A tweet from last week asked developers: “What’s in your game graveyard? Games that were cancelled or no one can play anymore?” What followed was a wonderful, melancholic list of delights we will never get to play again, or never had the chance to play at all. Battleborn came up, and a Disney Infinity sequel. But also beloved XNA games and YA interactive fictions. The deeper you go, the more thrilling these games start to sound, the richness and imagination that is forever out of reach. I read and read and it was like descending through coral – all this brightness and life swimming past untouchable.
Games that are no longer available – and games that never made it to release – are a unique sadness to creators, I imagine, and a uniquely tantalising vision to players like me. I hope it’s not wrong that those two responses coexist. And that idea – the game graveyard – is just perfect. We need a game graveyard, I think. Somewhere to wander amongst the stones and read the names, to be alone with thoughts of what might have been and how much work went into something that is now out of reach.
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