Remembering the games that didn’t survive

This is a running catalog. Every so often we add an entry: a mechanic, a genre, a way of telling a story in a game that briefly existed, found a small devoted audience, and then quietly stopped getting made.

Not out of nostalgia — out of inventory. A form that lost popularity isn’t necessarily a form that failed. Often it was good at something the market simply stopped paying for, and that something is still sitting there, unclaimed.

A few we keep coming back to:

• The text adventure’s trust in description over depiction.
• The full-motion-video game’s willingness to be a little embarrassing.
• The early-2000s “walking sim,” before it had a name or a defense.
• The adventure game’s patience with a player who is simply stuck.

Some of these died of cost, and cost is exactly what a generative pipeline changes. Some died of fashion, and fashion comes back around. A few deserved to die. The work is telling which is which — and that’s a research question, not a wave of nostalgia.

If there’s a forgotten form you think we should log, write to us. We read every one.