10 Popular Video Games Developers Abandoned

While the days of burying cartridges in the desert (looking at you, Atari) are long gone, that doesn't mean developers don't continue to call it quits on their games, albeit in a rather less ignominious manner than in the 1980s. It's pretty difficult to dump the internet into a landfill site, after all, and if anybody tried to pull such a stunt, Reddit would be all over it in seconds.

Developers inevitably hit bumpy roads on their journeys through a game's life cycle, be it licensing or monetary issues, superior competition or simply creating a buggy, unfixable mess which they had the audacity to charge people money for alpha testing. Rather than spending further time working to iron out these problems, sometimes it's easier to concede defeat and give up on games as a bad job.

Then again, some games achieve wild popularity, media coverage and player bases, but are still abandoned for various reasons. Sometimes it's after a few years, but occasionally they get dropped faster than a General Studies A-level, despite being infinitely more interesting and arguably more useful.

The list of instances is innumerable. However, the word count is not. The following examples provide a selection of the myriad circumstances that lead to a game disappearing off the shelves and into the murky recesses of forgotten things, alongside old exercise equipment, every single one of our New Year's resolutions, and the Cheeky Girls.

Nintendo has a history of being spoilsports. They have frequently flagged Let's Plays as copyright and refused television programmes the rights to showcase their games; their biggest acts of misery, however, are - perhaps understandably - the curbing of unofficial third-party license uses.

Pokémon has always been a common culprit, both in gaming and beyond - in 2014, an artisan plant pot charmingly inspired by Bulbasaur was forced to stop production, to the disappointment of both its designer and practitioners of horticulture. The creator of Pokémon Prism, a ROM hack of Crystal, claimed to have received a cease-and-desist order just months before its December 2016 release, following eight years of work.

One of the most ambitious unofficial projects was Pokémon Uranium, created entirely within RPG Maker XP and released in August 2016. It featured an original score and storyline, complete with 200 species of Pokémon, 150 of which were original designs. Among these was an exclusive "Nuclear" type, created by an accident central to the game's events.

Sadly, the developer deleted all links to the download of this impressive creation, following numerous DMCA letters from angry lawyers. Presumably, Nintendo was annoyed that somebody had created a game better than many of their own Poké-offerings.

Official development was promptly discontinued, but not before Uranium had garnered over one and a half million downloads. Thankfully, community-driven updates kept the game alive for those who were lucky (or mischievous) enough to own a copy, with the most recent patch being October 2018, over two years after its lamentably short-lived release.