surfaced as part of Apple's legal battle with Epic Games. The case was argued in May, and a federal judge is currently reviewing it to determine whether or not Apple violated antitrust law.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Ahead of this year's QuakeCon, a version of the Doom Slayers Collection for Nintendo Switch has seemingly been leaked by Best Buy.

A store page for the game can be found on Best Buy which includes a game overview and price, but no box art. The page also includes a release date for the title which, if accurate, is apparently September 2.

The Doom Slayers Collection is already available for console players on the PS4 and Xbox One, and includes the original 1993 classic, Doom, as well as subsequent releases within the series, Doom II, Doom 3, and 2016's Doom. Unlike the PS4 and Xbox One edition of the game, however, the Switch iteration listed on Best Buy also states that it will include Doom 64, which was re-released last year.

The listing, which features a retail price of $49.99, comes in advance of this week's QuakeCon - suggesting a potential unveiling of Doom Slayers Collection during the event. The possible leak isn't the first to take place in the build-up to the convention, either. We recently reported that the original upload of this year's QuakeCon schedule suggests that a 'revitalized edition' of id Software's classic FPS, Quake, could be announced during a panel.

If you'd like to find out more about the three-day event which will include tournaments, panels, and a range of other features then make sure to check out this article on the QuakeCon 2021 schedule reveal.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Next month, Microsoft is releasing a new $60 Xbox Stereo Headset designed for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PCs, and mobile devices.

The Xbox Stereo Headset aims to bring "more value to the entry-level headset category," with athe features and design elements bearing many similarities to the $99 Xbox Wireless Headset released last year. Features include high-quality ear cushions, a volume control dial on the right earcup, and a built-in unidirectional microphone.

The Xbox Stereo Headset connects to a wireless Xbox controller or other compatible devices via a 3.5mm audio jack like most wired gaming headsets. Microsoft also confirmed that the Xbox Stereo Headset supports high-fidelity spatial sound tech, such as Dolby Atmos.

Although it is missing a few features, if the Xbox Stereo Headset is anything like its wireless counterpart, this is a good alternative for Xbox owners looking to get the most bang for their buck, but who cannot justify spending $99 on the wireless variant – or just prefer wired gaming headsets over wireless ones.

The Xbox Stereo Headset will be available worldwide beginning September 21. You can preorder the headset today at the Microsoft Store or retailers, such as Amazon.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

In a new developer deep-dive for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Eidos-Montreal senior audio director, Steve Szczepkowski revealed just how integral music is incorporated into Guardians of the Galaxy. Rather than just a soundtrack, music will also factor into combat as well as Star-Lord’s backstory.

In a twist on Peter Quill’s backstory, Eidos-Montreal revealed that the name Star-Lord is taken from Peter’s favorite band growing up, and not some name he picked up because it sounds cool.

But instead of just letting the backstory be just that, Szczepkowski actually served as a frontman for the fictional Star-Lord band and recorded an entire in-galaxy album. You’ll be able to hear Szczepkowski’s original album as the band Star-Lord in the game.

Along with the Star-Lord album and full, orchestral score, the Guardians of the Galaxy video game will use select music from the '80s including Iron Maiden, KISS, New Kids On the Block, Rick Astley, Hot Chocolate, and more that will play throughout the game.

These tracks will also play during a combat mechanic called Huddle which will play an '80s song from Peter Quill’s cassette player and aid the whole Guardians team while fighting. In the video, the team is shown gaining a power-up while fighting to Joan Jett.

When the '80s hits, real or fiction, aren’t playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game will be set to a fully orchestrated score by Richard Jacques recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios.

Although Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a separate project unrelated to James Gunn’s MCU film, it’s clear that music is an important factor in both the game and movie and Eidos-Montreal has taken the sound design in Guardians of the Galaxy to another level.

Guardians of the Galaxy is Square Enix’s second collaboration with Marvel, but unlike Marvel’s Avengers, Guardians will be a fully single-player adventure and not a live-service game. Check out IGN’s full interview with the directors of Guardians of the Galaxy here to find out how Eidos-Montreal brought the space team to life.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Sir Ben Kingsley has confirmed that he will be returning to the MCU in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings when it premieres on September 3.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Kingsley confirmed that he will be appearing in the upcoming movie after being spotted at the red carpet premiere earlier this week.

"As you just saw, I was talking to Kevin Feige," Kingsley said to ET. "And thanks to Kevin and Robert Downey Jr. and Drew Pearce and Shane Black, I am in this movie and I'm a member of the Marvel family, because their welcome on Iron Man 3 was so astonishing and generous that I'm still with Marvel again. And I'm delighted to be here!" he added.

Kingsley's first appearance in the MCU featured in Iron Man 3 where he portrayed the role of Trevor Slattery - an actor posing as the notorious terrorist, the Mandarin. Following the events of Iron Man 3, Kingsley reprised his role once again in the Marvel One-Shot, All Hail the King. During the short film, Slattery is imprisoned in Seagate Prison and confronted by Jackson Norriss, a member of the Ten Rings organization who seeks to break Slattery out and give him over to his boss, the actual Mandarin.

After his long-awaited debut into the franchise, the real Mandarin is set to feature in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings where he will be portrayed by Tony Leung. How important Slattery's role will be in the film is yet to be seen. However, it now seems likely that the shamed actor will have to stand judgment before the villain he spent time impersonating.

In the upcoming film, Leung will play Shang-Chi's father Wenwu. The role of Shang-Chi's father has been reimagined for the MCU. In the early comics, the titular hero's father is an evil genius known as Fu Manchu. However, Marvel made the decision to replace Manchu due to the character's problematic origins. You can read more about Marvel's decision to replace Manchu in this article which explores what Marvel President Kevin Feige is saying about Shang-Chi to Chinese audiences.

If you're counting down the days until Shang-Chi premieres in movie theatres, then why not also check out this article which breaks down the film's latest IMAX posters. Alternatively, you can watch the film's exciting new trailer below:

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Marvel president Kevin Feige has addressed a number of concerns that have been voiced by Chinese audiences ahead of the release of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

As reported by Variety, Feige participated in an interview with Chinese film critic Raymond Zhou during the U.S. Shang-Chi premiere this week, in which he responded to some of China's biggest gripes surrounding the MCU feature and assured fans that careful consideration had been given on the road to taking the comics to the big screen.

In particular, Feige stressed that the upcoming Phase 4 movie doesn't feature Fu Manchu, a character who serves as Shang-Chi's father and primary nemesis in the comics who has been on the receiving end of backlash for years, with many seeing the character as a racially insensitive caricature. Feige confirmed he doesn't appear "in any way, shape or form."

"[Fu Manchu] is not a character we own or would ever want to own. It was changed in the comics many, many, many years ago. We never had any intention of [having him] in this movie," Feige emphasized, adding: "Definitively, Fu Manchu is not in this movie, is not Shang-Chi's father, and again, is not even a Marvel character, and hasn't been for decades."

Instead of Fu Manchu, Shang-Chi's father in the movie is Wenwu, portrayed by Tony Leung. As explained in a recent featurette, our titular hero will find himself returning to his father's world after running away in his youth, which is quite a different story to the one sometimes told in the comics that sees the character abandon his Chinese roots to embrace the West.

"That's certainly one of the elements we've changed," Feige stated, reassuring potential moviegoers. "All of our comics go back 60, 70, 80 years. Almost everything has happened in almost every comic, and we chose the elements that we like to turn into an MCU feature. So that story is not what this is about.

"That sense of running away… is presented as one of his flaws," he added, noting the narrative change. "It is a flaw to run away to the West and to hide from his legacy and his family — that's how the movie is presented. And how he will face that and overcome that is part of what the story's about."

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is set for a wide theatrical release on September 3. The movie doesn't yet have a release date in China despite it being an important market for movies, with its box office previously taking $629 million for Avengers: Endgame, making it the country's highest-grossing foreign film ever, plus the sixth-largest earner overall.

For more on the MCU film, get a glimpse of the movie's dragon character in the latest poster, check out our explainer on Shang-Chi himself, and if the Ten Rings are actually magical.

Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Splitgate, the portal-based shooter from 1047 Games, will remain in its open beta period for the 'foreseeable future' after its recent unexpected popularity has seen more than 10 million users download the game in under 30 days.

In a press release, 1047 Games announced that Splitgate will remain in open beta as the studio continues to work on scaling the game. The game's surge in popularity has caused a string of server queues and wait times for players hoping to access the Halo-like shooter.

1047 Games has been active in addressing the strain on its servers through social media and the game's official Discord channel, whilst at the same time working to increase player capacity on the game. In just the past four weeks the studio's team of just 30 people has increased its server capacity to now support up to 175,000 concurrent players, and significantly reduced player wait times.

It took a few weeks, but our server situation is better than ever! We can now support 175k concurrent players! And the server improvements are only going to continue. https://t.co/E2sWrxQevx

— Splitgate (@Splitgate) August 15, 2021

CEO and co-founder of 1047 Games, Ian Proulx, shared in the press release his thoughts on the game's overwhelming popularity and what it has meant for scalability. “This has been the most surreal time of my life,” said Proulx. “The fan support has been incredible as we work to improve the player experience. We never dreamed of having to scale this big this quickly, and as a result we have had to overcome challenges to keep up with player demand. We met several major milestones in a short time, creating a stable platform where fans can expect to find a server to play on relatively quickly, and I’m proud of what our team has accomplished - but there’s a lot more to come!”

Proulx continued, “In looking at the issues facing the scalability of the game’s backend, the process includes far more than simply dealing with server capacity. We are focused on keeping the game stable for fans, and iterating on the game’s concurrent capacity in order to minimize player wait times. We want to do this the right way, and we want to be prepared for massive scale when we officially launch, all the while continuing to improve the beta with frequent updates, additional features, and improvements to server capacity.”

1047 Games says that it has several content updates planned for fans across the rest of the year whilst further changes to the game's backend framework continue to be rolled out. Splitgate's first content update will feature on the game later today (August 19) and will bring with it a Ranked Duos mode as well as increased server capacity. 1047 Games will be announcing further updates in weeks to come including what the company describes as a 'significant announcement' at Gamescom 2021.

The development team at 1047 Games are certainly striving high with the FPS title. In a recent Q&A, the team discussed its hopes to bring the title to other platforms including a possible port to mobile and Nintendo Switch. For more on Splitgate, make sure to check out our review-in-progress for the game where we have so far awarded it a 7/10.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN who spends a lot of his time in Splitgate tentatively shooting through blank enemy portals. You can follow him on Twitter.

Skyblivion is a mod that’s very easy to explain: it’s aiming to bring the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion into the engine used by The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. But the reality isn’t that the team of volunteers making it simply wants to upscale the 2006 game we already know – they want to make the dream version of the game that Bethesda’s developers had in their heads back when they came up with Oblivion.

In a way, the Skyblivion team is treating Oblivion like a sketch, and painting in new details drawn from a number of sources. Seen in a recent dev diary, areas like the city of Leyawiin have been fully redesigned based on unused Oblivion concept art, bringing to life ideas that could never be realised in the original game. Others, like the Fall Forest, have been expanded and enriched with more foliage and areas of interest, with the Skyblivion team guessing at what the original designers might have aimed for with more technological grunt at their disposal.

This mixture of realising unused ideas and adding modern sheen to areas left fairly basic is part of the Skyblivion team’s philosophy. “We are definitely taking some creative freedom here and there,” project lead K Rebel tells me over email. “If we didn’t, you might as well replay the original Oblivion. Rest assured, though, that we are approaching this as fans of Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls games.”

You can see a Skyblivion quest in action below:

“Our cities, interiors, dungeons and environments are larger and filled with a lot more detail than anything in Oblivion, and in many cases Skyrim too,” K Rebel continues. “This already feels like we added some ‘cut content’, as I’m sure the original developers would have loved to create a bigger and more detailed world, but in the end were held back by the technology of the time. For example, a lot of the fortresses from the original Oblivion were singular towers, which in a lot of cases we have rebuilt into actual fortresses that are inspired by the stories you can find about them.”

It’s not just the world that will see those improvements, but the game’s mechanics, too. “Our approach to this project is similar in a lot of ways to any other AAA game's development cycle. We focus our efforts redesigning areas of the game that need it the most, such as environments and unique weapons. Nobody likes finishing a long questline only to receive a generic sword, or exploring through empty forests.”

For the initial release, at least, there is a line being drawn on what can be added, though. The first goal – and one the team’s been working on for many years already – is to bring to life a new version of the original Oblivion, while keeping its basic make-up intact. “Anything else that wasn’t part of the original game won’t be touched until after our first public release,” K Rebel explains. “We have recovered a big list of [cut] quests, for instance, but unless our questing department has time to spare before the release these won’t be added until later.”

That goes for the original game’s DLC, too – the 1.0 version of Skyblivion will include the team’s take on the base version of Oblivion, so don’t expect to be able to use the infamous horse armour right away.

Even while still in development, Skyblivion feels like a fascinating mixture of homage and fan fiction, resulting in something that doesn’t sit totally comfortably in either camp. I ask whether K Rebel sees this game as designed for those who already love Oblivion, or those who never played it: “It depends. I think that people who have recently played through Oblivion will be able to really appreciate Skyblivion on a new level, as they can clearly see how much work has been put into remaking this game. On the other hand, I think a lot of people, including myself, would kill to be able to re-experience Oblivion for the first time again – and on top of that a version of Oblivion which has much improved environments, better unique weapons and is overall a less janky and buggy experience (although a lot of this jank is what gave Oblivion its goofy charm).”

Of course, the worry that hangs over any project like this is that, no matter the good intention, a developer or publisher might see it as theft rather than tribute. Thankfully, the Skyblivion team doesn’t see trouble on its horizon. “There has been some contact with Bethesda, but projects like these are in a bit of a legal grey area,” K Rebel admits. “Bethesda allows us to do what we do but won’t openly support it. Having that said, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to a number of Bethesda employees, some of which even worked on Oblivion, and they had nothing but kind things to say about our project, which has been very humbling to say the least. A takedown is something I can safely say I never see happening.”

The last major question is when we might be able to try Skyblivion for the first time – and it’s really the only question K Rebel can’t give me an answer for. The project lead explains that the team has an unwritten rule not to promise a date, but that they are working on a public road map to make the road to the finish line a little clearer.

It’s a fair answer (if a slightly unsatisfying one for those excited by the prospect of the mod) – this is a team made up purely of volunteers, working on the game in their spare time. It’s a mammoth project, and one that K Rebel says takes up practically all of their spare time. So why take it on? In a way, it seems to be that making the dream version of Oblivion is, in itself, the dream:

“I think once you get to a certain age, everyone is going to try and chase their childhood. When I read comments on our updates I think that’s something that our ‘fans’ are the most excited for – reliving a memory from the past. For me personally though, the project started out as a dream to work on my own game and make it what I wanted it to be. This soon grew into a massive project that we want to work on together and are able to make it everything we want it to be in an Elder Scrolls game. We may not get paid for our work but it’s a really unique experience to be able to work with like-minded individuals and work purely on something out of love and passion.”

Skyblivion is looking for volunteers to join its development team - you can sign up here, or follow the team on Twitter.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.