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Games that can no longer be sold by the devs or publishers due to a lawsuit or other legal issues

Last posted Oct 08, 2017 at 08:23PM EDT. Added Oct 05, 2017 at 09:48PM EDT
9 posts from 10 users

It should be obvious from the title alone, but I'll say here: this is only about games that got official paid releases, we're not talking about fan games that got shut down due to legal issues. Anyway to start:

Uniracers

A Unicycle racing game for the SNES that was developed by DMA Design, the same company that'd later become Rockstar North and create the GTA series, and published by Nintendo. After the game was released DMA was sued by Pixar because they claimed the design of the anthropomorphic unicycles in the game bared too much of a resemblance to the unicycle from their 1987 short film "Red's Dream" (guess it doesn't help the game used DKC like pre-rendered 3D graphics). Pixar actually won the lawsuit and Nintendo was forced to stop selling the game, and because of this it can never be re-released.

Too Human and X-Men Destiny

Putting these together because they're made by the same company, Silicon Knights, and were taken off the market for the same lawsuit. What happened was that Silicon Knights made use of Unreal Engine 3 technology in these games but failed to pay a licensing fee to Epic Games, the maker of the Unreal engine. Made worse by the fact Denis Dyack, head of Silicon Knights, once said they were going to drop UE3 from Too Human when he couldn't get the visuals he wanted out of it. In light of the lawsuit it sounds more like Dyack was trying to get out of paying Epic the licensing fee. Epic Games sued Silicon Knights and won, forcing Microsoft and Activision to take Too Human and X-Men Destiny respectively off the market.

There's this one game called The Guy Game where women expose themselves whenever you are successful. A lawsuit was filed when it turned out one of the women was underage. As a result, further distribution of the game was ceased.

The quoted post has been deleted.

Sonic Retro theorizes that a potential reason for why those specific musical tracks were changed in the PC release was because the tracks used samples that weren't possible to emulate via a midi format. However, the most popular potential reason was Michael Jackson's supposed involvement with those tracks, and Sega didn't want to risk getting sued and changed them.

That said, the first theorized reason isn't all that logical: why create three new tracks instead of reconstructing the originals in midi? In my opinion, this leap in logic implies that the Jackson explanation is the most likely to be true.

Not only that, but Brad Buxer, one of Sonic 3's composers (and a long-time collaborator with Jackson), confirmed in a 2009 interview that Jackson was involved in at least one track. A large factor into the confusion on MJ's involvement stems from the fact that he was never credited in the game's credits (most likely due to dissatisfaction with the Genesis' sound capabilities and not wanting to be associated with the game as a whole).

You can read up on it here
and here

As for Ice Cap Zone's original track? It doesn't actually have much to do with Jackson. But it does bear striking similarities to an unreleased track from "The Jetzons" (a band Buxer played keyboardist for).

Last edited Oct 06, 2017 at 01:22PM EDT

Jojo heritage for the future HD, impossible to get it legal nowadays. Capcom lost the right's to the distribute it, Namco acquired the rights and made the "meh" 3D games.

A shame considering it was a great fighting game

Scott Pilgrim vs The World The Game from Ubisoft.

I didn't get a chance to play it but I heard some good things about it, but it can't be sold now since the license expired and now you can't really download it.

No One Lives Forever.
I've heard a lot from this game, so it's a shame that due to licensing troubles from multiple groups holding it, that it can't even get a re-release. Even people who own the rights aren't certain about who actually has the authority.

I have a question though: If one of the parties from aforementioned games would suddenly start distributing those games, how much money would the other parties lose if they'd take no legal action?

I'm not sure if this qualifies, but one such game that comes to mind for me is Darkspore.

For those who don't know, Darkspore, released in 2011, was a sequel to the 2008 game "Spore" that was a Diablo-styled hack-and-slash with a darker, grittier tone than the original Spore. Unfortunately, Darkspore was one of those games that suffered from always-online DRM that was plaguing a lot of games around that time. Because of the DRM attached to it, Darkspore became literally unplayable once the online servers for the game were shut down permanently. And by unplayable, I mean that you can't even play the game offline let alone start it up because the servers for it are long dead.

While Darkspore in hindsight wasn't a particularly good game, no game should have to suffer the fate of being lost forever due to shitty practices like needless DRM.

An old favorite of mine is Psi-Ops, a third person shooter game that was developed, published by Midway, whatever.

The thing with Psi-Ops is that Midway had a lawsuit about the game because the title was used for someone’s project, which was done months before Psi-Ops' (name on who sued currently escapes me). While I don’t think it stopped the selling of the game, it was a contributing factor on Midway's closing, which indirectly killed it. As of right now, it has been about twelve years since it’s release, and at this rate there’s no sequel to be seen. The action also killed chances at a stealth action sequel on GameCube.

Last edited Oct 08, 2017 at 06:18PM EDT

Not actually due to legal issue, but The 2014 iOS port of Tales of Phantasia, unlike Darkspore and other examples, actually deserves to be taken down. Despite being a port of a SNES classic, this reproduction was a mess of monetization that locked you in the hardest difficulty setting, and it tried to force you buying inapps items though lacks of useful litems like money and drops, and it also featured checkpoint starvation. Like Darkspore, it also had always online DRM despite being a single-player game with no multiplayer or social elements. This game is now removed from the store and its servers got shut down, rendering it unplayable. Good riddance !

Last edited Oct 08, 2017 at 08:24PM EDT
Skeletor-sm

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