From Prototype to F.E.A.R. – 8 dead games that are long overdue for a comeback
Remakes and reboots have long been the safest bet in the games industry, but the choice of what gets dug up often feels like a lottery. Some series get a third life in a row, while others gather dust for decades. Meanwhile, fans of the forgotten ones would gladly hand over their money tomorrow.
Reddit users were asked to name a dead game that deserves a second chance. The author of the thread opened with two picks of his own, Prototype and Dino Crisis. Prototype from Radical Entertainment came out in 2009 and let Alex Mercer tear New York apart, but after the 2012 sequel Activision effectively dissolved the studio.
Dino Crisis from Shinji Mikami brought raptor horror to the genre in 1999, while Dino Crisis 3, with its dinosaurs in space, buried the series in 2003. One commenter suggested Capcom will return to the lizards once it runs out of Resident Evil remakes, and after RE2, RE3, and RE4 that sounds less far-fetched than it used to.
F.E.A.R. from Monolith, released in 2005, got the most mentions. It had slow motion, the creepy Alma, and enemy AI built by Jeff Orkin on a goal-planning system. Soldiers picked their own tactics, flanking players, pinning them down with fire, and saving their own skins.
One player shared a moment they still remember:
I'll never forget sprinting towards a guy on a balcony with a shotgun and before I can shoot he drops a grenade at his feet and jumps over the balcony to the warehouse below to save himself and leave me there with a grenade.
Any chance of a revival vanished in February 2025, when Warner Bros. shut down Monolith. For anyone missing that exact feeling, commenters recommend the 2023 game Trepang2, which grew out of love for F.E.A.R.
The best games people want brought back died for very different reasons:
Titanfall 2 launched in October 2016 between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and drowned in the release rush. Yet it had a campaign with the robot BT-7274 and stunning levels
Anthem from BioWare had excellent exosuit flight, but the rest of the game never reached that level, and EA decided to shut down the servers in January 2026
Evolve from Turtle Rock, with its asymmetric 4v1 format, was ahead of its time. Microtransactions choked it, and the genre later flourished thanks to Dead by Daylight
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was a kind of GTA devoted entirely to explosions, but its studio Pandemic was closed in 2009
Dark Cloud mixed action RPG with town building, and hardly anyone has repeated that hybrid since
Burnout with its slow-motion crashes would look like a form of art on a modern engine
