Topic: Dead Games You Miss?

A lot of games can end up dead for many reasons: Servers shutting down, player count dries up or turns incredibly toxic, updates fundamentally changing the game, or some mysterious fourth thing. We sometimes get lucky with private servers or bots, but the experience is never really the same. Are there any games that are dead, dying, or gone that you miss playing like it just came out?

I have a couple.

• Radical Heights

Released in 2018, Radical Heights was Boss Key Studio's last chance to be relevant in the games industry after they created their own Coughing Baby Vs. Hydrogen Bomb moment of LawBreakers competing directly against Overwatch. A battle royale game released in the height of the genre's fatigue in something labelled as "X-Treme Early Access", Radical Heights got my immediate attention by being drenched in the hyper-stereotypical stylings of a 1980's game show.

The experience was extremely Smash TV coded, down to the in-match money system of which you had to find either cold hard cash or fabulous prizes like copies of the Radical Heights board game, state-of-the-art CRT Televisions, vacation packages, and those brick cellphones you could absolutely cave someone's head in with in real life. My favorite part of the game was the janky BMXs you could ride. Usually it ended with you glitching out, but sometimes you could get kinda Matt Hoffman with it.

Some gameplay if you're curious: https://youtu.be/hnHjhNeRBxA

• Whirled
  Lasting from 2008 to 2017, Whirled was a web-based virtual world game that was one of my initial places to make friends on the internet. Whirled had an emphasis on user-generated content. There was a free Silver currency and a paid Gold currency players used to buy the content users made. Typically it was things like avatars, uploaded music, or furniture and rooms for your own private domicile where you will not be harrased, Pinkman.

The game was created in Flash, as was the style of the time. It was a lot more sanitized than something like your typical Newgrounds game though, but it still felt just as flimsy. The artstyle was kinda all over the place, since anyone could upload anything at anytime, but it typically followed a harmless children's cartoons aesthetic when official content was made for it. The UI itself had that rubbery "Frutiger Aero" feel that I and many other salivate over.

Oh ***** also did you know the same developers did Puzzle Pirates?

The game shut down mainly because of Flash being unsupported out of security issues. A group of people have relaunched the game under "Whirled.Club". I recommend trying it out, but it's not the same.

Here's one of the crunchier videos I can find of Whirled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP-9Pg0mOEs

• OurWorld
  Similar in DNA to Whirled, Also running from 2008 to 2017. A lot of what can be said about Whirled can transfer over here outside of a few exceptions. You can have your own room to customize, but no user generated content can be uploaded. Playing flash games was a lot more of a main focus point, with that being the main way you earned "Flow", the XP to level up your account. One of my favorite things from OurWorld was this painting game that was mashed up with a Line Rider kinda thing? A ball rolled down lines you drew and it caused paint to splatter on the canvas when it rolled over certain symbols.

Here's some video of OurWorld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIYgXiD4FHk

• Darwin Project
  Wow, who woulda thought all of these Battle Royale games wouldn't all survive? Darwin Project hit Early Access in 2018, with a full release in 2020. This was a 10-player battle royale set in yet another game show featuring death row inmates forced into an arctic climate, with the main gimmick being an additional "Show Director" player, that was a glorified spectator. They can fly around with a camera that players could see and harass them over voice chat. The Director also had a deck of powers they could use to influence the map, like nuking a section of the map, or activating low gravity for all players. For some unknow reason, way after the game died due to lack of players, it got an update fixing the server and anticheat? I was hoping it would revive the playerbase, but it absolutely didn't.

Here's the IGN review from 2020: https://youtu.be/v1ifTRG1jjs?si=syURokWuxTKV4hjD

If you've interacted with any of these games, I'd love to hear about it. If you haven't, please tell me your own games that you miss. I might make a followup post with more games.