10 Industry-Defining Video Games That Are Nowhere To Be Seen

The generation of home consoles in the late 1990s and early 2000s produced a whole host of iconic characters, and here's another one. Spyro is the purple dragon that everybody loves, and is the main character another of those series that virtually everybody who owned a console played at some point.

At heart Spyro's adventures were puzzle-platformers mixed with occasional combat, but they were also fun collect-a-thons in a similar style to titles like Rare's Banjo-Kazooie. Usually, you're collecting Gems to unlock new areas, but sometimes you need to gather the occasional egg or dragonfly. And if you're really lucky, you might even get to go skateboarding.

Like so many, this series is another a casualty of the waning popularity disease. As with Crash Bandicoot, it did manage to navigate the jump into the Xbox 360-era and release a few titles, but these were not as successful as the originals whatsoever. 

The last main Spyro-fronted tale was Dawn of the Dragon in 2008, which admittedly introduced some interesting features such as different breath attacks and the ability to change characters, but fell short of expectations. Fortunately, he and some of his friends live on in Skylanders so he isn't gone for good, but as you can see above his current incarnation is a far cry from the original vision and charm of the character.