Intro
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I’ve recently been giving Entropic Domain a massive cleanup, decorating some neglected articles and more importantly adding in many new ones, these are all videos from Massi’s channel that were never given article versions before ( except for one, the Dark Messiah article, which was on this site’s predecessor, cheecken.net).

These have basically been added for the sake of completionism, aiming to add pretty much all of the channel content uploaded in the last 4 years (for now at least earlier stuff is excluded as that’s the stuff that was purposefully excluded when ED was originally made). Now we have all the [oscuro] content, we’re in the process of getting all of the SiG episodes (that format’s Chivalry themed banner now actually makes sense) and we’ve got everything DGR except the first 2 episodes.

Revisiting all these old DGR episodes has reminded me of a pretty common question the series has ignited, what is a dead game? Well, it usually wasn’t phrased as a question, more a bunch of people commenting on the videos saying “this game isn’t dead!”, for AirBuccaneers, Dark Messiah and Mirage no one was arguing with us, but for all the others…

_Toxikk

_UT

_DoD:S

_HL2DM

_{Quake 3 Arena}

And in a way they have a point, right? Murmurs about afterlives aside when someone’s dead they’re dead, they don’t come back and they don’t have any life signs, heart stops beating, pulse stops pulsing, brain stops sparking, the works. Until quite recently an example of this was War of the Roses, a medieval slasher game that relied on central servers from its developer Fatshark, servers that Fatshark shut down after 5 years. Then there’s Ubisoft’s always-online racing game The Crew, which recently sparked a massive stink after being shut down in 2024, 10 years after release, Ubisoft added offline support for the game’s 2 sequels (The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest) but not the original game, so even though it does have a solo mode you can’t access it¹.

There are plenty of games out there like this, where official support for games dies and their developers just don’t leave a fallback option, and in many cases they either just don’t have a community to make one or that community can’t figure out how, these games are truly dead, you just can’t play them. And none of these games featured on DGR are actually like that.

Those kinds of games are important to talk about because it’s ridiculous that companies can sell games that have a finite lifespan like this, I don’t expect any company to support a game more than they want to but I do think they should be obligated to offer either dedicated server support, peer-to-peer options or modding tools, they shouldn’t be forced to put in long term work to keep their games alive if they don’t want to but communities shouldn’t be ringfenced away from doing the job themselves, companies shouldn’t be dabbling in planned obsolescence.

Ross Scott has for example been very vocal about this issue over the past few years, last year launching his dedicated “Stop Killing Games” activist project to try and pressure governments, lawmakers and consumer protection agencies around the world to step in, and while I don’t believe he’s going to get anywhere by claiming that these practices are already illegal, I do absolutely agree with his moral stance on the issue and I do think it should be illegal.

Companies shouldn’t be able to tangle a game to a central server and then brick it with no alternatives and they shouldn’t be able to hide behind the legal fine print that games are “licenced” not “owned”. Again, under the current legal system I think they’re technically correct, but under any fair system they shouldn’t be. Killing off experiences people love, cutting them off from memories they want to make, is unfair; and, hell, even if a game is shit I believe in media preservation in general anyway, this erosion of ownership and choice is a disturbing trend that should be stomped out.

We don’t cover games like these for DGR though because they would be tough stories to tell, obviously we can’t speak to our own experience of what these games are like because we just can’t play them, and then there’s getting footage. Again, we can’t play them, so we can’t record anything, we would have to rely totally on 3rd party clips which would involve sending out a bunch of permission requests for footage that might not even go anywhere, that or just yoinking them with a video downloader, but making a whole video from nicked footage is both morally and legally dubious.

But when most people call a game dead, they aren’t being that strict, instead it just means a game that’s on a real downhill slump, even relatively popular games have been called dead at times, like PAYDAY 2, to the point that it was a running joke even the developers played in on.

_{Not exactly a corpse, is it?}

Another game that would jump to mind for me when it comes to dead games is Call of Duty: Ghosts, judge me for it all you like but I actually quite like that game and I played it long after its sequels came out, its developers have long since moved in, its playerbase has dwindled to the point that a lot of gamemodes are totally barren, but is it truly dead? Well, the servers are still up, people are still playing, and when playing the more common modes like TDM it didn’t take long for me to find a match, which adds on a few question marks.

Or we could look at Quake Champions, one comment on the Quake 3 video said “Quake Champions is dead, Q3 isn’t.” but if we have a look at SteamDB, Champions is either the most popular or second most popular game of the bunch depending on the day, neck and neck against Quake Live, IDs remake/update of Quake 3.

_{Quake games comparison - SteamDB}

Now of course you can get these games on way more platforms than just Steam, there will be PC players on other platforms, console players, etc etc, so this is far from a perfect comparison, but if Quake Champions can still outpace the rest of the series on some platforms, is it fair to say it’s dead but Quake 3 isn’t?

See what I mean right? Here the definitions can get a little murky.

So for a Dead Game Review we need “death” to mean something a little broader than “literally unplayable”, but it also can’t get too broad either, otherwise there’s no point to the label.

The Spectrum of Death
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Let’s look at our criteria for what’s dead enough for a Dead Game Review. When looking at that I would say there’s basically 3 strands to it:

Developer support (if the game still gets updates)
Community activity (what the playercount is)
Ease of play (how simple it is to launch the game and get into matches)

Developer Support
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Valve has buried older update history posts since they changed the Steam UI around for a fancier news feed, so if I mention “it seems” a point is when updates stopped coming, or some more diplomatic variation than just saying “this is when it was”, that’s why.

For the first 2 games covered on DGR, AirBucaneers seems to have been last updated in 2013 according to SteamDB, so it’s been dead for 12 years, 7 when it was covered.

After a bunch of patches from 2015-2017 and a 2018 hiatus Toxikk’s last patch was the 2019 “Predator Build”, a performance update, so it was the closest to life a DGR game has been, having died only a year before being covered, now being dead for 6 years.

As for Unreal Tournament, Epic stopped updating that in 2017, so it had been abandoned for 3 years when it was first discovered on DGR and 6 when it was revisited, now 8. As Massi pointed out in the episode, given that it was abandoned in a Pre-Alpha stage it could be argued that UT4 was never alive to begin with.

Torn Banner stopped updating Mirage Arcane Warfare the same year, so it had been abandoned for 5 years when we covered it.

I’m not sure when Arkane stopped updating Dark Messiah, but I’d wager it was pretty soon after release, and the game is now 19 years old (it was 16 when we covered it for DGR), Ubisoft has actually been quietly supporting a fan restoration project for the game recently but whether that could make its way the Steam release as something “official” is yet to be seen, unless something does come out about that I would say this doesn’t count as breathing new life in, since it’s an unofficial mod project.

Then there’s Quake 3, which unsurprisingly has the longest gap between death and coverage, the final release of that was version 1.32c, released in 2006, that makes 18 years².

So every game we’ve covered on DGR has been dead for a year or more in terms of developer support and nowadays has been dead for between 6-19 years, a generation or 2 in the grave. The only exception to this rule is the Source games we covered, Day of Defeat: Source and Half Life 2: Deathmatch.

These games do occasionally get drip feed updates, but they’re made up entirely of under the hood engine changes and the occasional bug fix, in terms of any actual content updates or new features it seems DoD:S hasn’t gotten any of that for the 19 (nearly 20) years since its release, so if we wouldn’t say it’s dead, we could say it’s been dormant for 19 years, 17 when we discovered it.

And for HL2DM it’s hard to tell because of that news feed problem again, if you look on the game’s Steam page it only shows updates back to 2021 but if you dig around in archives you can find that ones that go as far back as 2004, but having looked around on the wiki it seems the last bit of content for the game, a new map, was added in a 2013 update, so let’s say dormant for 12 years, 9 when it was covered.

I would say if there’s one cornerstone of our Dead Game criteria it’s this one, you can’t really credibly claim a game is dead if it’s still getting new content, whether that’s new weapons/gear, maps, mechanics, game modes, characters, whatever that may be, if all that motion is completely gone you quite easily credibly can.

Community Activity and Ease of Play
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But even if a game was totally dead in the updates department, it would be pretty dubious to call it dead if it had a thriving community, so that’s something we also take into account when considering a “Dead Game”, DGR games have either been totally unpopulated, like Dark Messiah or Mirage, or lowly populated, like all the other games we’ve covered.

_{A comparison between all the DGR games so far except Unreal Tournament}

Dark Messiah has actually since had a small rise due to that community update, so that only leaves Mirage as the truest of the true Dead Games we’ve covered, although the tools are there to resuscitate it, most people don’t use them.

Which ties neatly into the next area, Ease of Play, this one is where the DGR series has varied the most, we could roughly put the games we’ve discovered into 3 categories here:

Server support
In-game hosting
External work needed

Server support meaning there are still official servers chugging along even though the community is down and support is gone, we could take UT as an example, despite discontinuing the game in 2017 Epic still kept the servers for the game going until early 2023, so when Massi first covered the game in 2020 playing was still jump in and go.

In-game hosting is where official servers aren’t a thing anymore but creating your own game is something you can easily do from in-game menus, think DoD:S and HL2DM, Valve isn’t there for you anymore but they gave you the tools to DIY easily.

External work, this is where 3 of the games we’ve discovered so far lie, for UT Epic’s pullout of the official servers means you need a new master server to play the game, thanks to the hard work of Timimmit and his team on UT4UU one already exists and it’s a relatively painless process to set up, but you still have to faff about with console commands and creating an account on his website, so we’re firmly out of “turn up and go” territory.

The other 2 are where things got much more complicated. Unreal had the luxury of being a very big franchise, so it had a community around it that were going to fight for it to the bitter end, building a platform like UT4UU, Mirage and Dark Messiah are much more niche games and in these cases we had to do the work ourselves; Mirage did have a server guide which at times was helpful and other times not but we were otherwise on our own, which is why Massi dedicated half of the Mirage article/video just to how to go about hosting a server and made his own guide on that process for Dark Messiah.

Obviously these 2 elements are very much tied together, a turn up and go game is much easier to generate at least small amounts of momentum for than one which involves faffing about with servers, I’ve for example seen multiple examples of people showing an interest in Mirage on the Steam forums, asking how to play it, but once I link the server guide it’s either crickets or some level of interest but not one strong enough to actually do it, which is why Mirage’s player numbers are usually 0 and at best around 1-5: A select few people will launch the game, see the empty server browser, realise they have a 15 gig brick on their drive and then promptly give up.

_{Mirage player charts - SteamDB}

Not judging, by the way, it’s Massi who has always handled the faff for DGR, I’ve just helped by being a guinea pig with him, if I had to do it all myself, well, chances are these games would’ve stayed dead.

Summary
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That’s our big 3 in a nutshell, developer death/dormancy has been the essential hook for the series so far and technically you don’t need the other 2, which is why an easily accessible game with a (small but still) active community like Quake 3 can fit the bill, even though as Massi said in the video that “Quake 3 definitely isn’t dead” and that it’s in fact part of a family of old ID games that refuse to die, it could’ve easily worked under another label, a Quake 3 retrospective of some kind, but it also does work as a DGR.

So in theory any game that doesn’t get dev love anymore could be a DGR candidate, most games die within a few years, very few live past 10, stretch to 15 or 20, forget it. A very broad church then, but in practice a candidate will almost always have at least one of the other two.

Because the series wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t either exploring niche games you likely haven’t heard of before or telling a story about reviving a game from the dead, or both. For that reason the most engaging episodes of the series so far in my eyes are definitely the ones we did on Mirage and Dark Messiah, there’s a unique joy in playing around in the graveyard, playing a game you know no one else is, having an experience that is, at the time, unique.

But it’s also good not to be too picky either, after all I was the one who mostly wrote the Day of Defeat DGR, a game that still gets that dripfeed support, still has a modest but active playerbase and still has easy server hosting, it’s arguably the least dead game of the bunch alongside Quake 3, which is why I wrote that it “hasn’t quite finished decomposing yet”, but it’s a game that despite some occasionally whiny server admins was immense fun to play, whether that was enduring brutal battles of attrition, tense 1v1s or dicking around on bizarre community maps.

And we’ve had similarly fun experiences with all of the DGR games, well, Toxikk and AirBuccaneers were before my time, I wasn’t there for HL2DM and I absolutely was not cut out for Unreal Tournament, but there was still loads of riveting gameplay in the sessions we played so far and that really is value in itself.

This is why games that in some respects could be considered “alive and well” get Dead Game Reviews, as Massi has sometimes pointed out when it comes to games like these the title has a tinge of irony to it, pointing out why we shouldn’t write games off as dead when they still have a lot going for them, and even with the games that are much less so like Dark Messiah or Mirage we showed how easy it is to bring a game to life.

In those Dark Messiah lobbies we had 6 people or less, in Mirage it was often just me and Massi, maybe 2 or 3 others at most, we didn’t even have enough people for full lobbies and in Dark Messiah we didn’t even have bots to plug the gaps and yet the games were pulsing with life, we were trying all sorts of different classes, maps and game modes, engaging with the mechanics, giving some love to forgotten work.

So while I get why some people aren’t a fan of the label I think that potentially with the exception of Quake 3, we’ve struck the right balance. These are dead games one way or another, and we’ve had great fun shining a light on them and playing our part in bringing them back to life and showing that even though they’re long forgotten to some they still have value and fun factor to this day.