The best games nobody talks about anymore
Every year a handful of games get canonised and the rest quietly stop being mentioned. It is rarely about quality. Usually the studio closed, or the platform died, or the thing was simply too strange to become anybody's comfort pick.
These five were not failures. Four of them reviewed in the nineties. What they have in common is that almost nobody under thirty has played them, and every one of them is doing something that still has no real equivalent.
- 1Grim Fandango
A film-noir detective story set in the Aztec land of the dead, with a skeleton travel agent as the lead. It flopped hard enough to help end LucasArts' adventure line, which is the only reason it is not on every all-time list. The writing is the draw — it is genuinely funny in a way games almost never risk being, and it never nudges you to check whether you got the joke.
- 2Jet Set Radio
The game that made cel-shading a style rather than a trick. You grind rails through a cartoon Tokyo spraying graffiti while the police escalate from bored to absurd. What has not been copied is the confidence: it commits to a soundtrack, a palette and a pace with no concession to anyone who might not be in the mood, and it is over before it outstays that.
- 3Homeworld
A real-time strategy game in full 3D space, in 1999, where your fleet carries over between missions — losses included. Lose your support frigates in level four and level five is simply harder, permanently. Almost no strategy game since has been willing to let a campaign scar like that, and it turns a series of missions into one continuous retreat you are personally responsible for.
- 4Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
Three characters in three different centuries, sharing one puzzle space — flush something down a toilet in 1780 and collect it two hundred years later. Thirty years on, the structure still reads as ambitious. It is also short, warm and completely unbothered by its own cleverness, which is the part most modern puzzle games get wrong.
- 5Perfect Dark
GoldenEye gets the nostalgia, and Perfect Dark is the better game — more inventive weapons, far stranger levels, an AI that still holds up. It arrived at the very end of the N64's life and was buried by the hardware generation that followed within months. If you only remember one Rare shooter, you probably remember the wrong one.
