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What are some of your favorite "lost" games?
By "lost", I mean games that have been lost to time--games that you would not be able to play now, even if you wanted to.
It could be because you cannot currently get a copy of the game (through legitimate means), or your own copy is not able to run since the tech has moved on. Perhaps the game's servers have been shut down or the multiplayer base has died out. Or, perhaps the game's development took it in a different direction and you're left hankering for an older build.
The Lego website used to have all sorts of Flash or Java games back in the day, some of which were really good. Some of the stand-outs at the time:
Somewhere there's an archive with a lot of the old Lego games (including the Bionicle RPG!), and many of the more standalone ones are playable, but the weird engines and server-side elements of Backlot and Stormrunner respectively has meant I've never been able to play them since those days.
Bio Media project is a pretty awesome site, I forgot they added online versions of the games instead of just the downloadable archives. Too bad many of the ones I liked(junkbot, worldbuilder, spybot nightfall incident) are shockwave instead of flash. Not even sure if I could get a browser to support that.
But I had forgotten about the amazing, Mars Mission: Crystal Alien Conflict which is at flash.
Microsoft provides virtual machines of Windows 7 with IE 8 for "testing purposes" (seriously, that's all the EULA says); I tested Junkbot, and it seemed to work absolutely fine – it literally prompts you to install Shockwave, you click yes a few times, and it's done – but you should go ahead and test the others and check that you can get them to work too :)
Holy shit, you just gave me a Ratatouille-esque nostalgia flashback. I used to play the fuck out of those games and totally forgot about them until now. Also: Lego Island and Lego Racers. I still have the soundtrack from Lego Racers permanently ingrained into my memory.
E: AND THE LEGOLAND THEME PARK SIMULATOR AHHHHHHHHHHH
Oh man, I totally forgot about that Backlot game. I remember playing that game during summers at home as a kid. I also remember it hitting shockwave errors and it losing all my progress. 🙁
On the same Lego topic: the Lego Island games! Those were awesome as well. Probably doesn't stand up to the test of time/skill to go back and enjoy though.
Lego needs to turn Spybot into a mobile game.
You could try rebuilding it now with your current programming knowledge (:
Would archive.org help?
Oh man, this hits too close to home. All of my original software projects from when I was little are lost. I'd give my left arm to see those HyperCard stacks, text adventures, Kid Pix animations, Widget Workshop builds, and World Builder games again.
So THAT'S what it was! I have vivid memories of creating primitive binary flip/flops, adders, and so on in some weird program as a kid, but could never remember what it was actually called or if I was confusing it for something else.
Yes! I've managed to scratch that particular nostalgia itch a bit by downloading it from the Macintosh Garden abandonware site and running it in SheepShaver (which someone else mentioned earlier in this thead). What I really miss is all the stuff I built with it when I was a kid, but a fresh start is fun too. It's probably for the best that I can't revisit that stuff as an adult anyway, haha.
I used to play Word Munchers, Number Munchers and Cross Country Canada (Oregon Trail in Beaver's clothing) on the Apple II in elementary school (~1994).
WM and NM were great educational games, but CCC blew my mind. You mean, I can type 'hit dashboard' while sitting in my big rig truck and the game will give me the response 'ouch!'?
Incredible.
CCC was amazing. And you would always end up getting into an accident after picking up a hitchhiker.
Oh man, I forgot about CCC. I miss that game.
City of Heroes.
It was a heavily flawed game, but I loved it anyway. The movement powers, the progression system, everything. The game had a healthy RP community, and no game has come even close to the sheer amount of fashion options that CoH had.
There's a few emulator/spiritual successor projects underway, but progress on that front is almost non-existent. Champions Online is the closest thing to it still available, but that game is just a poor MTX-ridden imitation of it.
City of Heroes was the pinnacle of MMOs, the champion of the genre. Nothing rivaled the freedom you had in creating a character, by virtue of the number of costume options you had (I'm not at liberty to say how many, but it seemed like an infinity.) If there's any justice, our fans will triumph, and our exalted City of Heroes will rise in victory!
The oldschool mac game Munchies brings back a lot of memories. It's freeware, but I can't figure out an environment where it works.
Just the soundtrack is enough for me to get hyped.
You're this knock-off Pac-man dude moving around with your mouse eating food and avoiding utensils and skulls. If you find pea pods you can use those to shoot with. Salt and pepper modify the shots.
True classic, much like the original lemmings game.
It's been a decade since I've looked into it, but I once had a roommate that was telling me how much he wanted to play the classic MacOS versions of Oregon Trail, Day of the Tentacle, etc, so I set up SheepShaver for him. It seems I needed to find a copy of the System 9 floppy disks, and a system ROM, but I remember it working well once I got it set up.
Ironfell was an online mmorts that has now gone defunct. It was largely made and operated by a single guy and it wasn't really profitable for him. It had quite a few fairly active players, and I had played it for around 4 years or so (with periods of inactivity of course). It went through 3 iterations, fixing various large scale issues, but ultimately failed. There was a particular player that took a toll on the game due to botting, being very active, fighting players until they left a certain alliance or the game, and maybe a few other things (but there is a lot of drama there). I'll admit that I was allied with him towards the end (if you played this game, my username here is not a coincidence).
I loved that broken game and all those jerks that played it. Thank you DavidC
Holy shit, I remember playing that! I didn't realise it had been shut down :(
Light gun games! I specifically miss Duck Hunt for NES, Virtua Cop and Area 51 for Sega Saturn, and House of the Dead 2 for Dreamcast. This whole genre of games was obsoleted by the move away from cathode ray TVs. Even if you have the original console and peripheral hardware, they just won't work unless you also have a CRT. To my knowledge no recent attempts to recreate the experience come even close, because they're based on motion tracking instead of actually sampling what's visible onscreen where the peripheral is pointed.
There was an arcade near me with Area 51 that used to get so many of my quarters growing up. When I bought a Guncon and Time Crisis, I remember thinking about how much money I'd eventually save because I only had to pay once!
I hadn't thought about it until your post, but light gun games could almost be considered a lost genre (or soon to be, once old hardware dies out).
Definitely. The emulation scene has brought new life to a lot of classic games, but this is one niche that I don't think it'll be able to save. You feel a special kind of despair when you successfully boot up the Duck Hunt ROM and then realize you can't do a thing with it. The laughing dog has recently been meme-orialized online but I think its days in the public consciousness are numbered. There aren't many places left where you can actually play the game, I know I haven't seen it in the flesh in probably 20 years.
The Ship
Technically it's still playable, but it's only fun with other human beings, and the player pool is basically non-existent
Everyone is a randomized person on a 20s-era cruise ship. Each person is assigned a person to kill. So you have to find and kill your quarry without your own hunter killing you. This is complicated by:
Also SourceForts, a Source engine team-based game that proceeds in alternating build and CTF phases, where you have to build a fort using panels and boxes. It also had classes so some people could choose to be engineers to help repair the fort during the CTF phase
The Ship was a great game. I didn't understand how good it was until I played it at a LAN party. It's a very interesting game that's very nuanced, and I think that's why it didn't do well. Spy Party is a kind of similar idea that's only two players but has a very nuanced appeal to it.
I feel like Spyparty would be a little too much, stress-wise, but yeah I can see the similarities.
That was a great game. I remember it was the first RTS I had ever seen with squad-based units (rather than a single model representing a unit, it had many models in a formation). I thought it was so cool how you could see a unit's health based on how many models were left. I also vividly remember the cave troll unit. It looked really good.
Dune II from 1992 is the first RTS I can remember doing that. They only did it for the infantry units though IIRC.
I used to play a computer game called Harry The Handsome Executive in the late '90s and I remember it being pretty fun. Sort of like Office Space transformed into a video game. I hadn't even thought about it for years until I saw this thread.
I played that one too! Every time I scoot my swivel chair away from my desk I think of it. It's amazingly still available on the original developer's site but they have the audacity to charge $20 to purchase it.
Ambrosia was one of my favorite game companies of the 90s but it baffles me why they retain such a rigid distribution policy for titles that are for all intents and purposes obsolete.
My favorite lost games are not lost because I can't physically play them. They are lost because as an adult I just don't find the same games fun anymore. It's always terrible when I find a copy of the old pc games I used to love and then I start playing them only to find out they are too easy and kind of boring.
An old Minecraft ripoff flash game called Block Miner. I used to play it in the early 2010s because my Pentium 4 couldn't really run Minecraft.
Day of Defeat, before the Source re-design. I don't know if that game was as good as i remember, but I just really miss the clan guys and the tournaments we got into back then. Seemed like after the Source version everything fell apart and now I'm too old and rusty for FPS games.
I also loved some of the old Half-Life 1 mods like Natural Selection and Battlegrounds (not PUBG, it was American Revolution line battles).
There's a whole mess of Activision PC games I loved from the late 90's, early 00's that were too early for digital distribution and still haven't made it to those platforms. Notably, Heretic 2, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, Elite Force 2, Heavy Gear, and Heavy Gear 2. I'm guessing they're largely stuck in licensing hell, but it's a bummer that they haven't made it to GOG yet.
I also have fond memories of games lost when Gathering of Developers went under, like Heavy Metal FAKK2, KISS: Psycho Circus (surprisingly good and I'm not a KISS fan), and Nocturne.
I've got the discs for all this stuff, but the last thing I want to do is buy a disc drive to load them and go through the work of trying to get them running on a modern PC. But I'm more than willing to toss $10 at GOG for most them again.
Arcade games in general are getting harder to find. Luckily there's been a small resurgence with Dave and Busters and the like.
Also Star Wars Galaxies. There are numerous emulated servers supporting various features but none are complete and the community is just not there anymore especially being so divided.
Fantasy Online
A very basic browser game that for some reason I really enjoyed. I never got into RPG's, nor was I really a big fan of browser-based games. But the simplicity of Fantasy Online, from it's basic game play mechanics to 'old school' visual design, drew me in. I wasn't looking for something super in-depth, just something to play from time to time. It had a relatively decent online community as well. It was eventually bought by Newgrounds, who sadly shut it down a few years ago and is no longer available to play.
There's a new game in development by fans of FO, but honestly from what I've seen it doesn't look like something that will make me feel like I'm playing FO again.
ItsWar
ItsWar is/was another browser game somewhat similar to Utopia or Earth: 2025. A lot of strategy went on in each team's IRC channel, so you could communicate in realtime with your team to let them know what's going on. As far as I can tell the website is offline and has been for some time.
Section 8 is the only that comes to mind. It's not unplayable today, and it actually got a sequel, but it's largely a multiplayer game that never got popular. I had a lot of fun playing it but it seemed like a short wave before no one was playing it.
It's not too big of a loss. Many of the same mechanics that I thought were fun are present in some modern shooters like Titanfall.
One game I never seem to see revived on modern Nintendo consoles is The Guardian Legend, and I think it's a shame that the only way to play these days is to either hunt down a working cartridge and console or download a bootleg ROM.
Originally I was going to post about Shores of Hazeron, but as far as I can tell that game is actually alive and well, even if it looks like you have to pay to play now.
A game that is definitely dead is PerfectCompetition.net. It was kind of an MMO business sim, and I loved it. I even purchased the premium membership that gave you extra starting cash each round, which was good because I was young and awful at games. Some material about the site is preserved at it's original domain, though it appears that it may be replaced soon.
EDIT: There's also some captures on Wayback Machine if you'd like to check that out. It was all text based, with a grid map.
Echo Night Beyond is a PS2 horror game that has a rendering system so obtuse that there is no emulator that can display it properly. The ghosts aren't ALWAYS supposed to be invisible.
I don't think I would personally consider any PS2 game to be 'lost to time' because PS2 systems are really easy to find and soft modding is pretty easy with a network adapter.
This is a bit of nostalgia mainly - but the online Pokemon RPGs. There were loads - and while game play might not have been great (exceptions were there - like Omega), the sense of community in them is something I've never been able to replicate. It was a very tight knitted community of sometimes just 50 or so people - up to thousands, while maintaining the tight-knittedness. I've lost contact with most of them - and the RPGs are far harder to find today. You can still find big ones with loads of people (Eclipse, Deluge etc.) but it was the tiny ones that were great. Big ones don't have that same sense of community.
/rant