Video Games can easily fall prey to shuffling along in an undead state despite the creator's intentions, usually thanks to greedy or meddlesome execs.
- Command & Conquer entered this state after Electronic Arts disbanded Westwood Studios following the underperformance of Command & Conquer: Renegade, as despite the initial developers being gone, EA continued to make games in-house via their Los Angeles office — until that was shut down too, taking the franchise with them. While Command & Conquer was eventually revived with the mobile Command & Conquer: Rivals and the Video Game Remake Command & Conquer Remastered helmed by former Westwood programmers, it is clear that the franchise has lasted far longer than Westwood expected.
- Both Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were created as mascot platformers for the original PlayStation by friend developers Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games. Both then split off from Universal Interactive Studios for different reasons (Naughty Dog's contract with Universal ran out, while Insomniac was unhappy with the limitations of Spyro's character designs and walked off on their own) and moved on to different styles of games (Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank), leaving their old mascots to their owner (Universal, but eventually Activision as a result of several corporate acquisitions and mergers) who then ran both of them into the ground with a wide variety of games of variable quality, with the Crash series eventually undergoing a long hiatus and Spyro being retooled as part of the Skylanders franchise. However, both series were given a total revival in the late-2010s, with remakes and new games that were beloved by critics and fans alike, and sold extremely well.
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Scott Cawthon initially attempted to close out the series with Five Nights at Freddy's 3, which ended on a rather conclusive note with the location being destroyed, the Big Bad William Afton being crushed inside his own animatronic suit before being set on fire, and his victims passing on to the afterlife. This was followed up by no less than three Series Fauxnales, the last of which ended with an "Everybody Dies" Ending where both William's son Michael and his ex-coworker Henry kill themselves to take William down with them. And yet new games continued to be released after that; Cawthon's retirement from game development in 2021 wasn't enough to prevent the release of Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach.
- Guitar Hero is interesting, as it became a zombie but was able to remain competitive with its Spiritual Successor, Rock Band. After Harmonix and Activision parted ways following Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, the series' reins were given to Tony Hawk developer Neversoft (whose first entry was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock), and Harmonix moved on to MTV Games in order to begin producing the Rock Band series. Guitar Hero and Rock Band would remain Dueling Games for three years until 2010, when Warriors of Rock finally saw Activision shelve any future projects in the series... for five years, until they announced Guitar Hero Live in order to compete with Harmonix's Rock Band 4.
- Halo: Rumors suggest the franchise was only intended to consist of two games, but scheduling issues forced Bungie to release the original Halo 2 in a semi-complete state (only about 3/4 done). Then Halo 3 was billed as the Grand Finale of the series, but was followed by the Gaiden Game ODST and the prequel Halo: Reach (plus the RTS spin-off Halo Wars, a Dolled-Up Installment made by another studio, to Bungie's disapproval
). Bungie jumped ship and left the series with Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries, who then started a new "saga" of FPS games with Halo 4. Guess the fight wasn't quite finished yet, huh? That the IP was not only given to a company created for the express purpose of creating new Halo games, but is even named after a character in the series, inevitably led to people claiming that they are little more than a "franchise farm" for the series. - Katamari Damacy was never supposed to have a sequel, according to the creator of the original game. The sequel lampshades this by essentially making the plot about the King of All Cosmos gaining tons of fans due to the success of the first game and deciding to solve their various problems to become even more popular.
- Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude was released in 2004 for the PC, PS2, and Xbox, without any input from series creator Al Lowe; he criticizes the game on his website. The sequel, Box Office Bust (at which point the franchise wasn't owned by Activision anymore because it didn't print money), was even more critically panned.
- Mega Man:
- The Mega Man X series was supposed to end with X5, and then progress to the Mega Man Zero series in the future. However, the series continued without Keiji Inafune's knowledge into X6, and his only input afterwards was Maverick Hunter X and minor design advice regarding Axl. note This was somewhat difficult plot-wise, as X5 ended with Zero dead. In fairness, Mega Man Zero would have had to answer that particular red flag itself to even be a thing, but Word of God states Inafune had to alter at least some of his initial plans to accommodate X6. X6 then ended with him in the capsule not supposed to be opened until Mega Man Zero, making his appearances in the next two games awkward. Players were then told to think of the scene in X6 as a bonus ending for the series, rather than something happening directly after the game.
- The Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Zero series were each supposed to end after three games each, but Battle Network lasted for three more games, and Zero for one more. You can see that the endings of the third game of each series were meant as the end of each. Zero 4 manages to work with this because the Big Bad is still around at the end of Zero 3, so the final game was dedicated to solving that little hiccup and setting up the next Sequel Series to prevent this from happening again.
- Metal Gear:
- Hideo Kojima originally didn't intend to direct any Metal Gear sequels beyond Metal Gear Solid, but due to the immense success of the game, he was pressured by his superiors to direct Metal Gear Solid 2, which featured a twist ending that he never intended to explain away. Afterward, he wrote the basic outline for Metal Gear Solid 3, with the intention of handing it off to another director, but no one was willing to take the job. The same thing happened with Metal Gear Solid 4: although he had already named a successor, fans demanded that he return to personally direct the game (which included death threats). And as the Writer Revolt entry for that game shows, he didn't take it well.
Things came to a head during the development of Metal Gear Solid V, upon which Konami announced that Kojima would be leaving the company for good after the game's release, while also saying they wished to make further Metal Gear games. Kojima's response was to create a controversial moment in the final chapter that both altered the original game's canon and also denied fans the epic finale they had been clamoring for. It's also a symbolic representation of how Metal Gear had a fair chance of continuing past its Kojima finale, but that you'd have to settle for something less than Kojima. Unintentionally symbolic is that the first (and to date, only) Metal Gear title after Kojima's departure is a spinoff title about zombies. - Kojima didn't intend to make a sequel for the original Metal Gear, but a co-worker who developed Snake's Revenge met him on a train and convinced him to make a real one. According to Kojima, by the time they reached their stop, he'd already had the entire plot of the canonical Metal Gear 2 mapped out in his head.
- Hideo Kojima originally didn't intend to direct any Metal Gear sequels beyond Metal Gear Solid, but due to the immense success of the game, he was pressured by his superiors to direct Metal Gear Solid 2, which featured a twist ending that he never intended to explain away. Afterward, he wrote the basic outline for Metal Gear Solid 3, with the intention of handing it off to another director, but no one was willing to take the job. The same thing happened with Metal Gear Solid 4: although he had already named a successor, fans demanded that he return to personally direct the game (which included death threats). And as the Writer Revolt entry for that game shows, he didn't take it well.
- Yoshio Sakamoto initially didn't see Metroid going past 1994's Super Metroid, thinking the games up to that point formed a neat, self-contained trilogy. The franchise would eventually continue however, with both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion releasing in 2002, and new games coming out at a steady pace ever since. These games were all fairly well-received (Metroid: Other M and Federation Force notwithstanding), and Metroid Prime specifically is hailed by most as a worthy successor to Super and one of the greatest games of all time.
- Pokémon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara stated that Pokémon Gold and Silver were intended to be the final games, declaring that "once we entered the twenty-first century, it would be time for me to do something else entirely." Additionally, the majority of Gold and Silver's production took place before the rest of the franchise preceding it had been released outside of Japan; Game Freak consequently didn't know if the games would be successful internationally, thus the Gen II games were made to function as a finale just in case. Oodles of cash must have changed their minds, as the series proved to be everything but a fad and has been going strong ever since.
- Insomniac Games would later have a case with a franchise that never left their hands, Ratchet & Clank, which is often said to have peaked with A Crack in Time, and a retrospective downright has director Brian Allgeier saying Insomniac wanted to end the series there. But Sony pressured them to continue as the games remained popular, and the following sequels, All 4 One and Full Frontal Assult, were disliked by fans as they had noticeably weaker stories and were Denser and Wackier in tone, focusing on gimmicks instead of the usual third-person shooter gameplay, and redesigning most of the main cast.
- RollerCoaster Tycoon went dormant after the third game, which was released in 2004. After the second game, the lead developer, Chris Sawyer, handed control of the IP to Atari. In 2012, Atari decided to dust off the franchise and release a number of mediocre to very poor games under its name, including a stripped-down 3DS spinoff, two separate microtransaction-heavy Freemium mobile games (the first one, the confusingly titled RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile, initially had a price tag), a match-3 mobile game, and a VR rail shooter for some reason. The most infamous releases of the series are RollerCoaster Tycoon World, a game that jumped between three development teams and was rushed to release a day before its (much better recieved) competitor, Planet Coaster, with predictable results, and RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures, an investor-driven title for the Nintendo Switch where Atari directly asked people to invest in the development of the game in exchange for a share of its sales, with the end product being an extremely low-effort port of a mobile game that was a port of World, with no indication if any of the investors got their money's worth. The only positively received releases were ports of the first three games, and with such a terrible track record of new games, it seems that Atari is only using the series name as a shameless Cash-Cow Franchise.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Sonic 3 & Knuckles is not only considered the original series' peak, it was also the last time the three figureheads of the series — character designer Naoto Ohshima, series director/game planner Hirokazu Yasuhara, and programmer/producer Yuji Naka — all worked together on a Sonic game; afterward, the Sonic Team development studio shifted their focus toward making original titles afterwards for the Sega Saturn. Sega, unwilling to retire their cash cow, initially tried to continue the Sonic franchise without them to no success; most infamously with Sega Technical Institute'snote Sonic Xtreme — the series' intended Video Game 3D Leap for the Saturn that ultimately never made it to shelves. Sega eventually moved Sonic Team back onto the series for good to produce Sonic Adventure, a proper 3D debut for the Sega Dreamcast that was overseen by both Naka and Ohshima; though the following years saw Ohshima, Yasuhara, and Naka's departures from the franchise and Sega altogether. The series sticks around as one of Sega's few remaining cash cows, but it has had wild ups and downs since then. (Notably, the best-received game in the series since the series' 1990s heyday, Sonic Mania, is a Megamix Game of the original titles that was also not internally developed by the eponymous studio.)
- Star Control: The original developers had long since moved on to other projects, and they actually retained rights to all the creative content apart from the name "Star Control". The publisher wanted another game out in the series, even if it lacked any familiar content tying it to the previous games. In the end, the developers gave in, figuring it was the lesser evil. The game was actually made by completely different people, though. Oh, and there was a novel too, which most people prefer to forget about.
- Super Smash Bros. was originally a side project featuring completely original characters, but Masahiro Sakurai's boss Satoru Iwata suggested that he put Nintendo characters in the game. The game became an international hit, but Sakurai felt that more could be done with the game, so the sequel Super Smash Bros. Melee was developed with a much larger budget. Shortly after the completion of Melee as well as Kirby Air Ride (as Sakurai is also the creator of the Kirby video game series), he left HAL to form his own studio, Sora Ltd., stating that he was dissatisfied with the "sequel process" at HAL and the gaming industry in general. Despite this, he ended up making two more Smash games while at Sora. He later came out and said that every Smash game past the original was developed under the expectation that he wouldn't make any more Smash games, and that he had no desire to make any more past Smash 4. Per the last request from Iwata to him, he then made Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and later stated that he would keep working on the series for as long as Nintendo wanted him to. (And, considering it's one of the company's biggest Cash Cow Franchises, it's hard to imagine they ever wouldn't.) Sakurai is also no longer involved in the creation of newer Kirby games. Note that though Kirby is technically a franchise zombie, many of the newer Kirby games are considered as good as or even better than the older games to longtime fans of the series.
- Various interviews from developers at Core Design have shown that the first four Tomb Raider games were genuine attempts to improve on each entry, whether they could be considered successful or not; however, the "Lara dies" twist at the end of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was a serious attempt to either finish the series or buy time for a next-gen debut. But then they were talked into developing Tomb Raider Chronicles, a game where Lara's closest friends reminisce about Lara's previously unseen adventures, as an easy moneygrab; and being distracted by that may have played a small part in the failure of Angel of Darkness. Of course, the franchise managed to recover after Crystal Dynamics rebooted it.
- Twisted Metal: Sony and Singletrac split up after Twisted Metal 2, resulting in Sony owning the Twisted Metal name but Singletrac owning the engine. As a result, Sony had No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, and the third and fourth games received relatively poor reviews. Luckily, former Singletrac employees founded Incog Inc. (and later Eat Sleep Play) and Sony handed them back the series from Twisted Metal Black onwards.
- Worms Armageddon was going to be the last in the series during its development and was also the last to involve the series creator Andy Davidson, who departed due to Creative Differencesnote . Armageddon was extremely successful and is still the most well-acclaimed entry, so the series would eventually continue with the release of World Party, followed by more games down the line.
