9 Indie Video Games That SAVED Doomed Franchises
1. Desperados Became Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun
Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive was a 2001 wild west-themed real-time strategy game wherein you played a group of cowboy-type folk out rustle up a bounty on a legendary train robber.
Bounty hunter John Cooper gathers a few friends and allies to claim said bounty. Thanks to a stealth system modelled after the 1998 game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, the player uses a tactical approach to complete various story-progressive missions by utilizing each character's unique specialties.
Desperados was developed by Spellbound Entertainment which went belly-up in 2012 while developing the fourth game in the series, called Desperados Gangs. This left the series in limbo with the last official entry being 2007's Helldorado - which received abysmal reviews with its nigh-impossible difficulty cited as a pretty significant factor.
This is where a small German developer with an adorable company name, Mimimi Games, comes in. They were able to create a Desperados-like game set in a fantasy realm modelled after Feudal Japan.
In the end the resulting game, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, was so good, THQ Nordic, who acquired the rights to the Desperados IP in 2013, had Mimimi develop the first Desperados game since 2007. The critically acclaimed Desperados III finally came out earlier in 2020.