Trivia games, i guess they could update the questions, but stuff that was once fairly common knowledge will now be more obscure.
Perhaps games that were attached to a celebrity who is now not very well known.
I guess licenses in general, various racing games have been delisted from online stores because the license for particular cars expired. And i feel like licensing issues for thing like film tie-ins might prohibit reissues.
I was going to say text adventures, but i can see there is an anthology of Zork on Steam. And i found this: Castle of Terror on Steam which is pretty obscure. I guess that indicates that the bar for re-issues on Steam is low enough that even game genres which have fallen out of favour can see re-releases.
There is a modern market for Text Adventures if they fit into a choose your own adventure format, like Hosted Games’ releases or those Vampire the Masquerade games. I think you could rerelease older games as long as you implement some rudimentary graphics (i.e. some colored text and maybe a half dozen backgrounds, less work than the Saturn port of Zork) and a guided mode that diminishes the ability to get stuck.
My go-to example of a game that only piracy will save is Wreckless/Double S.T.E.A.L. The publisher vanished decades ago and the rights are probably owned by an insurance company now.
With games where the current rightsholder of the game itself is unclear, I have to ask myself “Would Piko Interactive ever be interested in fishing out the rights for this?” and the answer is always “maybe???”
like 99.9% of games for microcomputers, swhether japanese or european. in a lot of cases, the companies involved haven’t existed for decades, in some cases there never even were companies, and the game was put out by one person using a psuedonym
just a quick vibe check: is “re-released officially” a good thing?
back in the “old days” when every console was a unique machine with pretty specific limitations and quirks, i was obsessed with differences between releases. no console could play exactly what you were getting on another console, so there were always differences.
nowadays… most of these types of “re-releases” i cynically dismiss out of hand. most of the games resold from older generations are using emulation (and the ones that aren’t are frequently enough bad ports, or have various weird issues).
assuming emulation: the emulator they are using is frequently enough shit, especially relative to the best examples available for free download. even the best retro packages are only occasionally as complete and optimized an experience as one can get using free emulators.
there are quite a few notable exceptions, of course. M2 and Hamster do good work. Atari 50 is about as good as these things get - that one featured a best-in-class bespoke Atari Jaguar emulator (though this is now also publicly available). that Disney Collection that included a remixed version of Aladdin? brilliant stuff… EGGCONSOLE… Virtua Racing for Switch… Maybe the 3D Sega Ages for 3DS, but we’re getting into basically remake territory there…
idk. i just wanted to share my cynicism - please freely ignore!
Sonic 3 did get re-released despite apparent licensing issues, but they had to take out all the songs with contributions from MJ’s keys player and replace them with reworked songs from the beta, yeah?
I agree with Frank Cifaldi that Atari 50 represents the way games should be re-released. They should contain context, either from internal company archives, or from researchers.
I disagree with this to the extent of the quality of the emulation software itself, when developed by companies who still exist. Sony has great PS1/2/P emulators. Nintendo’s emulators are all fine. MS has done an amazing job keeping the Xbox game experience consistent from the Xbone on.
I feel like the problem comes how legacy games are pitted against new releases in the marketplace. Nintendo’s happy to maintain their own Disney Vault, but with that system you only get access to the canon. The recent US case about games and libraries that ruled that you can either research games, or have fun playing them, but not both, is related to how we got here.
This video has a lot of examples where they did rerelease it & just change the music or sprites, but some are truly copyright hell. I timestamped the Ginga Ninkyoden part which is the most fun to watch (captions on)
i’d counter that these (Sony and Nintendo’s emulation solutions) are exemplary among anything short of the best-in-class examples i gave, and even they can be fairly described as “categorically inferior” to using free, often open-source emulators
The delisting of this one isn’t that mysterious, because it has licensed real cars and games with those have a limited shelf life before the license ends unfortunately.
