10 Beloved Gaming Franchises That Just Disappeared

Remember when everyone was trying to work out what Crash Bandicoot's "hum-le-gah" sound was meant to be? Those were the days.

By Mark Allen /

Nostalgia can be a powerful thing. For some reason or another a great many of us are utterly convinced that things were just better in the past, and when talking about video games, there are some good points to be made - especially when many are the game series' with only one or two entries that are loved by legions of fans simply up and vanished into thin air one day. Sometimes this is because developers go belly up, or they decide to take the company in a different direction, or the rights move to a publisher that doesn't have any idea what to do with the franchise, or - even worse - they just decide that nobody wants any more of that game. It's understandable for some franchises that are less profitable for others, but in an industry where brand recognition is possibly more crucial to a game's success than any other medium (Mario, Sonic and Lara, we're looking at you), it seems faintly ridiculous to toss aside a successful series for any minor reason. It might seem strange to lament the lack of sequels for a game, as movie sequels are often greeted with cynicism, but the fact is that games developers are far better than film studios at improving on an original product, meaning a phenomenon exists (almost solely) within gaming where the first game in a series is rarely the best. What then, are the games series' without recent instalments that deserve to be revived? Here are ten we think should make the cut...