10 Awesome Video Games You Can't Play Anymore

With Sony confirming that a digital-only PS5 will be available by the end of the year, the march towards digitalisation in the medium continues. Of course, when it comes to convenience, digital is king, with players having a whole library of titles to choose from without ever having to leave their living room. However, it's important to remember that the decline of physical software does come at a price for the future of video games.

While still not without its own issues, physically playing games on their original hardware has remained a viable method for ensuring that classic gaming experiences can be relieved for decades to come.

Emulation has long been considered the last bastion of video game preservation in lieu of second-hand hardware but even that isn't necessarily safe as a gaming archive. This has been demonstrated on several occasions by companies like Nintendo declaring war on ROM sites and actively cracking down on archivists attempting to preserve the art form's history by slapping them with multi-million dollar lawsuits in order to 'protect' their intellectual property.

Some games have already experienced this sorry fate, and are now all but resigned to the memories of those who enjoyed them contemporaneously.

Arguably the most famous example of a game being removed from circulation, Flappy Bird emerged seemingly out of nowhere and became one of the biggest gaming sensations of the early 2010s.

Reductively simplistic? Yes. A product of media hype? Probably.

Regardless, Flappy Bird at its core was a ridiculously addictive, and actually quite fun experience that had gamers of all kinds glued to their phones attempting to set new high scores. In January 2014 it reigned supreme as the most downloaded free app on the App Store and fans seemingly couldn't get enough of the yellow bird.

Then, just as quickly as it emerged in the public consciousness, it was gone.

Creator Dong Nguyen removed the game from both the App Store and the Google Play Store without warning in February 2014, resulting in a false demand emerging for phones that had the game installed that bordered on mass-hysteria levels of panic.

Of course, the barebones nature of the game meant that thousands of side-scrolling copies sprung up in its absence hoping to recapture the audience that Flappy Bird left behind, but none would come close to achieving the same level of popularity.