That old phrase digital means forever is far from true.
These days, games that exist online can easily be taken down, and in some cases, taken down
forever.
So today, we’re lamenting over titles we can never return to with our list of the top
10 games you can never play again.
Some of the numbers on this list are gone thanks to digital removals, while others involve
titles that have disappeared into obscurity over time.
So with that in mind, let’s jump in!
10 Tetris Nintendo would port the game in 1989 for the
Game Boy, one of the most iconic forms of the title to date.
Over the course of 25 years, they continued to port the game, and provide Nintendo console
owners with Tetris goodness.
But these days, Tetris is no where to be found on any Nintendo platform - that’s because
the legal rights to it now belong to Ubisoft, who develops Tetris games.
While this might not be a huge loss to many of you who still have a functional Game Boy
and a Tetris cartridge, those who want to play that original 1989 port are sh*t out
of luck.
Just gonna have to settle with whatever new version of Tetris Ubisoft pumps out, friends.
9 City of Heroes City of Heroes was an mmorpg that initially
debuted back in 2004.
It allowed players to create super powered characters that went around, fought criminals,
and completed missions with other players’ characters all within the fictional Paragon
City.
And it had a really devoted fan base!
It even managed to survive a lawsuit from Marvel, whose trademark claims were dismissed
by courts (although the suit was settled out of court later).
Despite major backlash from the community and an outcry to save the game, it ceased
to exist in 2012 due to a decreased amount of popularity.
8 The Matrix Online Ever watched the Matrix and thought, hey,
that’d be a dope online game?
Well, turns out Sony and Monolith Productions thought the exact same thing after the release
of Matrix Revolutions.
Enter The Matrix Online, an MMORPG that continued the story of the film trilogy.
Debuting in 2005, it lasted up until 2009, with its servers closing due to incredibly
low subscriber numbers.
7 Metroid Prime Hunters Metroid Prime Hunters was a game initially
released for the Nintendo DS.
It provided a single player mode, but the real gem of the title was it’s online gameplay,
with this title really excelling from the lessons Nintendo had gained from it’s predecessor
Metroid Prime 2.
You could play as one of seven awesome characters, including Samus.
But then, Nintendo ceased it’s online services for DS and Wii games back in 2014, meaning
the game could still be played offline in single player or multiplayer, but it’s just
not the same.
Even when the game was released on the Wii U, the online services for it were non existent.
6 One Life One Life is a survival shooter in which, if
you die, your Steam account gets locked out of the game.
Perma death!
It’s a multiplayer in which you can team up with your friends, and play with your own
rules, but, every move you make could be your last.
You’ll need to find food, water, and survive within harsh natural environments.
In addition to that, you can choose how to interact with enemy players, even taking them
as captives.
After the title was announced and green lit back in October of 2015, the developers behind
the game went quite, and even the website for the game was taken down.
Unfortunately, if you want to play One Life, you’re gonna have to wait a while.
But it is still coming!
After Kotaku reported on the radio silence from the devs since 2015, they reached out
to the news site to say that the title was delayed indefinitely, but wasn’t cancelled,
saying, I quote, “in all that time we have received a huge number of questions and requests
from players.
We haven’t even expected this kind of attention.
In the context of such overhype, we just need to make everything perfectly, so the development
of the game is delayed indefinitely.”
5 The Sims Online Sims Online was notoriously a mess.
The Sims is one of EA’s most popular, and profitable, franchises.
So it makes sense that EA would want to optimize the series in whatever ways they could, like
creating an MMO version of it.
Back in 2002, for $9.99 US a month, you could play the Sims MMO, doing all of the things
you love to do in The Sims with other players now involved!
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Except it all went downhill, pretty fast.
The game had a player driven economy that ended up growing into what one critic from
Rock Paper Shotgun called “a capitalist cautionary tale”.
A virtual mafia popped up, which would extort players out of their simoleons in exchange
for not ruining their reputation and therefore limiting the things they could do in the game.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the game finally imploded on itself thanks to a clothing
rack.
Actually.
Thanks to a bug in the game, a clothing rack (in which players would normally use to sell
clothes to other players) duplicated player’s profits, beyond what other players actually
paid.
So that completely destroyed the in game economy.
Despite it being patched, the damage was done, and this didn’t get resolved until 2007
when the game was rebranded as EA Land, but that didn’t bode well.
Four weeks after the re branding, the game shut down.
But fret not!
There’s actually a free to play fan made version of the game that came out in 2017
called FreeS that continues to be updated regularly.
4 Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game This one kills me a little personally; a little
while back I was searching through the Playstation store to find it, and to my dismay, it was
gone.
Sad times.
Some of you may remember the 2010 Edgar Wright film Scott Pilgrim versus the World.
It was pretty darn great, and it was an adaptation of an even more fantastic series of graphic
novels.
Brie Larson was in it.
She played Scott’s ex.
ANYWHO!
When the film came out, a game was released that was downright awesome.
It was a beat em up side scroller in which you played as Scott or one of the other colourful
characters from the series.
Best part was, the graphics had adapted the characters to what they looked like in the
comic, so it felt as if you were literally playing inside the world of the graphic novels.
It was a game that was released digitally back in 2010, with no physical copies available,
which is why when it’s four year contract was up in 2014, the game completely disappeared
altogether from the Playstation Store.
Talk about tragic.
3 Legend of Zelda Four Swords Anniversary Edition
Back in 2004, Nintendo released an episodic cooperative multiplayer Zelda game called
Four Swords, in which you team up with your friends to explore eight different worlds
in a story set a century after the events of Twilight Princess.
Eventually, a single player version of the game was released with the remastered Four
Swords Anniversary edition, which was free to download for the Nintendo DS and 3DS, and
even included new stages that were inspired by the original Legend of Zelda title, A Link
to the Past, and Link’s Awakening.
But these days.
Nintendo no longer offers the game for download, and unfortunately, was only available for
two short time spans – the first being between September 2011 and February 2012, and the
second for only a week in 2014.
2 PT PT, aka Playable Teaser, was a demo for the
next instalment to the Silent Hill franchise, titled Silent Hills.
And it was really, really good.
Co-directed by hideo Kojima and Guerillmo Del Toro, players would walk through a looping
L shaped hallway in a suburban home filled with horrors and puzzles to solve.
Despite being a short length, it was critically praised, with some critics even calling it
one of the best horror games of all time.
Imagine what it could have been!
When the game was cancelled by Konami, and Kojima left the company, PT was taken down
off of the Playstation Store, the playable teaser was gone for good.
Some people even went around selling their PS4s that had PT installed on it for quite
a good chunk of change.
1 Upsilon Circuit Upsilon Circuit has a crazy concept – it’s
a game that if your character dies in it, you can never play the game again.
While it’s not unheard of for a game to involve a permadeath – in which, your character
dies and therefore you can never play as them (or with them) again in the game (looking
at you, all of my deceased companions in Skyrim), a title in which you can no longer access
the game AT ALL is something that’s a little terrifying.
But oh so intriguing.
So what exactly is Upsilon Circuit?
It’s a fantasy RPG that plops you and 7 other players into a single server, and each
contestant explores the overworld and generated dungeons in search of something called the
Dream Tech Crystals.
You fight monsters, avoid traps and compete with the opposing team – each team is made
up of four players.
And, another interesting factor – when you get EXP, the audience watching the game gets
to choose what to level up on your skill tree.
The creators behind the title eventually pulled their Indiegogo campaign to fund the development
of the game, stating that they didn’t want players to have to pay for a game that ultimately
would be free to play.
They switched to a patreon instead, and have since decided that they need to revisit the
title and give it an overhaul, all while working on other smaller games in the meantime.
But they promised that despite the overhaul, the core concept of perma-perma death will
remain a part of it.
There we have it friends!
What other games can you think of are titles we’ll never be able to play again?
Give us a shout in those comments below and let us know!
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In the meantime though, thanks for watching friends!
I’ll catch you all in the next video!