I weep for the various IPs that are left to rot in the vaults of these major video game companies. Games that will never receive another port, remaster, remake, or sequel in spite of fan demand. The worst offenders among them are as follows:
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Nintendo (Pilot Wings, Metroid, Mother, Star Fox, Kid Icarus, F Zero, Wars series [ie Battalion Wars], including many more, and are just overall worse as a company post-Iwata)
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Konami (Castlevania, Metal Gear series, Contra, Frogger, Gradius, Silent Hill, Yu-Gi-Oh [TCG is heavily mismanaged], and through their acquisition of Hudson Soft; Bomberman, Star Soldier, Lode Runner, and Adventure Island)
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Ubisoft were the beneficiaries of the messy bankruptcy of The 3DO Company, who were behind, among others, the Might and Magic series, its spinoff Heroes of Might and Magic, the Army Men games, and a couple of underrated gems known as BattleTanx and Starfighter. For Ubisoft proper, Prince of Persia, Rayman, Red Steel, Silent Hunter, and The Settler series have all been left to rot, while they continue to besmirch Tom Clancy's name after his death with subpar titles, so the Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and Rainbow Six IPs will not be far behind.
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Capcom is especially guilty of this (Megaman in particular was brutally abused before being shelved coughMegaman Legends 3cough; Others include Dino Crisis, the Breath of Fire series, Steel Battalion, Darkstalkers, Bionic Commando, and many more)
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SNK of Neo Geo fame seems to have been stuck in copyright hell for the last 30 years before they released much of anything recently, having only released the 40th anniversary compilation in Nov 2018.
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Sega deserves its own post just on account of their treatment of the Sonic IP (tl;dr Sega had no main release for the Saturn, releases post hardware market withdrawal were middling, Sonic Boom was a Sonic Bomb, and Sonic Mania, a game made by a couple fans, was somehow more polished and better put together than Sonic Forces was by Sonic Team proper... how the mighty have fallen).
However, if you were born later than 1998, you wouldn't know that they have an entire library's worth of IPs outside of Sonic. Afterburner, Phantasy Star (no experience with Online 1/2), Nights, Daytona USA, Sega Rally, Golden Axe, Thunder Force, Virtua Fighter, Shining Force, Out Run, and too many others to list that would have been lost to the sands of time were it not for preservation efforts by enthusiasts and Sega releasing the occasional compilation. Panzer Dragoon after more than 2 decades is seeing remakes, Yakuza titles are seeing PC ports after being console exclusive for who knows how long, and Shenmue 3 was an unfortunate disaster.
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Electronic Arts needs no introduction, so instead of IPs, I'll give you companies that EA has killed. Maxis, Westwood Studios, Pandemic Studios, Origin Systems, Mythic Entertainment, Visceral Studios, Bullfrog Productions, Danger Close Games, and Distinctive Software, and the in-house studios that brought them to fame in the first place (RIP Jane's Combat Simulators). Here is hoping BioWare will soon be joining that list :P.
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I feel like Bandai Namco should be somewhere on this list, even though Pacman and Ace Combat have seen regular (if slow) releases over the years, but feel free to correct me on this if I'm missing something.
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Square Enix are the owners of Taito (Space Invaders, etc), Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider, etc), and Eidos-Montreal (Deus Ex), among others, including many other IPs that were published by themselves over the years, and with the exception of the aforementioned famous titles, are all (with the exception of Final Fantasy) in various states of abandonment, disregard, and disrepair (Taito is suffering from "baka gaijin", having made their Space Invaders compilation released earlier this year JPN exclusive, but that is a different discussion). The Supreme Commander series in particular (spiritual successor to RTS game Total Annihilation) is one of the examples of SE wanting to take their toy with them and go home, having gone after the Forged Alliance Forever team in the past, and as of this writing, will not allow them to use the recently released GOG versions in their (FAF) client, completely defeating the purpose of GOG.
I just wanted to get all this off of my chest. I also wanted to put Rockstar and Take Two Interactive on the list, as there are games besides GTA which they own that I wish would also see the light of day again, but that is such a corporate clusterfuck of companies within companies that I wouldn't even know where to start.
Enjoy!
EDIT: It has come to my attention that I forgot one particular big player, Sony. WipeOut, Twisted Metal, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper, and SOCOM are just a small list of examples from Sony Interactive Entertainment that we will never see again. Unfortunately, this doesn't take into account their subsidiaries that may or may not have gone under in this time frame.
Activision-Blizzard on account of being around since the Atari era in one form or another has a bodycount in similar size and/or infamy to EA. Just like EA, I will list companies and not IPs. Sierra Entertainment...seriously look at their history here and sort by year released, Neversoft, RedOctane, Raven Software, Radical Entertainment, Luxoflux, Swordfish Studios, Underground Development, Shaba Games, Bizzare Creations, and a studio by the name of Behavior Santiago.
And just to round up this list, Microsoft.
Microsoft holds more than Halo, Minecraft, and Windows. They also hold the MechWarrior IP and has allowed it to continue being abused by Piranha Games Inc, on top of going through legal hell during this time frame as well (Thanks Harmony Gold, you greedy bastards!). They also own Rare (formerly RareWare), and while MS released Rare Replay, prior to that, all their IPs were left for dead.
Probably a bit controversial considering the amount of nostalgia involved but I'm not sure if that's really a bad thing.
A lot of series are just beating a dead horse. Do you really need the 50th Ubisoft open world reskin, the 100th EA sports game +1, the 200th Zelda or the 500th Mario? At some point it's just played out.
If they would do a sequel to some of the old stuff it would either suck by modern standards (if they stick to the original) or it would be unrecognizable.
Do I want a new Syndicate game? Hell yea. Do I trust EA to do it? Fuck no! Just rember that mobile Dungeon Keeper abomination!
Maybe we should let good old games stay in the past. With all the economic (e.g. microtransactions) and ideological crap involved in big publishers these days any sequels would be nothing but wearing the skin of its ancestors, and that's heresy!
Yes.
With the exception of Pokemon (which is really Game Freak/The Pokemon company), Nintendo has done a very good job trying to keep the big entries in these series fresh and unique.
The, usually fantastic, Zelda and Mario titles we get every few years are not at all comparable to the yearly madden or Call of Duty release.
I worked retail when Sega was in its zenith at the end of the Genesis-Dreamcast era and the subsequent nose dive that was their 3rd party output for Xbox and late PS2. Phantasy Star Online had them on life support but they kept cranking out Sonic titles that were each more awful than the last. In the end, Sonic had to take a break but his return years later was still met with caution.
Sometimes it is better to cut and run and still be able to look back on a game as a good series, rather than kill it with uninspired cash grabs. As much as I loved Westwood, I wouldn't trust a Dune RTS sequel by another company not to include shit like exhaustable "card game" mechanics and single-use power ups. (see also: Plants vs Zombies 2)
Some games were products of their time and don't need updates. I can imagine a remade Contra where instead of 80's action hero Schwarzenegger and Stallone expys we get smug looking pink haired she-men as the mains.
oh god no. After Wolfenstein you know they'd do that, too.
Add the James Bond games to the list as no one is going to port the post goldeneye classics like Agent Under Fire, Nightfire & Everything or Nothing
I think those games are stuck in licensing hell.
I'm still hoping for DICE to join the EA list. I was going to say to add Criterion, but they have a job porting old shit for now. DICE is apparently helping them, so my bet is them dying first.
You forgot Zone of the Enders. It's okay. Konami and Kojima have forgotten it too. QQ
And Rocket Knight Adventures. Poor Sparkster has one utter masterpiece and three games ranging from okay to terrible under his belt....
I never realized that Rocket Knight was Konami. I always just remembered it as a forgotten Sega gem.
Speaking of Sega gems, we've also forgotten Shinobi, Chakan, Gunstar Heroes, LandStalker, and Gauntlet too. Granted Gauntlet is Midway, but it's a damn crime that Gauntlet IV has never been released in any Genesis collection.
Star Fox? They just came out with Star Link, not sure there was anything wrong with that.
On my list, the one I'll always be salty about was Six Days In Fallujah which the moralists on the right removed by smearing it and claiming it was an attack on veterans and the mothers of people killed in Iraq. In order to re-coup costs, Six Days was morphed into Breach and sold as an Xbox LIve title.
Fundamentally, it was going to be a genuine squad based tactical shooter set in Fallujah, and was being developed by veterans who were in the damn battle. Knowing what Fallujah was actually like during the battle would have been more than interesting.
I don't honestly know if it was just the right wing authoritarians were pretending to defend veterans by virtue signaling about why veterans of Fallujah were attacking veterans of Fallujah by making a video game about their experience.... or if the chicken-hawk neo-con establishment of the time was concerned that the Marines developing the game might be honest and genuine about their experience.
Incidentally, a similar reason is why you should pick up MOH Warfighter. One of the levels is developed abound one of the SF advisor's memories of a secret mission into Pakistan (I think it's the one in the alley/slums). He was then disciplined by the military for relaying the story to the developers.
No, Breach was an Xbox Live only release, meaning it got shut down with the rest of it's servers. However, the transition from Six Days to Breach was a desperate attempt to recoup the losses that they took to the skull when the publisher stopped wanting any development after the Neo-Con establishment right started smearing the game, and so did the regular establishment (see ABC News below). Breach is basically the finished gameplay & multiplayer elements with 5 maps as a kind of "Big Team Battle". It's clear that they had done significant work on the core gameplay elements, but they tossed it into a Big Team Battle mode to make any recouping of losses. It works okay, and leads to fairly strange results because you're talking about a genuine tactical shooter with heavily lethality in 12v12 fire-fights with slow movement speeds. In my experience, battles could be won initially, but if they weren't, the whole map turned into a giant stalemate of cross map sniping and firefights. It wasn't necessarily super fun when that happened... but that's also fairly realistic to what can happen when two armed groups fight over a choke point with no real combined arms tactics to overwhelm their opponent. It becomes an absolute slog.
Had it been allowed to be a tactical shooter, it probably would have been amazing.
Take a look how the media genuinely used it's power to kill a game, gatekeep, and put people in their place. They're actually using the military adviser's own experience as a weapon against him.
I'd probably lean more towards the ruin of studios like how EA kills everything it touches more than IP. I was particularly a fan of a lot of what Maxis, Pandemic, and Visceral. I think for me it's not the death of IPs that irritates me, it's frustration with how homogeneous new games have become. It's just yet another third-person action adventure with and open world and RPG elements.
I also find when using an existing IP, you get too much of a whiny fanbase. Change the game a bit, "oh that's not a real ____ game!" Leave it the same, "you're just putting out a DLC for full price!" Make a complete spinoff within the IP, and that's also looked down on.
I've just adjusted really and lost a lot of interest in new games. I'm not sure there's a single game coming out that has me wanting to pay full price to play it soon. Perhaps Yakuza 7 if I had managed to catch up on the first six. I wouldn't have bought the Tetris Effect Connected that I'm playing on Xbox Game Pass, but in hindsight I like it enough maybe.
With the high quality of emulation on older systems and some of the newer systems I have, I've just gone backwards things I've missed instead. I think the only major old system I'm not covered on is the PS2, but I just tend to find an Xbox or GC release if there's something on there. If I really wanted I could emulate a PS2 on my PC easily.
There are still plenty of good new games. They're just being made by small to mid sized studios IMHO, not the corporate behemoths.
Buying newly released games for full price is counter productive anyway. You pay extra for a buggy incomplete game. Let the kids worry about getting the latest RIGHT NOW MUST HAVE!!!1 I'll wait a year or so until it's patched, all DLC is released and it's on sale.
I can only play so many spiritual successors before I realize that I want the real thing. RedOut is speedy zero G fun reminiscent of F Zero and WipeOut, Bug Fables hits the right charm points of the first two Paper Mario games while managing to be its own thing, Freedom Planet is an homage to Sonic that adds combat mechanics, 20XX is what Mighty Number 9 tried to be and failed, and the Bullet Hell genre was inspired by the scrolling shmups of old. These are all good games, but in the end leave me craving for more of what inspired those games in the first place, the real deal if you will.
Yeah, I do still find new games I like, but often by accident. Which, I guess makes sense being that they don't have the big money hype machines behind them.
When it comes to buying a new game, I assign a value of sorts to it at what price point I'm willing to pay. Most of the big budget games from the past couple years, I'm waiting for $10 prices on. Yeah, pretty much looking for the 80% off sale. So far it's working out too. They eventually get there. I've got a pile of stuff to play in the meantime, so who cares if it takes longer?
Also Altered Beast when it comes to Sega. Loved that game, and I don't even like side-scrolling platformers much in general; for me, video games didn't really shine until I played stuff like Dark Sun, Diablo, and Sim Earth. But I did like Starfox, Sonic 1 and 2 (my kids had a Genesis), Tempest, and Galaga before that.
I do wish they'd update Sim Earth, though. But without the constant "Divide By Zero" errors ...
And Master of Magic, too.
You should add FF7 to that list of dead IP's. FF7 remake was as empty as destiny and it's sole purpose was to ride the coat tails of an almost 30yr old game to make some nostalgia bucks. The original is still fun albeit the graphics are pretty out dated.
Before anyone asks - I platinumed FF7 part 1 because I've wanted to play a modern version for a long time. The best way I can describe it is; the game couldn't decide if it wanted to be an action game or rpg. So it decided to be a movie. Instead of letting us explore Midgar they created thin stretches of map to walk/listen to npc's, and to crawl between things so they could hide the loading screens.
Sometimes it's ok for a game to not have sequels because it was good enough to stand on its own and anything that comes after would just mar a masterpiece. I truly despise this idea that everything needs to be a never ending franchise just because someone made a good game.
Trouble is, games can be lost with the systems that played them.
That's why people want sequels, so they can keep playing their favorite on the new consoles.
The existence of a sequel does not equate to preservation of the original.
There are always emulators on PC or these mini console things if you don't want to deal with that yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCNE5L5yPw
Man, I'd forgotten Virtua Fighter. The PS2 version of the fourth installment had a single player mode where you ranked up playing against simulated arcade opponents of increasing skill. To this day, I have yet to encounter a more enjoyable or more convincing fascimile of the arcade fighter experience. Plus there were a ton of wild character customization options, so you could easily identify AI players both visually and by tendencies.
Anyways, yeah, this list made me sad.
I'd add some of the IPs controlled by or associated with Sony, like Warhawk, Wipeout, and Twisted Metal. I would love to have remade versions of these games with modern bells and whistles. Of course, I've also had my fill of gender neutral character creation options and politically correct design choices, so...
Sony! I knew I was forgetting a company or 2. Will edit that in right now.
GameFreak and the Pokémon Company should probably kill off the Pokémon series, but Nintendo would never let them do so.
The latest few games in the series were absolutely shit shows and it seems pretty clear that at this point the series still exists in order to milk as much money as possible.
But I agree that Nintendo has been worse off since 2015, when Iwata passed.
They have adopted the Disney Vault practice and have done it twice in just a few months. First with 3D All Stars, and next with FE Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, a “limited edition” Digital rom.
Gamefreak and the Pokémon Company also deserve their own post just on account of how short of a time it took for them to go borderline EA with regard to DLC practices as soon as Nintendo made a network infrastructure capable of handling DLC and subsequently kill a large chunk of good faith from fans (definitely did for me, with the whole lying about fitting the Pokédex fiasco). However, I only have so much energy and this OP was a result of a 3AM frenzy.
Overall, I agree.
For F-Zero, and a lot of other titles on that list, at some point we have to acknowledge that these companies aren't running a videogame charity.
If the title isn't going to sell, because the market is comprised of lowest common denominator retards, then they're not going to throw away millions of dollars just to satisfy the nostalgia of the few of us who care.
And if they didn't spend the big bucks, and instead tried to keep the series going with smaller/cheaper non-AAA entries, you know the core fans would be pissed off and refuse to buy it.
"We'll sell you the old games for full price then."
Aw man, you had to bring up breath of fire didn't you? I just got over the travesty of it turning into a sacrifice on the mobile game alter. The first Breath of Fire was my first RPG and I've always had a special place in my heart because of it. 2, 3 and 4 were all amazing and different even Dragon Quarter had interesting ideas (albeit ones that didn't belong in a BoF game). I dunno, maybe they only have room for one Ryu at Capcom?
While I can certainly see the sentiment expressed in this thread about letting old dogs lie, a lot of these games had long stretches where the games were as good or even better than the originals.
I'd also add the 'Musashi' game franchise to the Squaresoft list, brave fencer musashi was a highly underrated title for the original playstation and while the sequel wasn't anything to write home about I still felt it petered out too soon.
Square Enix also puts out Dragon Quest games, don't forget!
Some more for the list.
Alien Isolation: We'll never get a sequel, we only got a shitty mobile trash that works as a "sequel" to the game but nobody played that trash anyway.
Duke Nukem: Hahaha never gonna happen in the current cucked landscape..
Damn, that’s my childhood right there.