10 Beloved Gaming Franchises That Just Disappeared

6. Jet Set Radio

There seems to be a pretty strong pattern of game franchises that started out on Sega's doomed Dreamcast suffering an ignoble fate, like the previous entry Shenmue (and does anyone remember Chu Chu Rocket?) and the sublime graffiti/rollerblading neon-wonder that was Jet Set Radio. A truly original game for its time, JSR had players skitching and grinding across a vibrantly coloured Tokyo as a host of weird and wonderful taggers attempting to make their mark on the world by first spray-painting their graffiti on bus stops and alleyways and then taking down totalitarian fascist police states. (Try hunting down another game with something even close to that premise...er, discounting Marc Ecko's Getting Up. Which came out after JSR anyway, so shush.) What could have come off as oddball and inaccessible to many ended up becoming a cult favourite, the addictive game loop of trying to get a tag finished within a time limit or before the cops arrived to beat seven bells out of you and zooming off to the next one appealed to gamers so much that Sega made a sequel - Jet Set Radio Future - for Xbox in 2002...and then promptly forgot their brilliant franchise existed. So why haven't there been any more games in the twelve intervening years? Some of the characters have appeared in Sega's tennis and racing games, so they must still think they have some appeal, and a Jet Set Radio Revival would most certainly be warmly welcomed by gamers. A modern twist on the formula could work wonders, what with open world gaming being as popular and potentially vast as it is today - just imagine a city built to true scale that could be sprayed all over - and the options for players to create their own tags would be endless with the option to upload and manipulate images on next-gen consoles, Forza-style.