Cow Clicker Retro is out and you better get ready to start spending money and clicking feverishly.

For those of you who don't know the story of the original Cow Clicker it was intended as a gaming joke about the glut of microtransactions in social games, which unfortunately ballooned out of proportion.

The gist of the game was that you would own a cow in the virtual Facebook game and every hour you could click it and it would turn, however, if you wanted to click it again before the hour limit, you would have to pay for it. Of course, more and more people started playing, started clicking and before you know it started paying...all...to click...a cow.

The game was originally created by Ian Bogost, who was ashamed at how (intentionally) problematic the game got out of hand. It wasn't exactly a labour of love for him to spend a few days coding a simple game.

Cow Clicker Retro is the same devious game but with a few things slimmed down. For example, the cow just moo's now, instead of turning. And once you click it, you'll have to wait six hours to click it again...and if you've played the original, your fingers start to twitch and you just have to go and ask it's creator where can you throw your money.

I curbed my urges and spoke with the creator of the recent iteration, Colin Walsh. He said about his Cow creation that he'd "love to say I was trying to make some sort of important statement on video games or something like that, but in reality Cow Clicker: Retro was just something I thought would be an amusing distraction."

He did however state "that it could be an ironic commentary on game cloning", but that was never his intention. Colin and I have "been fascinated by the Cow Clicker saga since [he'd] first heard about it." It started when the original creator re-tweeted someone being disappointed that they never got to play Cow Clicker and the realization that he'd never actually played it.

Colin figured "Retro games are all the rage now… What if there was a retro clone of Cow Clicker? That would be hilarious!" and so Colin began to work on making a pixel version of Ian's iconic cow game. 

Colin says on the work of Ian and his Cow clicking adventure that he'd "been watching with some interest for a while and I feel like it's been an interesting and useful experiment and commentary on certain aspects of the industry that many are still trying to understand." Mr. Walsh likes the fact that the game holds "a mirror to the industry, and hopefully getting game developers to think about what kind of impact their games have on the people that play them."

But he is objective about the game and it's intention as Colin says "at the same time, the unintended realization that maybe, sometimes all people want to do is play a stupid game with little to no depth, was something I think needed to be put into perspective as well. It's the perfect example of how most issues are never as black and white as people think they are."

I also asked what he and the guys at Celcius Games are working on next and it's a little title called Drifter. "The game is a space-trading title like Elite II: Frontier and Privateer. The genre seems to be somewhat under-served with a lot of the more recent space trading games being relatively small.  Plus the whole 'Galaxy-on-a-floppy' aspect of Frontier always fascinated me so I'm taking a stab at creating a huge procedurally generated sandbox with all sorts of fun and interesting things for the player to do."

The game will be out 2012 for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad for sure (hopefully Android), and Colin is hoping a PC/Mac port will be possible as well, but I can't promise anything just yet. Remember you can always follow Colin Walsh and Celcius Games on Twitter @celsiusgs. Also if people are interested in keeping up to date on the game, it has a page already.

Thank you again to Colin Walsh for answering my questions on such short notice. You can play CowClicker Retro right here and then wait 6 hours.

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