8 Video Game Reboots That Failed TWICE

Reboots are the easiest way to refresh a franchise that's either been inactive for too long or, in more desperate cases, has lost its shine for one reason or another. If your series has become stale, or dropped a critical or commercial bomb, then one way to pull out of the nosedive is to change course entirely. How about a fresh start?!

The problem is that reboots are notoriously tough to get right. You need to differentiate your new product from the old, whilst also retaining enough of the pre-existing core to appeal to what made it great in the first place. Ergo, a reboot really should be considered one of the more risky moves you can make.

After all, you don't want to reboot a reboot. If you asked players to trust in the process once before and messed it up, the same thing could happen all over again.

This list will look at just that; video game franchises that decided to clean the slate only to make a total mess of the opportunity and then managed to do it all over again.

The stark contrast between the confidence in the identity of Silent Hill during its late 90s and early 2000s heyday and everything that followed is something to behold. And despite ten years of entries that (at best) narrowly missed the mark, in 2014 things were looking up when the intriguing, shadowdropped demo P.T. was revealed to be the next Silent Hill game.

Helmed by industry legend Hideo Kojima, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro and starring Norman Reedus; P.T.’s terrifying scares and mysterious demeanour set the internet ablaze. Of course, the only way that P.T. failed was in weathering the storm that was the breakdown in the relationship between Kojima Productions and Konami. The game was infamously cancelled and a decade later remains the biggest “what if” in gaming. 

With the bar set so high that Konami feared to go anywhere near it for eight years, the franchise would need to really leap to claw back some trust from the public. In October 2022, the company announced half a dozen new Silent Hill products including the next mainline entry, a new motion picture, a remake of the beloved Silent Hill 2…

But the first into the hands of the public - and the first since P.T.’s cancellation - was Silent Hill Ascension; an interactive drama series bloated with microtransactions and, of all things, a battlepass. This painfully wrought animated series was Silent Hill’s biggest point-and-laugh moment; an embarrassment of poor decision-making, least of which was the fact that new episodes would launch weekly for several months, long after people had mentally checked out. 

The last anyone ever really heard of the game was GenVid developers denying the usage of AI in their scriptwriting. Which, if true, just means you wrote a terrible script.