2 more examples came to my mind.
1.) Light cycle games / Tron bikes
To the tune of games such as:
Bananatron , GLtron, is Armagetron Advanced. They actually released the game on steam 2 years ago, labeled as
Retrocycles. In order to make it more accessible to new players.
That game was very customizable, had many different game modes and a monthly Ladder ranking competition called ''Laddle''. It was, and still is an awesome game!
Unfortunately everything casual about it seems to have died out. :(
There are still loyal teams duking it out in the Laddle, but everything else just screams ''graveyard''.
The server list brings up an error.
The forum entries are borderline ''I am not hosting my server anymore'' or from 2017.
And the game being very customizable also means that the ''I want to click a button and play'' people will not spend 5 minutes changing settings, much less reading up on how you can setup, say, your own Main Menu background for a game that you can essentially only play against AI anyway.
For all intent and purposes I fear the light-cycle genre has passed. :(
2.) Freeware hacking simulator
Dark Signs This one is interesting because for several years this game had vanished. All traces of it were gone.
Then it reappeared.
But what is this game?
A hacking simulator to the tune of
Uplink or even better yet -
Hacknet! In order to progress in this game you had to write your own scripts.
It had a built-in programming language. Maybe crude and primitive, but name even one game that has that feature! Apart from Hacknet, obviously. But I don't remember if in Hacknet you could write scripts, or it if it was just command line typing. In Dark Signs you HAD to create your own ''Scan number range; add +1; repeat'' to pass unto the next level.
The game somehow vanished; got replaced with some... silly... multiplayer version.
(Seriously, ''silly'' is the best way to describe that fever dream. I did not understand what the point of an ''open point'' version was; and the programs, that were shared around, were just too high for me.)
Then even the multiplayer version vanished.
I don't know what kind of memory diving I went through, but somehow, it appears the original reappeared 2 years ago.
*fun fact - in the FPS
Tron 2.0 there are 3 light-cycle levels.
Many people complained that those were too hard and could barely beat those. Due to my Armagetron experience I found those bike levels relaxingly easy... huh...