As the prominence of physical media continues to dwindle, we’re increasingly reliant on digital storefronts to buy and enjoy games. A study published on Zenodo found that around 87 percent of games are no longer playable unless you scrounge around for a physical copy and the right hardware. No matter how great a game is, there’s no guarantee it’ll be properly preserved.
This is the norm for consoles, where backwards compatibility is never a guarantee and selling an old system usually means losing access to its associated games. But these games still live on PCs as abandonware. While it’s not always legal to chase down a download, these games are still worth celebrating—even if it’s been a minute since they’ve seen the light of day officially.
To commemorate the favorites of yesteryear, here are some great PC games you can’t buy anymore unless you’ve got an old disc or the right port.
6
Blur
The team behind Metropolis Street Racer and Project Gotham Racing had earned a reputation for their excellent arcade racers by the time they released Blur, which eagerly abandoned whatever trappings of reality lingered in the studio’s formula. It brought the hectic, item-slinging action of Mario Kart from Nintendo consoles onto Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.
It was still graphically sleek and leaned photorealistic for the time, but it emphasized a unique scoring mechanic where racers attracted fans by playing wildly. Combine that with upgrades like mines and shields, and you’ve got a superlatively arcadey combat racer that prioritizes chaotic fun above all else.
The game was a commercial flop despite its ambitions, and was delisted after developer Bizarre Creations closed its doors in 2011. It released in a crowded month for games—the same month as Super Mario Galaxy 2, Skate 3, and a visually similar Disney-published racer called Split/Second, in fact.
5
The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Almost certainly the best Simpsons game—the arcade beat ’em up is the only one that gives me any pause—The Simpsons: Hit & Run is a lighthearted racing game with a pseudo-open world, styled after the Grand Theft Auto games of its time.
If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll be pleased that it’s packed to the gills with callbacks and references. Even if you’re not, it’s a surprisingly challenging and robust racer with a competitive speedrunning scene.
It’s best known for its GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox versions, but it may surprise you that it also had a Windows release. Like many licensed titles, keeping it available on digital storefronts comes with a bit of extra red tape. It remains a childhood favorite for many, though, as the closest thing to GTA their parents let them play. Hopefully, it’ll get a re-release at some point for the sake of preservation.
4
American McGee’s Alice
The Alice platformers comprise a decidedly atmospheric, extremely Y2K take on the likes of Spyro the Dragon. The catch is, you get a much grimmer story and a much bigger arsenal. Alice can toss explosive jack-in-the-boxes, roll dice to summon random monsters, or just chuck a knife at the nearest walking playing card that looks at her funny.
Built using an adapted version of Quake III Arena‘s engine, it very much plays like a shooter despite its linear platforming core. The original 2000 release was exclusive to PC, but it came to macOS a year later. A decade after that, it was ported to PS3 and Xbox 360.
The game has popped on and off digital storefronts for years, and it’s not exactly clear why. American McGee has long since moved on from the series, and its sequel was a flop, which may explain EA’s disinterest in keeping the game available. Besides, the long-rumored third title in the series isn’t showing any signs that it’ll resurface soon.
But the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, remains readily playable on all platforms—and the Xbox version still comes bundled with the original game as a free DLC. If it’s the original PC release you’re after, though, you’ll want a disc.
3
The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth I & II
Licensed games always run into the same trouble, it seems, and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth is no exception, lying dormant for years.
The Peter Jackson films have a surprising legacy of good games, but none match the excellence of the original RTS duology that sees massive armies go head-to-head with base building and hero units galore. Scry on enemies with a Palantir, find and wrest the One Ring from Gollum mid-battle, and even create your own custom hero units in the sequel.
As it would with any game so tied to a film and an intellectual property as closely guarded as Tolkien’s acclaimed novels, it’d take a healthy amount of paperwork to get this game onto digital storefronts.
Both games released on Windows a few years after the film trilogy completed, with only the sequel getting a console port to Xbox 360. Despite the game’s status as abandonware, it still has a pretty sizable player base and modding scene online. Hopefully, we’ll see a return of the king (of licensed RTS) one of these days—but for now, the game is a relic of the past.
2
Prince of Persia
It’s true that you can buy Prince of Persia games from all sorts of eras, from the recent Metroidvania-styled The Lost Crown to Assassin’s Creed precursor The Sands of Time. But that original Apple II version is nowhere to be found on modern PCs.
Nor is the SNES version. Or the Genesis version, or the DOS version, or the Amiga version, or the TurboGrafx-16 version… if you hadn’t guessed, this game remains one of the most ported games of all time, with each of those early versions coming with its own quirks, visual style, and additions.
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Even if Ubisoft were to bring the classic game back into the limelight and not a modern reimagining, it’s hard to imagine how they could approach it in a way that captures the breadth and depth of all these different versions.
But as perhaps the first weighty, cinematic platform game that would later inspire titles like Blackthorne and Oddworld, it certainly deserves to be commemorated and accessible simply for history’s sake.
1
Need for Speed
Like Prince of Persia, the classic entries in the Need For Speed series have been superseded by a bunch of modern remakes with souped-up visuals and reimagined worlds. You can buy games called Need For Speed Most Wanted and Need For Speed Hot Pursuit on Steam, but these are thoroughly different from the originals, which are nowhere to be found.
Further back, classics like Need For Speed II: Special Edition have no such current-day analog, and to this day sit in the abandonware bin with most of their contemporaries. These games popped up on all sorts of consoles over the years, but on most modern digital storefronts, they’ve been outright replaced with their remakes.
It makes perfect sense that EA would choose to peddle the newer, shinier titles where possible, but it’s hard to swallow given how influential the classic games are to this day. I’ve had a fair bit of fun with the newer games in the series, but they aren’t such definitive steps up that the old games should be lost to history.
I understand it’s no easy feat to keep games playable, and I’m certainly not above the convenience offered by digital storefronts dishing out software licenses. But it’s a tough pill to swallow that you rarely truly own anything you buy digitally, and the games I love today may be delisted and inaccessible tomorrow.
With the way legacy series get wrapped up in ownership rights disputes and drama, like Konami’s notorious breakup with Kojima, it’s a miracle you can find so many old games on storefronts like GOG. But as these games still have communities around them, speedrunning scenes, and continue to influence the industry we’re in now. So, here’s hoping they find a way to resurface in the future.
