10 Awesome Video Games You Can't Play Anymore
6. The Movies
The first of two games on this list from Lionhead Studios, The Movies was a highly innovative sim which allowed players to not only run a Hollywood film studio but also produce their own films and, upon release, even upload them to the game's official website.
There was nothing quite like The Movies when it released in 2005. YouTube hadn't yet become a cultural monolith, and Valve's Source Filmmaker software wouldn't release until 2012.
As both a sim and a creative tool, The Movies is absurdly enjoyable, at once serving as both a love letter to Hollywood and a tongue-in-cheek takedown of it - complete with a fantastic musical score from future Oscar nominee Daniel Pemberton.
But when The Movies' online services were shuttered in 2008, the game was also delisted from Steam and hasn't appeared on any official online storefronts ever since. Furthermore, even if you still own the original game disc, getting it working on Windows 10 PCs is a bit of a pain.
The Movies feels like the sort of game that would've flourished in the age of social media, with its vast pipeline for users to share their content, and so might've been just a few years too early to become a bonafide sensation in its own right.