In March of 2009, Ubisoft released the game Wheelman for PS3 and Xbox 360. Starring Vin Diesel from the Fast and Furious series, it promised a game about cars driving around in a big city, with a big star behind it.
It also featured real cars from Saturn and Pontiac. At roughly the same time as the game was released both brands were shuttered by General Motors as part of its bankruptcy proceedings. Midway, the original publisher of the game, also declared bankruptcy, which is why Ubisoft’s name is on the box. The developer behind the game, Midway Studios - Newcastle, formerly Pitbull Syndicate, also folded in 2009, dying as Midway was carved up and sold.
Why am I recounting the doom and gloom surrounding a game nobody remembers? Because you’re never going to see that game on sale again. It sold poorly, a ton of the people involved went bankrupt, and it launched to a wave of indifference. Things could not have been worse for the game, and as a result it’s destined to live in obscurity.
It’s a fascinating game to me not because of the quality of the game itself, but because of the circumstances surrounding its release. While Vin Diesel seems to have emerged unscathed, everyone else went bankrupt, and none of it seemed to be related to the game itself.
That’s also a good reason why you’ll never see the game released again. Nobody blames Wheelman for everyone around it failing, at least not to my knowledge, but nobody was fighting over the rights either, and it’s possible that nobody actually knows who owns the rights to it. There are plenty of games where that’s the case, such as No One Lives Forever, a very popular PC game that will never be released again because licensing behind it has been a convoluted mess.
There will be video games that become lost media in our lifetime. The hardware that plays it will fail, the media they are stored on will degrade, and while popular titles that fall through the licensing cracks will have an enthusiastic following keeping them available through alternate means, the games that lack that same following are going to be gone forever.
We are already seeing it with early cell phone games, and there’s a small group that unearths old cell phones in order to find games that are stored within.
There’s a real risk that you won’t be able to play Wheelman, and I know that plenty of people will say ‘oh who cares, it’s a bad game starring Vin Diesel.’ But lots of people worked on that game, putting in long hours to make the game work, and were immediately fired when their studio went out of business. It’s a shame their work will be, inevitably, lost to time.
