Missing Episode/Video Games

• Video game example, kind of: The entire fourth installment of the seven-part (six-part?) Leisure Suit Larry series was never made, largely because lead designer Al Lowe couldn't figure out how to logically continue the series from the third game on and chose to skip straight to the fifth one. Its lack is a major plot point in the fifth game and it pops up in other series by the same company, never playable.
  • Another explanation is that Larry 4 was originally going to be a massively multiplayer online adventure game (in the early nineties!), but development never got off the ground as modem technology was still much too primitive at the time, so in the end the small minigames that were used to beta-test the project's online capabilities were packaged together and sold as The Sierra Network.
    • Leisure Suit Larry 4 turns up as a gag/plot point in Space Quest 4. Vohaul smuggled his consciousness onto a disk of Leisure Suit Larry 4, and the Xenonian scientists are so eager to play it that they load it into the planet-controlling supercomputer. When you're in Vohaul's lair later in the game, one of the programs on his computer is "LSL4."
  • Legend has it that Al Lowe had intended to end the series with 3 and thus once said that "there won't be a LSL4". Well... there isn't.
• Here's an interesting example: the sequel to the original Star Fox, Star Fox 2, was never released, even though development was already completed. The plot would have continued the story from the previous game, and would have introduced Star Wolf as one of the main antagonists. The game was canceled most likely due to the pending release of the Nintendo64, which many developers desired the most. Shortly after the game's termination, Star Fox 64 began development, and rebooted the storyline from scratch.
  • English translation was never completed, but nowadays fans have come up with ways to translate it.
• Many computer games, after their initial publishing run, suffer from a problem somewhat unique to the medium. As Science Marches On, it can be quite rewarding to produce a Video Game Remake or Updated Rerelease especially designed for newer computers, except that the source code and other assets of many commercial games are rarely held onto. For example, when the xu4 and Exult projects wanted to make source ports of Ultima IV and VII, Origin admitted that it had lost everything. And when Fallout Tactics was under development just a few years after the previous Fallout game had been released, it turned out that virtually all of the original game's 3D assets had been lost, and nearly all of it ended up being remodeled.
• Speaking of Fallout, there's the original sequel to Fallout 2 made by Black Isle, code-named "Van Buren", which was almost more than half done before Black Isle's parent company Interplay went bankrupt and the game was never seen again. Fallout 3 was eventually made 10 years later by Bethesda yet had nothing to do with Van Buren.
  • Fallout: New Vegas, however, does reference several concepts that would have been part of Van Buren, specifically Caesars Legion, the Van Grafs and Hoover Dam. It's no coincidence that the development team for New Vegas was comprised of many former members of Black Isle.
• Many games that don't make it overseas are this to the foreign fans of a series who are cursed with hearing people who actually did get it talk about it, but will never play it themselves. If they're lucky, it's an old game that will get a Fan Translation. If not, they're screwed.
• The excessively violent and knowingly offensive beat/slash 'em up Thrill Kill was pulled from distribution before it could offend, likely to avoid fears of a moral outcry. The game developers were rightfully annoyed by this; leaking a beta version of the game before releasing another Fighting Game using the same game mechanics, albeit marginally toned-down (i.e., LESS bloody and gory).
• Games magazine Amiga Power reviewed Putty Squad, made by Team 17, and gave it 91%. High praise from such a hardline mag. Trouble was, they still hadn't released the Amiga version by the time the magazine folded, two years after the review. Gallingly, the SNES version was released on time.
• The fourth game in Atari's Swordquest series, Airworld, was never developed, probably due to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. One of Parker Brothers' Return of the Jedi games also never made it past the concept art stage (the other unreleased game, Ewok Adventure, was discovered as a prototype).
• Similar to the Leisure Suit Larry example above, there was an installment of Sam and Max Freelance Police made called Sam & Max: Freelance Police!!. However, LucasArts cancelled it and it wouldn't be until another four years before Telltale Games would make a Sam & Max game. Like LSL above, the game is referenced in the Telltale Games series as a "particularly gruesome case".
  • The gruesomeness (and bitterness) around the LucasArts sequel is that the game was finished before being caught up in the studio's decision to leave the adventure game business entirely.
• The reason why many Sega Saturn classics like Panzar Dragoon Saga and Shining Force 3 have never been re-released is because Sega lost the original programming code for the games. Same for their System-16 (and then some) arcade games.