Welcome to Delisted Games, a growing archive of 868 games you can’t play.
The site is expanding all the time with new additions, reader submissions, and a feed of Watch List news below. You can use the search bar to find any game — It’s powerful! Read some hints — or use the menus at top to browse our collection by platform. Thanks for checking out the site!
Hard as it is to believe, Microsoft’s ‘Games For Windows – Live‘ — a service that sought to bring an Xbox-like, cross-gaming backend to PC titles for Windows — is still causing games to be delisted six years after its retirement. The latest instance is Grand Theft Auto IV which launched in 2008 and disappeared from Steam just about a week ago. A Rockstar spokesperson spoke to USgamer to explain the situation:
“Grand Theft Auto 4 was originally created for the Games For Windows Live platform. With Microsoft no longer supporting Games For Windows Live, it is no longer possible to generate the additional keys needed to continue selling the current version of the game. We are looking at other options for distributing GTA4 for PC and will share more information as soon as we can.”
It’s not hard to imagine that Rockstar will be retooling the title to make an exclusive appearance on their own games launcher as long as the work-vs-income ratio lines up for them. Meanwhile, the game can still be downloaded on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 including the well-regarded Gay Tony and Lost and Damned DLCs. I’ll get the PC version up on the site soon and hope that a relisting announcement isn’t too far off.
It’s finally time to do a giveaway! I was out of town for work recently and stopped in at the Knoxville McKay’s to browse their gigantic reserves of old junk. That’s where I found a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus for the original Xbox. This 2004 brawler was never delisted itself but it does contain a real lost gem: the 1989 TMNT arcade game from Konami.
The ’89 original is perpetually one of our most viewed games on the site and even though this version has some peculiar omissions, I thought it would make for a fun first giveaway. All you have to do to enter is tell us one delisted title you’d love to see come back. Of course, you can earn some extra entries by following us on social media, and you can stop back each day for bonus entries. Just use the widget below or bookmark our giveaway page.
The contest runs from January 14th through February 4th after which we’ll pick one lucky winner to receive the physical copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus for the original Xbox. Please be aware, anyone can enter but the winner must be a United States resident. We’ll ship it anywhere in the continental U.S. for free.
Delisted Games’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade GiveawayYou can watch the game in action in the video below and see me unlock the ’89 version on my second attempt. It’s at this point that I am reminded about the peculiar differences from the arcade original. For whatever reason (I’m guessing legal) all of the game’s digitized voice samples have been removed. The classic TV theme song is also missing and the soundtrack has been replaced by a couple of decent but forgettable synths.
Beyond that, the four-player arcade experience is intact and complete. It isn’t ideal but it is one of only two ways to legally own the game nowadays, the other being the $350 Arcade1Up cabinet. If nothing else, it makes for a unique delisted collector’s item.
Good luck to you all, I’ll post a follow up with
a bonus video after the giveaway is over.
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Yeah, umm, wow. Every year I say that the site has grown by orders of magnitude but in 2019 we saw more visitors and traffic than every year before it combined (and then some)! While I’ll take a little bit of credit for the typical growth, the real boosts came from Babylonian, Fragments of Silicon, Pixel Little Mad, and of course Jim Sterling, who each featured the site in their content throughout 2019.
I’d also like to thank everyone who mentioned the site on Twitter and Facebook, pointing us out to their own friends and followers. From pundits to podcasters and everywhere in between, the more people that are made aware of delistings brings us closer to some long overdue changes! That increase in exposure led to an increase in submissions as well. So many in fact that I’m still trying to catch up, but it’s one of those “good problem” situations.
Without further ado, here are some of the usual stats and figures to round up the year:
- An astounding 309 new game pages were added to the site in 2019!
- By December 31st that brought the total up to 855 delisted games on the site
- The site welcomed 116,488 visitors who viewed our pages over 408,000 times!
- No wonder I was overwhelmed, you awesome folks submitted over 240 games to the site in 2019 alone!
The Most Beloved Games of 2019
No big surprises here, everyone still loves and misses Scott Pilgrim. It was far and away the most viewed game page on the site. The movie turns 10 in 2020, so maybe it’s finally time for a revival! Here’s the Top Five game pages for 2019:
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game — 17,092 views
- Bookworm Deluxe — 4,679 views
- Bookworm Adventure Deluxe — 3,326 views
- Metro 2033 – 3,104 views
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989) — 2,816 views
My IRL job took quite a turn late in the year and things got hectic, to put it lightly. I’m not sure how 2020 will fare with wild bouts of upheaval already looming on the horizon. But I hope to keep adding new games to the site on an every-other-day basis like I did through most of the year.
Thanks again for all the visits, views, submissions, and discussions in 2019!
I frequently find myself perusing Bandcamp’s “video game music” page for a little background music as I sit down to work on the site. Today was no different but I noticed a pair of album covers that looked particularly familiar: Antipole and Cosmos X2. Both games, along with other titles from developer Saturnine Games, were delisted from the Nintendo 3DS eShop in September of 2018.
Although the games are still gone, it looks like composer Zach Parrish has polished up their soundtracks for a recently remastered re-release. Both albums are available for a pay-what-you-want price and offer a nice complement of sci-fi chill and shmup rockin’. It doesn’t appear to have been re-released but the soundtrack to Saturnine’s other delisted game, Turtle Tale, is also available from Bandcamp.
The latest entry in Spike Chunsoft’s storied “Shiren the Wanderer” series is about to get a little more lonely across North America and Europe. Publisher Aksys Games announced in an email sent to fans that the PlayStation Vita title, Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate, will be losing its online features by the end of December.
“Online service to cease in 2019. Thank you for playing Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate on the PlayStation®Vita system since its release on July 26th, 2016.
Unfortunately, the North American and European online services for this game, specifically the Multiplayer, Wanderer Aid/Rescue, and Ranking systems are shutting down at the end of December 2019. Please continue to enjoy the adventure in its entirety offline.”
That doesn’t give players much time to catch up, but fortunately the game itself isn’t going away. To commiserate, Aksys has put the physical versions of the game on sale through their own shop and the digital version on sale through the PlayStation Store.
Thanks to Michael Huniu and PlayStation Lifestyle for bringing this news to our attention.
