Missing Episode / Video Games

General examples

• Many computer games, after their initial publishing run, suffer from a problem somewhat unique to the medium. As computers (and screens) improve, it can be quite rewarding to produce a Video Game Remake or Updated Re-release to take advantage of newer technology, except that the source code and other assets of many commercial games are rarely held onto. For example, when the xu4 and Exult projects wanted to make source ports of Ultima IV and VII, Origin admitted that it had lost everything. And when Fallout Tactics was under development just a few years after the previous Fallout game had been released, it turned out that virtually all of the original game's 3D assets had been lost, and nearly all of it ended up being remodeled.
• Many games that don't make it overseas are this to the foreign fans of a series who are cursed with hearing people who actually did get it talk about it, but will never play it themselves. If they're lucky, it's an old game that will get a Fan Translation. If not, they're screwed.
  • Some may eventually be released, even if in a different form, such as Final Fantasy II (part of Final Fantasy Origins for the PlayStation) and III for the Nintendo DS and Super Mario Bros. 2 (released in the US about 7 years later for the Super NES on the Super Mario All-Stars cartridge as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels).
• This happens constantly with embedded online games (mostly Adobe Flash nowadays, but some older ones used Shockwave). See Defunct Online Video Games for a list of some:
  • Anything that was on Bonus.com in the late '90s/early 2000s, since the site is now defunct and most of the media on it (mostly games but some stories too) were endemic to it.
  • The BBC's website had a game that revolved around an Allosaurus called The Big Al game. It was very good for a web game. You started as a baby and had the option of staying near your mother, who moved on her own but would protect you if you were on the same tile, or venturing off. You moved one tile at a time searching for food and avoiding predators, including bigger Allosaurus, and even your own mother if you spent too long away from her. The game revolved around eating to get bigger. To eat, you would find prey, then click to attack it and if the its strength bar is lower than yours you eat them and if it is higher you did damage but also got injured. You could find a pile of hidden eggs for lots of free food, but they attracted other small predators, which is actually a good thing if you found it when you were big enough to eat them (more easy food). There is also a carcass, but you died if you got too close to it because of rushing water or something. The second to last level involved searching for a sauropod migration ground and forming a pack with other Allosaurus to take one down, and if you succeeded, you go to the last level, which is spent mating as many times as you could to add to your score. To mate, you had to select the correct series of actions to woo the female, get it wrong and they attack, and if you selected a certain series of actions you trigger a hidden Easter Egg; the female would ask you a random trivia question about Allosaurus, mate with you if you got it right, attack you if you got it wrong. It's not known why this game was removed, but now it's gone with few knowing it ever existed. Now you are one of them.
  • There was also another BBC game called "The Evolution Game" which would have been fun if it wasn't so brokenly hard. It was similar to "The Big Al game" in principle. You moved one tile at a time to find food or avoid predators, and in theory evolved over time into a human. In practice, it was literally impossible to make it past the first 3-4 life stages without starving to death or getting killed by a predator, which is probably why it eventually got taken down.
  • Millsberry was an advertisement game for General Mills. It ran for 6 years but shut down in 2010.
  • When GarfieldGames.com shut down, many exclusive Flash games disappeared along with it. While some are available on Garfield's official website, others like Go Fish!, the most polished Go Fish! game on the Internet, weren't so lucky.

Hardware-related examples

• Due to the locked-down, walled garden nature of Qualcomm's BREW platform for CDMA cellphones^note In what appears to be an effective yet draconian DRM scheme, BREW games are encrypted and downloads are tied to the subscriber's account, making it hard if not impossible to rip and pirate even for preservation's sake., practically all games made for it were presumed to be lost forever, if not still stored on an old LG phone gathering dust in someone's cabinet. One such example is the Verizon VCAST-exclusive release of Need for Speed Underground 2, whose remaining footage is that of a review from Gamespot; the version made infamous by Kuru HS is actually a bootleg Game Mod of Fast & Furious: Fugitive. It also doesn't help that, according to Gamespot's review, assets for the Verizon release of NFS Underground 2 are downloaded ad hoc when the game needs it to save on device storage space (considering that memory for mobile phones was at a premium back then) as opposed to a single monolithic package. In contrast, Java ME fared better on a preservation standpoint, as while piracy was rampant due to the lack of DRM, it had the side effect of also allowing for preservation as JAR files for popular mobile games of the day can still be found on the web and played on a suitable emulator. Also contributing to the problem with BREW is its market share compared to Java ME—BREW is only available for CDMA devices, while Java ME is a lot more popular due to it being a more or less open standard and thus cheaper to implement especially in developing markets. Same goes for Symbian, though pirated games and apps for S60 Third Edition phones onward require a hacked device to run unsigned code, and emulators for those aside from the official Nokia SDKs are still in very early development.
  • This is no longer the case when dumps of BREW games have surfaced on the web in the late 2010s to 2020s, either as retail copies or beta/debug builds as in the case of Underground 2.
• By virtue of it being a satellite broadcast system, most of the games offered on Nintendo's Super Famicom Satellaview service haven't and will most likely never be re-released again. The service relied on broadcasting games and other pieces of media to those who ponied up the equivalent of an extra $140 or so to buy the peripheral in the first place. These games included unique versions of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (with their own unique plots), a Chrono Trigger Gaiden Game styled after one of the minigames from the original title, a pseudo-sequel to F-Zero with new tracks and circuits, a variant of Excitebike with Mario as a playable character and much more. Due to the way the games were distributed, they could only be played if the person had a compatible memory pak and downloaded the title, meaning that once the service ended, very few copies of the games were left in existence. While some of the games (like the Zelda titles) have been preserved as ROM files and distributed online, plenty more have been lost in the ether.
• Back in the mid 90s, Sega had the digital distribution service known as Sega Channel. Players would receive games straight to their Genesis via a TV signal. Unfortunately, no means of storing them was provided, so the games would be lost after the system was shut down. As as result, any Sega Channel-exclusive game versions were never dumped and are now lost forever. Among them is the Sega Channel-exclusive game Garfield: The Lost Levels (three levels cut from Garfield: Caught in the Act, which does not include the sci-fi one from the PC version), the American version of Mega Man: The Wily Wars (which eventually got released with the Sega Genesis Mini over 20 years later) and a Genesis port of Chessmaster.

Specific examples

• This happens to most MMOs once they shut down, unless fans are able to preserve them on fan-run private servers separate from the ones the creators maintained.
  • The Sims Online has been lost, but there have been attempts to restore it. The first major attempt at it was TSO Restoration, which was abandoned due to EA sending a cease-and-desist letter to the developers. Today, the most successful restoration project for TSO is FreeSO, an open source port of the game.
  • Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends once had an MMO type game called Big Fat Awesome House Party. By the time it ended in 2009, it had over 13 million users.
• When TripleJump did their Worst of 2004 list, they noted one of the games that could have entered, the gladiatorial management game Coliseum, missed the cut because there is no footage of it online, describing it as "something so rubbish that no one thought of preserving its memory".
• Nintendo's first ever video game, EVR Race, a horse racing simulator, seems to have been lost to time as no cabinets for the game are known to have survived to the present day.
• A small game known as m199h, published anonymously on PLATO in 1974, is generally considered to have been the very first known Western RPG (and digital Role-Playing Game, overall) ever released. Unfortunately, because the PLATO mainframe was intended for "serious academic study and coursework", most games on it were deleted permanently as fast as the admins could find them, leading to all copies of m199h being lost to time (the much better known and well-preserved WRPG titles like dnd and Dungeon only came later).
• The Mass Effect DLC Pinnacle Station has been lost to history; the source code has been lost, and the backups obtained from its developer Demiurge are corrupted beyond salvation, meaning that PS3 players who want to enjoy this DLC are out of luck, though there's a fan restoration for Legendary Edition on PC.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid Mobile, an award-winning Interquel set between Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 with a whole new plot and game mechanics, was released just before touch-screen phones became the new thing, and thus was immediately rendered incompatible with everything. It doesn't help that it was only available in Japan and to people using Verizon phones in America - so many people in Europe thoroughly missed out. It was only available for digital download from companies that have now shut down on phones that impossible to emulate. It was released on the NGage, and that version is available through illegal channels, and can be emulated by the truly determined.
  • Piece Walker, a rather enjoyable promotional game for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker where you compete with another player to complete jigsaws, is down from the website and can no longer be played. It has not been released again in any form.
• Namu Amida Butsu!, the precursor to Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-. Due to that game's obscurity before it was shut down and more successful -UTENA- took its place, there are very few screenshots and even less gameplay footage uploaded online, and whatever videos available only cover small bits of the game and not its entirety or in the least its main parts, effectively making this game lost and forgotten among Japanese fans, and unheard of among overseas fans.
• Ratchet & Clank has this with Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile!, a side-scrolling adaptation of the gameplay made in 2004. As the name suggests it was a mobile title, but like the Metal Gear Solid Mobile title above it was made for old number pad-style phones, not as a smartphone app. The primary way to get it was to text "CLANK" to a specified number, which no longer works. The only way to play it today is to download a Java file and an accompanying phone emulator.
• Rescue The Russian Leopard is an obscure PC game by the World Wild Life Fund. The player was charged with saving the rare Amur leopard, by securing funding and habitat, fighting poachers and forest fires, increasing the breeding population, etc. It was a realistic sim, with the aim of the game being to actually use it to find a real-world solution to this problem. This game was almost certainly pointless and a waste of funding to make to begin with, being made for a completely lost cause as there is little interest in or hope of preserving this species, but as a game, it actually was fun, unique and strategic, if Nintendo Hard. The game appears to have completely disappeared of the face of the Earth, possibly only findable now on unsafe websites if even that.
• Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 had a number of free DLC released for the Dreamcast versions, which were excluded from later rereleases and are no longer available to download via official means. Fans managed to preserve most but not all of the DLC. Among the permanently lost content are the Black Market Chao downloads which included rare Chao not available through any other means (although they can still be obtained through hacking) for both games, the first New Year DLC for Japanese Sonic Adventure, and at least one kart race track for the international version of Sonic Adventure.
• The MMORPG Star Trek Online has removed a number of missions from its game as Cryptic went back and started reworking them. The more notable one was "State of Q", where the player went back in time to the Battle of Wolf 359 to save Benjamin Sisko from the Borg of 2409, sent back in time by, presumably, the Iconians. Cryptic has stated, though, that they'd like to revisit this mission one day.
• Educative video game The Sumerian Game (1966) was the ancestor of simulation game Hamurabi. It was more complex, featuring, in addition to a first step featuring the notorious grain-and-land management featured in Hamurabi along with additional features such as technological innovations, two other steps, each more complex than the previous, where the player had to allocate workers between agriculture and crafts. In addition, projector slides and audio documentations were developed for the game, since it was meant to be played at school. The source code is lost, apart from projector slides and three printouts of individual game sessions; only the description of how the software computed entered values are available; it was how Ahl coded Hamurabi.
• The Advertisement Game WD-40 Spray Game exclusive to members of the official WD-40 fan club has been lost to time, as little if any mention of it remains online. It was developed by JV Games, a third-rate Shovelware house who also developed a version of Night Fire for the Game Boy Advance.

Unfinished or Unreleased examples

• The Commodore 64 based website Games That Weren't investigates lost games, by attempting to find out why they went unreleased and trying to track down any surviving elements. Notable full-game finds included a licensed Daffy Duck game which scored 94% in Commodore Format but went unreleased when the publishers folded, but many remain lost.
• The original sequel to Fallout 2 made by Black Isle, code-named "Van Buren", which was about 85% done when Black Isle's parent company Interplay went bankrupt and the game was never seen again. Fallout 3 was eventually made five years afterwards by Bethesda, yet had nothing to do with Van Buren.
  • Many of Van Buren's story concepts were later used in Fallout: New Vegas, such as Caesar's Legion, the Van Graffs and the Hoover Dam. The development team for New Vegas included many former members of Black Isle.
• Similar to the Panzer Dragoon Saga example (see "Other"), the Game Boy Advance version of Mega Man Anniversary Collection was cancelled because Capcom lost the original code for the original Game Boy Mega Man games and it proved too expensive to rebuild them.
• Metal Gear:
  • There was a Metal Gear Solid port for the unsuccessful Tiger Electronics Game.com console that was never released due to the poor performance of the platform .
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • Original plans for the game was for it to be called Metal Gear Solid III, to reinforce the game's censorship/editing of sequences theme (where did the missing II go?). This was soon abandoned, but early (internal) trailers still refer to it by this name.
    • There is a large and expensive chunk of that which was modeled, animated, acted and complete, but cut from the game at the last minute as the 9/11 terror attacks happened towards the end of development (the scenes depicted Arsenal Gear laying waste to various New York landmarks). The model of the ruined New York and several of the props and character models used in the sequence can be looked at on the Documents of MGS2 disc, which also presents the script of the sequence; and the novelisation and comic book adaptations (released in the 2010s) retain this sequence. One cinematic from the sequence (a news report showing the Statue of Liberty's new resting place) was Dummied Out and was found by a mod group spelunking the PC version, but it is missing audio.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was planned to feature an additional mission titled "Kingdom of the Flies" that would've resolved a loose plot thread in the main story namely the whereabouts of Eli and his child mercenaries after they escape from Mother Base by hijacking Sahelanthropus. This mission was planned to be introduced to the game as post-launch DLC, but Hideo Kojima's departure from Konami resulted in such plans never coming to fruition and instead a video on a video was included on a bonus Blu-ray disc packaged with the limited edition of the game that depict the events of said mission through unfinished cutscenes and concept art.
• Several Amiga magazines were sent review copies of Putty Squad, and even the hardliners at Amiga Power graded it 91%—but the Amiga port never publicly surfaced beyond a coverdisk demo. Only an SNES version was published. The Amiga version was finally released twenty years after initially planned, and for free - you can download it from System 3 on their promotional page.
• The Atari 2600 game Saboteur was never released (would have been released circa 1980), but it was a selectable game in the Atari Flashback 2, released in 2005.
• Mire Mare, the fifth Sabre Man game, was never made, despite being mentioned by name in the ending of Underwurlde.
• There was an installment of Sam & Max made called Sam & Max: Freelance Police!!. However, LucasArts cancelled it and it wouldn't be until another two years before Telltale Games would make a Sam & Max game. Like LSL above, the game is referenced in the Telltale Games series as a "particularly gruesome case".
  • The gruesomeness (and bitterness) around the LucasArts sequel is that the game was finished and already rated by the ESRB, before being caught up in the studio's decision to leave the adventure game business entirely.
• SimRefinery, an obscure Maxis sim game made for internal use by Chevron, was thought lost until tech website Ars Technica wrote an article about Maxis' business unit, briefly mentioning that the game was lost. One reader of the article talked to a retired chemical engineering friend and was given a floppy, perhaps the last, of the game.
  • This one has a happy ending though - Lazy Game Reviews managed to get that disk, verify that it was indeed SimRefinery and film gameplay, also sharing the disk's contents online for free.
• The infamous would-be Killer App for the Sega Saturn, Sonic Xtreme, never made it to shelves – a result of the game's Troubled Production, which was riddled to the core with Executive Meddling – taking a near-fatal toll on the remaining programmer's health, due to which the game's development was discontinued shortly afterwards. Some assets – such as character sprites, level assets, and a early prototype of the "Project Condor" boss engine – have been leaked onto the internet, whereas other aspects (such as the original engine used for the game) have not seen release.
• Star Fox 2 was never released, even though the Japanese version was practically completed. The plot would have continued the story from the previous game, and would have introduced Star Wolf as major antagonists. The game was canceled most likely due to the pending release of the Nintendo 64. Shortly after the game's termination, Star Fox 64 began development, and rebooted the storyline from scratch. Eventually a ROM was leaked to the internet, and an English Fan Translation was released. However, the ROMs were all earlier builds as Dylan Cuthbert said the leaked ROMs lack the final few months of QA work and were set up in debug mode. The game was finally released, in its completed form, in 2017 via the SNES Classic Mini, and is one of the thing's major selling points. The game was later released on Nintendo Switch Online.
• The fourth game in Atari's Swordquest series, Airworld, was never developed, probably due to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. One of Parker Brothers' Return of the Jedi games also never made it past the concept art stage (the other unreleased game, Ewok Adventure, was discovered as a prototype).
• The excessively violent and knowingly offensive Thrill Kill was pulled from distribution before it could offend, likely to avoid fears of a moral outcry, and because AO-rated games are not allowed on consoles. The game developers were rightfully annoyed by this; leaking a beta version of the game before releasing another fighting game, Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style using the same game mechanics, albeit marginally toned-down (i.e., LESS bloody and gory).
• While it's unknown exactly why the Tiny Toon Adventures video game Defenders of the Universe by Treasure was never released despite being practically completed and getting all the way to having an ESRB rating, box art and retail listings, it is known that the publisher, Conspiracy Entertainment, had major financial troubles at the time that led to them terminating many of their other planned products. The company said that "business complications" were the reason the game was delayed from its planned Spring 2002 release date numerous times all the way up to 2004 before it was eventually cancelled by the game's director. It was not until 2009 that a build of the game leaked.
  • Another project, Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Bad Dream, was released the same year as Defenders of the Universe was set to release. While it was widely released in Europe, America only saw a very limited run underneath the name Scary Dreams.
• Ultima X: Odyssey: It was canceled just four months after EA shut down Origin Systems.

Mods & Fan-Works

• Doom:
  • This trope applies to all versions of Freedoom, a project to make a game with 100% free content using the Doom engine, prior to 0.6.4. Before its release, a Doomworld community member discovered that one of composer Sam Woodman's contributions was plagiarized from the 1997 Duke Nukem 3D total conversion The Gate. 0.6.4 was soon uploaded with all of his music removed due to potential copyright infringement; and because his music was present in Freedoom for so long, all previous releases were taken offline.
  • When the Doom mod Grezzo 2 was released, there was speculation about why there seemed to be no "Grezzo 1" around, to the assumption that it was a plain troll by the author, or it was an obscure reference to whatsoever; to some, the only logical answer was the fact that the mod was technically based on Doom II. Eventually the author revealed that a "Grezzo 1" actually existed: he made it in 2004 during his high school days. It had the same levels of the original Doom, only with different sounds and sprites for the enemies. It featured many in-jokes understandable only by him and few other people, so he felt it wasn't worth being published online.
• Many user-uploaded cities and components such as buildings and maps of past SimCity games like 2000 and 3000 (the first with an Internet component) have been lost as fan sites compiling those city files for others to play have shut down, bought by larger media companies that didn't care about those archives, or corrupted during site upgrades.
• There's actually quite a lot of Super Mario World romhacks that fall into this. Some examples include anything from before the time SMW Central was hacked, any resources use in the Japanese hacks Ore World 2 and The Mario (since the authors' websites have vanished along with their asm and code), anything from the first VIP 5 uploader (taken down because people used it for things other than VIP 5 submissions), anything from the original Japanese hack hosting/submission site (which vanished without a trace) and "Super Mario World Freedom" since the author's website has been taken down.
  • The Super Mario World romhack Notte Luminosa was taken down from SMW Central after it was revealed that the creator lied about having terminal cancer, in an attempt to get other people to make Let's Plays of the game. Eventually Subverted, as the patch would make its way to SMWDB, a site dedicated to preserving SMW ROM hacks.
• Many fan made animals for the Zoo Tycoon games have been lost as websites have gone down, such as the Umbreon mod.

Other

• An interesting case can occur when a speedrunner or other competitive gamer fails to produce a recording of a notable achievement, either through neglect, equipment failure, or simply not having the proper tools. While generally stand-alone videos rather than part of a traditional series, this can create missing episodes in the timeline of a game's competitive history; it becomes noticeable if, for example, attempting to view and study how the world record speedruns of a particular game evolved over time, such as the case of Summoning Salt's world record progression videos. This was much more common in the earlier days of the activity, when there was less organization and socialization built around it, as well the technology being less available. Now that it's fairly trivial for anyone to record and upload footage, someone claiming a new record without proof will usually be taken as a red flag that they're lying.
• The Eyewitness Virtual Reality series of educational video games has one of these, if it ever was made. There is an Eyewitness Virtual Reality Shark game referenced to in the others, but no physical copies exist. Not even torrents. It's likely that this one game never was made. There's also evidence that there was an Eyewitness Virtual Reality Jungle game planned as well, but even less is known about it.
• Deliberate example: There is no Leisure Suit Larry 4, largely because lead designer Al Lowe couldn't figure out how to logically continue the series from the third game on and chose to skip straight to the fifth one. Its nonexistence is a major plot point in the fifth game: at the end of the third, Larry finally found the woman of his dreams; at the start of the fifth, they're separated and neither of them actually knows why, leading to Patti trying to find the missing Larry 4 so she can figure out what the heck happened.
  • Another explanation is that Larry 4 was originally going to be a massively multiplayer online adventure game (in the early nineties!), but development never got off the ground as modem technology was still much too primitive at the time, so in the end the small minigames that were used to beta-test the project's online capabilities were packaged together and sold as The Sierra Network.
    • Leisure Suit Larry 4 turns up as a gag in several other Sierra games, but is actually a plot point in Space Quest 4. Vohaul smuggled his consciousness onto a disk of Leisure Suit Larry 4, and the Xenonian scientists are so eager to play it that they load it into the planet-controlling supercomputer. When you're in Vohaul's lair later in the game, one of the programs on his computer is "LSL4."
  • Word of God has it that Al Lowe had intended to end the series with 3 and thus once said that "There's not going to be a Larry 4! I'm stopping with three.". Well... there isn't a 4, but he didn't stop at 3. Same source says that it suddenly occurred to him at that time that skipping 4 would be a great marketing gimmick. He was right.
• Minecraft has a number of older versions of the game that are missing, especially during the Classic and Indev development cycles. This was because at the time, Minecraft was relatively obscure (especially compared to the Cash-Cow Franchise it is today), so there were fewer players available to back them up. Furthermore, updates were released at a very rapid pace, often multiple times in one day, making it even harder to back all of them up. There are also versions that have been released onto the Minecraft Launcher, but are recompiled from their original source code and thus do not exist in their original forms; this is a known issue for many pre-Classic builds.
• The reason why many Sega Saturn classics like Panzer Dragoon Saga and Shining Force III have never been re-released is because Sega lost the original programming code for the games. Same for their System-16 (and then some) arcade games.
• In a case of adaptation-induced limitations, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective was translated from its gamebook origins into a trio of CD-ROM Interactive Movie titles. Each CD includes three cases for a total of nine playable games; the original gamebook had a tenth case, "The Cryptic Corpse", that simply does not exist in FMV format.

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