Top 10 Discontinued Video Game Series

Starting life as a comic book character way back in the 1950s, Turok is a dinosaur hunter and star of the video game series of the same name. As an exclusive title for the Nintendo 64 that was later ported to PC, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter sold more than a million copies and led to a franchise that remained popular for the rest of the 90s. Sadly, it was a victim of publisher Acclaim’s bankruptcy in 2004. Though a reboot was released in 2008, the planned sequel never materialised due to developers Propaganda Games being severely downsized during the project, reducing their staff by more than 70. Now it looks like the series is extinct for good.

Now we come to a series which last saw a console release in 2006. Onimusha tells the tale of a samurai trying to fight demons who are trying to take over feudal Japan. Gotta love those demons - they always think big. While at one stage there was even a feature film in the works, nowadays the series has died a death, with the latest release being a browser-based game in 2012 and no new games in sight. This is a dishonorable state of affairs.

This Playstation mainstay, which puts players in the shoes of US Navy Seals, has not seen action for some time. Though the games had been going for a few years, the shutdown of the Playstation network in the early days of SOCOM 4’s release did a lot of damage, as players were unable to use the game’s online functions due to the PSN security breach. But the game might have been able to survive this, if it hadn’t turned fans off from the series, as many claimed it did not feel like a SOCOM game in the first place. Servers were shut down in 2014 and there are no new games on the horizon, making SOCOM 4 the last mission.

The brainchild of former Rare employees, this is one of the definitive first-person shooters. Considering that part of the attraction is the ability to play in different time periods, it’s amazing that the series isn’t still going. Sadly, like so many on our list the series owes its cancellation to a closing development company. Free Radical Design was absorbed by Crytek back in 2009 and is now part of Dambuster Studios, a company which does not hold the rights to Timesplitters. As a result, there seems to be no commercial interest in developing a new Timesplitters. Perhaps it will come back in the future.

Keen gamers have noticed more than a few similarities between this dino-killing action-oriented series and the Resident Evil franchise. This is because they were developed by the same team and even had the same director, but there’s a reason that this franchise isn’t as well known or as old as Resident Evil. The last title in the series was Dino Crisis 3, and why nobody would want to follow up on a game about mutant dinosaurs in space is beyond me. This game’s poor reception, due to elements like the annoying fixed camera and dialogue so cheesy that you could stuff it in a pizza crust, led to the series being cancelled for good.

Most players would have a hard time beating the original run and gun game Contra. Known for its difficulty, this game led to a series that has been going more than twenty years. The franchise had its heyday in the early 90s and since then games have been few and far between. One of them, Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS, was never even released in the EU or Australia. The last console game was the downloadable Hard Corps: Uprising in 2011. But as Konami have now decided to cut back on all of their franchises, it’s not surprising that Contra’s hardly a priority these days.

Despite multiple attempts and more than 20 years in which to do it, nobody has been able to get Streets of Rage 4 off the ground and into our stores. Not that people haven’t been trying: there was one particular aborted development attempt that resulted in some neat 3D footage for the Dreamcast and sadly, nothing else. Though the series was popular, it fell victim to the tastes of the time, as the 2D beat-em-up was seen by those in power as a genre that was on the way out. But with the current market for retro-style games, now might be the perfect time for another Streets of Rage game.

Wing Commander as a franchise went from strength to strength back in the 90s. There was a time when it was the go to name in Dogfighting space combat – so much so that Mark Hamill even starred in one of the games. Then there was a movie made about it, but we don’t like to mention that… Sadly, the last game, Wing Commander Arena, was released in 2007 and didn’t feel like much of a Wing Commander game at all. Ultimately the games stopped being developed after EA absorbed and then dissolved Origin Systems.

Back in the mid 90s, Westwood Games developed a real-time strategy game that would go on to be their biggest success. Sadly, much of the fanbase they’d established migrated away when EA bought Westwood. It didn’t help that a lot of former Westwood employees quit EA too. EA then ran the series into the ground. Command and Conquer 4, crashed and burned due to issues with DRM and the fact that it didn’t feel like Command and Conquer at all. A reboot of the series in 2013, called Command and Conquer, was abandoned after negative fan feedback on the alpha version. Since then, the developers have been shut down and the future of the franchise is up in the air.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions…

“Extreme G” (1997-2003)

“Medal Of Honor” (1999-2012)

“Alex Kidd” (1986-90)

“Final Fight” (1989-2006)

“Panzer Dragoon” (1995-2002)

If you were alive during the mid 1990s, you couldn’t really miss Crash Bandicoot. Hewas the unofficial mascot of the PS1, his games are beloved by millions of fans. After Naughty Dog decided to focus on Jak and Daxter, Crash went multiplatform and left his success behind. The last game in the series at all was Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 2 in 2010, a sigh mobile racing game. Since this release, it has emerged that there is no further interest in developing new titles. We can’t be the only ones thinking that this isn’t a fitting end for the beloved bandicoot. A childhood icon deserves better than this.

Do you agree with our list? Let us know what series we have missed and we might do another video. For more gaming top 10s, published every day, be sure to subscribe to Watchmojo.com.