5 Incredible Fan-Made Video Games Killed By Legal Action
4. Streets Of Rage Remake
Streets Of Rage is perhaps the definitive side-scrolling beat-em-up, a genre that dominated gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s before vanishing almost without trace in the middle of the decade.
Brutally unforgiving in their difficulty, all three instalments of Sega’s series sold strongly on the Megadrive, but neither a Saturn or Dreamcast follow-up ever emerged and it seemingly became a casualty of the company’s switch from console manufacturer to third party games developer for others.
A Spanish developer spent the best part of eight years creating a new game that mashed up the best elements from each entry in the trilogy, creating over 100 stages, 19 characters, 64 enemies and a 76-song soundtrack without reverse engineering or reusing a single piece of Sega’s source code.
It was a herculean effort that wowed all those who got to experience it with the exception of its original developers, who instantly began efforts to remove all trace of it from the internet.
Thankfully, it’s still relatively easy to find and download, with Sega’s interest having seemingly dwindled after they profited on a re-release of the trilogy themselves on Xbox Live Arcade. They’ve since followed that up with a long-awaited sequel, Streets Of Rage 4, which slipped under the radar somewhat despite boasting online co-op.
Perhaps fans didn’t want to reward them in the wake of their previously punitive actions…