Disney quietly pulled 14 games from Steam over the weekend, and if you didn't already own them, you're out of luck. No warning. No explanation. Just gone.
The delisted titles include Armed and Dangerous, the 2003 cult classic shooter from LucasArts, and Disney's Hercules Action Game from 1997 - you know, the one you definitely played on your parents' Windows 98 machine. Also removed: multiple Toy Story games, Gargoyles, and a bunch of other Disney-published titles from the late '90s and early 2000s.
Here's the thing that makes this infuriating: Disney isn't hurting for money. They're not some struggling publisher trying to cut licensing costs. They're a multi-billion dollar entertainment conglomerate that just decided these games aren't worth keeping available. No sunset announcement, no final sale, no chance for fans to grab them one last time.
This is the game preservation crisis in a nutshell. These aren't just products - they're pieces of gaming history. Armed and Dangerous was genuinely funny, with absurd weapons like the Land Shark Gun that let you fire sharks through the ground. The old Disney movie tie-in games were how a generation of kids experienced those stories.
And now they're just... gone. Unless you pirate them, which is apparently what Disney's digital strategy is pushing people toward.
The worst part? If you already purchased these games, you can still download them. So the infrastructure exists. Disney's servers aren't shutting down. They just decided new customers don't deserve access to their back catalog.
This isn't the first time. In recent years, we've seen Ubisoft delete games people paid for, Sony try to shut down the PS3 and Vita stores, and countless publishers let games vanish when licensing deals expire. The industry treats its history like disposable trash.
Some folks will say "just buy physical." Cool. Find me a physical PC copy of Armed and Dangerous that works on Windows 11. I'll wait.
The gaming industry desperately needs legislation around game preservation - something like the initiative in Europe that would require publishers to leave games in a playable state. Because right now, corporations are erasing decades of gaming culture, and they don't even have to tell us why.
