I remembered there were third-party games available on the iPod, but checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_game , it doesn't look like an SDK ever made it to the public.

Yeah, I'm amazed that there aren't any homebrew ones.

I used to run this on my iPod happily: https://www.rockbox.org

That's an entirely different OS and it's seriously cool. But I really do wonder why it seems like no homebrew was attempted on the original OS.

This is an April Fools article.

I would imagine the "OS" doesn't have a lot of graphical routines, just to draw text/menues, scroll bar (to indicate song progress) and some library to display images (for album covers). And that it boots straight into this player app, and it has no idea of how to load other apps...

There were native games on it already!

Including a Breakout clone, of course ;)