10 Video Game Franchises Where Nobody Played The Original

A long-running video game series is a miraculous thing, since gaming history is littered with franchises that briefly flourished before perishing alone and forgotten. I mean, has anyone seen or heard from Gex the Gecko recently?

This makes the continued survival of big titles like Resident Evil or Tomb Raider all the more impressive, since they’ve been able to make the leap from generation to generation while giving fans what they continually crave.

There’s also likely to be a lot of experimentation with formula over the years, and thanks to improvements in gameplay and graphics, it’s often a sequel that’s considered the best of the series.

In fact, the sequel can be so impressive or groundbreaking it can overshadow the original completely, to the point where fans consider it the 'real' starting point.

The original can become something of a footnote in the franchise’s history, with new players skipping it and going for the shiny new model. In some extreme cases, it’s forgotten entirely.

This is a sad state of affairs, and here we’ll take a look at ten franchises where most fans haven’t even played the original entry...

Despite being the granddaddy of the FPS genre, Wolfenstein 3D never became the mega-hit Doom was. It wasn’t until Wolfenstein: The New Order that the series garnered the success it always deserved, thanks to a surprisingly compelling story and great run and gun action.

There’s a good chance most gamers have never touched Wolfenstein 3D, but the odds are even better they didn’t know about the very first Castle Wolfenstein.

That’s right, the series stretches all the way back to 1981, where the original was a stealth-based action game, seeing you guide a soldier through the eponymous castle while hiding or shooting down Nazi soldiers.

It looks insanely crude by modern standards, but the game was praised for its design and strategic gameplay.