Time. Whether it’s the passage of or Crisis, we cannot escape its sands, as coarse and irritating as they may be. You can see this in how we look at games today. New games enter the zeitgeist and explode, then because 100 fewer people played it over a week, it’s a dead game. It’s so, so stupid. But these are some games that were genuinely massive at one point, but fell off harder than a leper from a horse, and now we’ll probably never see anything from them again.
Medal of Honor
There was a time in a pre-algorithm world when Medal of Honor was basically the military shooter. Yes, everything was black and white.
The series started on PlayStation in 1999, with Steven Spielberg coming up with the original concept after working on Saving Private Ryan. It was a huge success, quickly followed by the quite underrated Underground, before Allied Assault arrived on PC in 2002. Its Normandy landing became one of the defining FPS moments of the era, while Frontline brought its own version of D-Day to consoles just a few months later. Every 30something dude remembers the horror.
And these games were properly, properly massive. Frontline sold around 2.5 million copies in the US on PS2 alone, plus at least another 600,000 in the UK. On my playground, there was GTA, and then Medal of Honor. Rising Sun followed in 2003 and was another multimillion-seller. There were PC expansions, handheld versions and new games seemingly every year, including Pacific Assault, European Assault, Vanguard and Airborne. I did kinda lose track somewhere in the middle, not going to lie. By 2013, the series had reportedly shifted around 39 million copies.
But Medal of Honor also helped create the game that would eventually eat its lunch. Or like take the lettuce out of its sandwich, lick it, then slap them in the face. Several developers from Allied Assault left to form Infinity Ward and make Call of Duty, which honoured veterans for the decades to come from the #1 spot.
EA, of course, followed it there, rebooting Medal of Honor in 2010 with a present-day Afghanistan setting. And despite being largely forgotten now, that game still sold around five million copies. It was alright!
Then came Warfighter in 2012. It was bad! An absolute rushjob with nothing to it, sales disappointed EA, and the series basically disappeared overnight. EA has put everything on Battlefield since.
There was one very strange comeback with Respawn’s VR-only Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond in 2020, and it did kinda win an Oscar, which is a fun bit of trivia, but nothing since. For a series that once felt almost inseparable from first-person shooters, Medal of Honor has basically been driven out.
Driver
Before Grand Theft Auto III completely changed open-world driving games, there was Driver. Reflections’ original arrived in 1999 and basically let you live out 1970s car chases without the corruption charges, throwing undercover cop Tanner into open versions of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. It was a huge success, selling more than six million copies, and that opening car park tutorial probably prevented another six million people from ever seeing the rest of it. Not me! I’m a real gamer.
Driver 2 followed just a year later and went bigger. Maybe a bit worser. Tanner could now actually get out of his car and steal another one with all the grace of a reversing dump truck. It was technically ambitious to the point that the PlayStation could barely keep up, but that didn’t stop it selling millions either. For a brief period, Driver was one of gaming’s biggest driving franchises.
Then GTA III happened, and millions of teenagers became paramedics, taxi drivers, and just generally upstanding citizens overnight.
Driv3r eventually arrived in 2004 to combat it with a huge marketing campaign, Hollywood voice talent including Michael Madsen and Mickey Rourke, and expectations that it could properly compete with Rockstar. Instead, its buggy launch and notoriously poor on-foot sections did enormous damage to the series.
The franchise never completely disappeared. Parallel Lines followed in 2006, while Ubisoft eventually acquired Reflections and the Driver name. That gave us the absolute whipper of Driver: San Francisco in 2011, which ditched traditional car-jacking for the wonderfully strange Shift mechanic, allowing Tanner to possess other drivers around the city.
And then, that was basically it.
There were a couple of smaller mobile and handheld releases afterwards, with Driver: Speedboat Paradise arriving in 2015. But the last proper console Driver is now 15 years old. For a series that once sold millions and went head-to-head with Grand Theft Auto, Tanner still seems to be stuck in that parking lot.
Unreal
Look, ok, so there probably aren’t many forgotten game series whose name appears on the screen every time you boot up a brand-new AAA release. Unreal is absolutely everywhere in 2026 as the Unreal Engine, just not a-a-a-as a video game. Sorry, microstutters.
The original Unreal arrived on PC in 1998 from Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes, and immediately became a showcase for just how good a 3D game could look. I’d argue it maybe wasn’t as gripping as something like Quake, but technically it was genuinely impressive stuff. There was a story, but don’t worry about that.
It sold around 1.5 million copies, but things really took off with Unreal Tournament in 1999.
[diagonal wipe]Rather than worrying much about a campaign, it concentrated on multiplayer: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination and Assault, with excellent bots meaning you didn’t even need an internet connection. It went directly against Quake III Arena and became one of the defining multiplayer shooters on PC.
For the next few years, Unreal was everywhere. There was Unreal Tournament 2003, the absolute hall of famer UT2004, Unreal II, Unreal Championship on Xbox and eventually Unreal Tournament 3. By 2008, Epic said the wider franchise had sold more than 15 million copies.
But gradually, the technology underneath Unreal became far more valuable than making another one. Unreal Engine grew into one of the foundations of the entire games industry, while Epic eventually found a slightly more lucrative use for it with Fortnite.
Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007 remains the last completed mainline release. Epic started developing another Unreal Tournament in 2014, but work eventually stopped thanks to Fortnite and the game was never finished.
So Unreal certainly isn’t a forgotten name. It’s just easy to forget that Unreal Engine was named after an actual game when you’ve got Homer Simpson hitting the nae nae on Chappell Roan.
SOCOM
Online multiplayer on a console is completely unremarkable now, but on the PS2 it still felt like something you needed an engineering degree and your dad’s weird mate to get working. SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs was one of the games that convinced people it was pretty, pretty cool.
Released in 2002, SOCOM was developed by Zipper Interactive and became a major showcase for Sony’s PS2 Network Adapter. It was a tactical third-person shooter built around slower, more deliberate combat, with players commanding a four-man SEAL team through missions around the world. It even came bundled with a USB headset in some regions, allowing you to issue voice commands to your AI teammates and, more importantly, shout at actual people online.
It caught on big time. The first game sold more than three million copies, while SOCOM II became an even bigger deal online. By 2006, Sony said the series had sold more than seven million copies in North America alone, and during the PS2 era SOCOM was effectively one of PlayStation’s flagship multiplayer franchises.
Sony kept them coming pretty quickly too. SOCOM 3 and Combined Assault followed on PS2, while the PSP got its own Fireteam Bravo games. And apparently Man United were really into them. Players would bring their PSPs along on away trips and play SOCOM multiplayer together for a bit of team bonding.
By the PS3 era, though, things started going wrong. SOCOM: Confrontation launched with serious technical problems, while 2011’s SOCOM 4 pushed the series towards a more conventional action-shooter style. Its timing was spectacularly bad too, launching just days before the infamous PlayStation Network outage knocked Sony’s online service offline for weeks.
Zipper Interactive closed the following year, and that was basically that. Despite helping establish online multiplayer on PlayStation, SOCOM hasn’t had a new game since 2011.
The Getaway
When The Getaway arrived in 2002, it was very much A Big Deal. Developed by Team Soho, it swapped the usual fictional videogame city for a remarkably detailed recreation of London, with around 40 square kilometres of streets built using photographs and mapping data.
It was going for a gritty British crime-film feel, my China plate. There was no traditional HUD, with indicators on the cars showing you where to turn and your character recovering health by leaning against a wall. The story bounced between ex-criminal Mark Hammond and Flying Squad officer Frank Carter, but really it was just Lock Stock and Two Smoking DualShocks.
Reviews were fairly mixed, particularly because the controls were super clunky, but commercially it was enormous. The Getaway sold more than four million copies, making it one of the bestselling games on PS2, and every bloke who watched The Football Factory probably has strong feelings about it.
The pretty decent The Getaway: Black Monday followed in 2004 and popped up in Superbad, and the PSP got Gangs of London in 2006. More importantly, The Getaway 3 was announced for PS3 and used as an early technical showcase for the console, with footage of an incredibly detailed Piccadilly Circus appearing during Sony presentations, but The Getaway as an IP really just fizzled out.
Team Soho became part of London Studio, The Getaway 3 was eventually put on hold, and the series never returned. London Studio itself was closed by Sony in 2024.
Look, it’s easy to be lazy and say a good chance got away from Sony…but it really did. There were a tonne of cool of ideas here, but it couldn’t quite join the same club as GTA.
Midnight Club
Rockstar having another open-world driving series running alongside Grand Theft Auto sounds implausible now when they make one game a decade, but for most of the 2000s Midnight Club was massive. More than most people realise.
It started with Midnight Club: Street Racing in 2000, one of the PS2’s launch games in North America. Developed by Angel Studios, it dropped players into open versions of New York and London and let them race through the cities however they wanted. Knowing the streets, finding shortcuts and working out the quickest route between checkpoints was a huge part of it.
Then the series really took off. Midnight Club II added Paris alongside Los Angeles and Tokyo, before 2005’s Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition went all-in on the increasingly huge tuner culture of the era. Rockstar partnered with DUB Magazine, filled the game with licensed cars, bikes and ridiculous amounts of customisation, and rode the Fast and the Furious boom pretty well.
By 2008, Midnight Club: Los Angeles had become a properly lavish open-world racer, recreating a huge chunk of LA without loading screens. The series was a major seller too: Take-Two said in 2010 that Midnight Club had sold almost 13 million copies worldwide.
And then Rockstar just stopped making them.
It’s not exactly difficult to work out why. It’s the same reason why they stopped making more games. First off, Grand Theft Auto increasingly swallowed up a lot of what Midnight Club used to offer. GTA V and particularly GTA Online eventually had enormous car collections, extensive customisation, street racing and a constant stream of new vehicles. If Rockstar wanted to make some racing content, they already had millions of people sitting there waiting to play it, and pay for it with Shark Cards too.
The last substantial release was Midnight Club: Los Angeles Complete Edition in 2009, and there hasn’t been another game since.
Considering the series sold almost 13 million copies, and how good Midnight Club 3 and Los Angeles were, it’s still a shame that one of the biggest arcade racers of the 2000s basically got absorbed into GTA.
Resistance
Resistance was there right at the beginning of the PS3, and that’s pretty much where it died too.
Resistance: Fall of Man launched alongside the PS3 in 2006, coming from Insomniac Games while it was still best known for Spyro and Ratchet & Clank. It imagined an alternate 1950s where Britain had been invaded by the Chimera, mixing conventional weapons with wonderful bollocks from Mars Attacks,
It was a big early success. Fall of Man sold more than four million copies and it was one of the games you bought to show off your expensive new console. Its 40-player online multiplayer was impressive too, particularly this early in the generation.
Resistance 2 followed in 2008 and went much bigger. The Chimera invaded America, multiplayer jumped to 60 players, and there was even a separate eight-player co-op mode. For those first few years, Resistance genuinely looked like it might become PlayStation’s long-term answer to Halo.
Then came Resistance 3 in 2011. I’m a freak so it’s my favourite of the trilogy, with its darker road-trip structure, but it didn’t have the same commercial impact. By then Call of Duty was dominating shooters and Sony had plenty of competing franchises of its own.
There were handheld games too. Bend Studio made the surprisingly good Resistance: Retribution for PSP in 2009, while the Vita got the considerably less beloved Resistance: Burning Skies in 2012.
And that was it. Insomniac moved on, Sony never found another home for the series, and there hasn’t even been a remastered trilogy, which is weird really.
For something that once looked like a permanent PlayStation fixture, Resistance basically came and went within six years. These things aren’t black and white.
Black & White
But this is.
There was a period where putting Peter Molyneux’s name on a PC game was enough to make it feel like an event rather than a multi level marketing scheme, and Black & White might be the best example of it.
Released in 2001 by Lionhead Studios, Black & White was basically a game where you played as a god. You could pick up villagers, throw rocks around, perform miracles and gradually expand your influence across different islands. But the big attraction was your enormous creature, which could be trained by rewarding or punishing its behaviour. Treat it nicely and teach it to help people, or accidentally encourage it to start eating villagers. Oops.
Your creature’s appearance changed depending on its behaviour, while your temple and even the landscape around you could become brighter or considerably more sinister. There was barely any traditional interface either, with mouse gestures used to cast miracles and physically interacting with the world replacing loads of menus.
And Black & White was huge. Years of magazine coverage and Molyneux talking about its ambitious AI had created enormous expectations, and the game sold more than two million copies. It won plenty of awards too, and for a while that giant cow or ape staring back at you from screenshots was immediately recognisable to PC players.
An expansion, Creature Isle, followed in 2002, before Black & White 2 arrived in 2005. The sequel added much more city-building and warfare, followed by the Battle of the Gods expansion in 2006.
And that’s where Black & White ends.
Lionhead moved onto Fable before eventually closing in 2016, and the series has never received another sequel, remake or even a straightforward modern remaster.
For a game that was once used as proof that videogame AI was about to become ridiculously sophisticated, Black & White has basically become a piece of early-2000s PC history.
[zoom transition]MotorStorm
Few games sold the idea of the PS3 quite as effectively as MotorStorm. That infamous E3 2005 trailer of cars smashing through mud had people imagining what the new generation of consoles might look like.
[diagonal wipe]The actual game arrived alongside the PS3 in Europe in 2007, developed by Evolution Studios, and while it obviously didn’t quite look like that original target footage, it was still a fantastic showcase. Races threw bikes, rally cars, trucks and big rigs onto the same tracks, with different vehicles taking completely different routes.
It did extremely well too. The original MotorStorm sold more than three million copies, establishing another new PlayStation franchise almost immediately. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift followed in 2008, moving everything to a tropical island and adding monster trucks, split-screen multiplayer and tracks built around volcanic areas, jungle and water.
There was even MotorStorm: Arctic Edge for PSP and PS2 in 2009, before Evolution went considerably bigger with MotorStorm: Apocalypse in 2011. It had races taking place through a city that was actively collapsing around you, with buildings falling, roads breaking apart and earthquakes changing tracks mid-race.Pretty cool stuff.
Unfortunately, its timing was awful. Apocalypse arrived around the time of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, leading Sony to delay or cancel its release in several territories. It eventually came out, but never really got the chance to build the momentum of the earlier games.
The final release was the smaller downloadable MotorStorm: RC for PS3 and Vita in 2012, which wasn’t very good at all. Evolution moved onto Driveclub, which was actually very good, but they were eventually closed by Sony in 2016.
Despite being one of the games most closely associated with the PS3’s early years, MotorStorm hasn’t had a proper new entry in fifteen years. Do people just not like kinda silly arcadey racers anymore? Lemme see.
Lemmings
Lemmings escaped onto practically anything capable of displaying tiny green-haired people walking off cliffs for a good few years. But nobody even really mentions it anymore.
Developed by DMA Design, long before they became Rockstar North, the original Lemmings arrived in 1991. A stream of creatures blindly marched across the level, and you had to assign them jobs like digging, building, climbing or blocking to get enough of them safely to the exit. Like most workplaces before human rights, this also meant a lot of suicide.
The original was ported to more than 20 different platforms, from the Amiga and DOS to the Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy and even machines like the Acorn Archimedes. Estimates eventually put sales of Lemmings and its various versions into the millions, and its little green-haired characters became some of the most recognisable faces in gaming.
Sequels arrived constantly.
There was Oh No! More Lemmings, a name I will always love, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, All New World of Lemmings, 3D Lemmings and Lemmings Revolution, alongside various spin-offs and Christmas releases. Sony eventually acquired the rights through its ownership of Psygnosis and continued the series with new versions for PSP, PS2, PS3 and Vita.
But somewhere along the way, Lemmings went from gaming institution to the thing you sort of remembered on your Windows 95 that you didn’t understand before you just went ahead and booted up Doom. Just me?
The last traditional console entry was Lemmings Touch for Vita in 2014. There is actually still a Lemmings mobile game, originally released in 2018, so the franchise isn’t technically dead.
But compared with the early ’90s, when Lemmings seemed legally required to be ported to every computer in existence, its modern existence is a bit sad.
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