The cozy rhythm adventure, ‘Mirth Island’, is coming to PC and consoles in 2026
Press release:
Rotterdam, The Netherlands – 28 July 2026 - SOEDESCO® and developer Clay Game Studio [...]
Time marches on. The world changes. Things evolve. These statements are true in all walks of life, but perhaps even more so in the fast-moving medium of video games. Developers have far more advanced technology at their disposal today than they had in the past, and their audience has changed substantially.
As such, certain genres are bound to get left behind, and old people – like me – are left to lament such losses in videos – like this one. Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. Evolution can be a good thing. In fact, many of these types of games actually spread their beautiful wings and developed into something different.
And as long as there are indie developers around, no genre will ever truly die. Instead, it will just go missing from the main stream, becoming a comfy niche for nostalgic or curious gamers to discover and snuggle up in.
So, before the wide-open sandbox with RPG elements renders all other genres obsolete, let’s take a misty-eyed look at some game types that we don’t see very much anymore. And, yes, we’re being flexible with the word genre. It’s just because we really miss some of these things and we’re feeling sentimental.
Dating back to the 1930s, light-gun technology has been around for longer than you might think. Making use of light sensors to enable players to blast moving targets on a screen, light-gun games hit mainstream notoriety in the mid-80s with Duck Hunt, and went on to boom in popularity during the next decade.
Bloodthirsty 90s kids relished the opportunity to take a plastic gun in hand and live out their action-movie fantasies with the likes of Virtua Cop and Time Crisis. One could even hold the weapon in a side-grip, for maximum action-hero immersion.
Nowadays, the light-gun game is only really ever spotted in arcades, where you might come across a House of the Dead cabinet, or maybe even 2018’s Halo: Fireteam Raven.
Outside of arcades, however, you’re only likely to find the peripherals in a tangled mess of wires at the bottom of someone’s closet. Tragic, really. Despite the genre’s slide into obscurity, the spirit of the home light-gun game is sort of being kept alive today by the likes of Farpoint, which lets players use the PSVR Aim Controller to pick off targets inside the virtual world.
Even that dropped off the radar pretty quickly, though. To be fair, any game that’s best played standing up has an uphill battle to win me over.
Were you disgusted that the scouring of the Shire was omitted from The Return of the King movie? Did you insist that Tyrion Lannister should have been far uglier than the dashing Peter Dinklage? Well, we might have the ideal genre for you.
Text-based adventures give you all that good video game stuff, such as choice and interactivity, but it’s presented in text only, meaning that everything looks, sounds, and feels precisely how you imagine it. In some ways, its minimalism is similar to card games, which are quite popular, and in which players spend a lot of money, take a look at hearthstone boosting services at least.
Most definitely a product of the very early days of gaming, before things like graphics had been invented, the player interacted with the game entirely by typing in various commands.These games could even be played by multiple players online, using early dial-up connections, meaning that they’re a precursor to the modern MMO.
How’s that for pedigree? The name “text-based adventure” even stuck around into the early years of graphics, so long as the interactivity was handled through text input. Notable examples include the likes of Zork, in which players had the opportunity to be eaten by a Grue, and The Oregon Trail, in which players had the opportunity to die of dysentery.
Choices, choices. Primitive games, I’m sure you’ll agree, but there is still a market for them out there, and enthusiasts are developing them to this day. Unfortunately, though, reading is for nerds, so I’ll be giving them a miss. I’m sure you’ll understand.
Let’s make something clear straight away: Vehicular combat games and the still-popular kart racing genre are very different. Causing an opponent to spin out with a banana peel in Mario Kart is not the same as mercilessly whipping a fellow rider with a chain until they fall from their bike and collide with oncoming traffic in Road Rash. Understood? Good.
Once enjoying huge popularity, vehicular combat games like Twisted Metal enabled players to take road rage to frankly absurd heights, often while mowing down innocent bystanders.
The genre evoked the violent power-fantasy side of gaming that is so often maligned, and some of them, such as Carmageddon, were banned in multiple countries. Clearly, the authorities were expecting impressionable youths to fit a spiked grille to the front of their mum’s hatchback and go on a rampage through suburbia.
Anyway, the genre nowadays appears to have been relegated to bit parts in sandbox action games, such as Rage 2 or Mad Max. That said, if a big publisher were willing to chuck some bucks at a revival, there’s definitely potential for this one to come back. What do you say, Sony? Twisted Metal for PS5? Get cracking, then.
Quick Time Events, as with most other controversial gaming tropes, are not inherently evil in themselves. If you’re the type of gamer who does find them difficult to tolerate, however, then you might want to skip these games entirely. Imagine, if you will, a game that’s basically one long QTE from beginning to end.
Having nightmares yet? The likes of Dragon’s Lair and Road Avenger (or Road Blaster in the arcades) only barely qualify as games at all, but this lack of interactivity did mean that developers could really go to town on the graphics.
These experiences were about as close as you could get to actually playing a 90s cartoon. A cool one as well, like M.A.S.K. or Dungeons & Dragons, or something.The genre was somewhat necessarily put to bed once graphical advances meant that games could look as good as cartoons while having actual gameplay.
It’s probably the one genre on this list that really is consigned to the past for good, although its influence will likely be felt for generations to come.
***Sponsored post by piratebay-service***
More by Guest Author:
Tags: Gamer, Gamers, Gaming, House of the dead, Mobile games, PC games, RPG, Sandbox, Video games
