Let's Review Games That Resulted In "Classic" Giant Bomb Moments You Can't Play Anymore [Blog Edition]

Author's Note: Hey there, everyone! Chuck was kind enough to ask me to write a brief article to show people that the new site is still going to have plenty of cool stuff that makes it a special a fun place. In order to show what staff articles or editorials might look like, I whipped up the following post. If you enjoy this and are in the beta, which requires Giant Bomb Premium, consider dropping a supportive comment on the beta site version of the article! I changed a few things in this edition because there were a few mental notes and thoughts that crossed my mind shortly after publishing the article version. So, have at it!

Preamble

It's great to see Giant Bomb with a much-needed new coat of paint. And as everyone here likely agrees with me, having this site up and running not only honors the hard work of everyone who has contributed to it but also reminds us all of the gaming history that lives and dies on this very website. To help highlight that, let's look at a handful of games that provided incredibly memorable moments in Giant Bomb's history that are largely or entirely unplayable to this day. I don't claim to have gathered everything from the site's catalogues that falls into that umbrella, and I hope that this quick and fun write-up can inspire you to share games where Giant Bomb plays a prominent role in preserving them for posterity's sake.

Now, some of you may point out Star Wars Galaxies or The Matrix Online as examples of games that qualify for inclusion, but given the ubiquity of fan servers for those sorts of games these days, I opted to disregard them. Likewise, I'm also not going to include games that were physically released and can still be obtained on eBay. I also don't have any bad games that got pulled but didn't penetrate the site or this community beyond a single Quick Look or article. For example, I know that Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma was pulled from all platforms it was released on, but thinking about the Quick Look and everything that happened to the game and its developers just depresses me more than anything else.

Ravaged

The Giant Bomb Moment: Let's Watch A Pro

What Happened To The Game?

An online multiplayer game that went dormant after its release and is unplayable today? Say it ain't so! Well, things are a bit "weird" for Ravaged, as shortly after its release in 2012, it introduced DLC that shifted the game's focus away from its post-apocalyptic setting to one more oriented around zombies. Its developer even renamed the game to "Ravaged Zombie Apocalypse." This direction change ended up being divisive among fans, and that's an understatement. People who supported the game at launch for the Mad Maxx-inspired visuals and world, were upset that the game became a generic zombie apocalypse survival game.

Nonetheless, this tonal shift wasn't entirely the reason why the game was completely removed from Steam and other marketplaces. Somewhere down the line, developer 2Dawn got involved in a lawsuit they likely lost, which resulted in their company going dormant. At one point, 2Dawn's URL link on their own Steam page redirected players to a dog site, and they went completely radio silent on Ravaged, not saying a word, as early as 2015. So, enjoy rewatching Brad and Vinny gawking over a hapless helicopter pilot crashing into the ground, as it is one of the few examples of the game being well-documented on the internet.

Bot Colony

The Giant Bomb Moment: Pick Up The Pepper Grinder

What Happened To The Game?

Bot Colony is an odd case that blurs the lines. If you want to play the version of Bot Colony that Vinny lost his mind over, then you are out of luck. The developer never fully transitioned Bot Colony out of Early Access, and at one point, opted to cease using speech-to-text after they no longer wanted to continue paying for the software license for Windows Speech Recognition (WSR). So, if this article got you nostalgic about Bot Colony, I regret to inform you that there's no yelling at androids about pepper grinders in your future!

If you purchase an Early Access license for Bot Colony today, you will have to play it with a text parser, which I tried, and it remains a largely frustrating experience, but nothing on par with what Vinny had to endure. However, here's where things get a little weird. After saying their game would stand as an incomplete experiment, the director behind Bot Colony this year announced they were rebooting the game as "Bot Colony redux." The bad news? The game's director and lead have gone down the AI rabbit hole, and this new project reeks of something likely to utilize a LLM to power its textual backend. I shouldn't be too negative, as, after Vinny did their streams of Bot Colony, that very creator took to the forums to push back on the notion that their game was unresponsive or incomplete. So, if you are reading this, prove me wrong, and I'm more than happy to send your game the praises it deserves.

Drawn To Death

The Giant Bomb Moment(s): A pretty hilarious Quick Look and Dan's Drawn To Death Character Impression During Vinny's Beastcast 99 Intro

What Happened To The Game?

We have a classic case of an online shooter that got its servers shut down shortly after it released and continually struggled to find an audience. Drawn to Death was released exclusively on PS4 on April 4, 2017, and Sony shut down the servers on March 25, 2019. We have seen this story before and we will likely see it again.

The more interesting question to ask is if this is the game that "broke" David Jaffe. As many of you may be aware, David Jaffe has become Persona non grata in the industry after leading some of the biggest games exclusive to the PS2 and PS3. Since Drawn to Death he's repeatedly attacked games journalists on social media, attacked the teams in charge of the God of War games in the present, and even been dunked on by official Nintendo PR on his inability to play Metroid Dread. Was he always a prickly personality with a penchant of being resistant to criticism? Sure, but seeing the man today is kind of a depression factory.

P.T./Silent Hills

The Giant Bomb Moment(s): An incredible solo Quick Look with Patrick and a fun Six Crazy Frights feature with Abby

What Happened To The Game?

Most of you know about this one at this point, right? P.T. was a "playable teaser" for a now-canceled installment in the Silent Hill series by Hideo Kojima. P.T. was released in 2014, and around 2015, rumors surfaced that Kojima and his senior staff planned to leave Konami following the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Those rumors came to fruition, and while most weren't exactly surprised by Konami's announcement that Kojima's Silent Hills game was dead, they were shocked at the lengths the company went to scrub all traces of P.T.'s existence from the internet and on players' consoles. Anyone who deleted the game from their hard drives was permanently blocked from re-downloading it, and Konami has been relatively active in using copyright laws to prevent people from sharing builds or rips of the game. If you didn't play P.T. at the time of its release and want cooler heads to share what the game was like, look no further than either of the videos I linked to above.

Velvet Sundown

The Giant Bomb Moment: An incredible Quick Look where Jeff honestly could have won an Academy Award for his performance.

What Happened To The Game?

Here's another unusual game that effectively lives and dies on Giant Bomb, as not many people have video evidence of Velvet Sundown's existence. Velvet Sundown is a Frankenstein's Monster of a video game, and it was a magical role-playing device you really had to see to understand. It blends the conceit of a hidden role game with a dubious text-to-speech algorithm. In many ways, it was barely a game, and yet, it was also one of the most enthralling video game experiences of 2014. Regrettably, its developer, Tribe Studios, was acquired, and its new owner ceased paying for the license to use the text-to-speech software that powered the game's core functionality. Worse, that text-to-speech engine was piped into the game via a cloud server and wasn't entirely integrated into the game's code. Even if you attempt to run a copy of the game that you own, any attempt to play Velvet Sundown today results in a server error and boots you back to your desktop.

Don't worry, Ingmar, you are a national treasure in our hearts.

Wrap-Up

So, what games on the site or from Giant Bomb's past can you think of that aren't even playable these days? Share away in the comments!