Disney delists 14 games from Steam without warning, most notably Armed and Dangerous and that one Hercules game you vaguely remember playing in 1997

Cover art for Armed and Dangerous. — (Image credit: Disney)

In a blow aimed precisely at the heart of my hazily-recalled childhood memories, Disney has gone and yanked down 14 games from Steam. What's worse, the games were delisted entirely without warning, meaning we didn't even get our now-customary chance to pay slightly too much for access to them before it goes away forever (and then never play them anyway).

The games that have been removed are (via Wario64):

I've reached out to Disney to ask why these games were delisted without warning, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.

Now, my general ideological stance that games should be preserved and accessible aside (putting aside also my intense personal regret regarding the loss of Disney Fairies: Tinkerbell's Adventure), I can't say I'm too broken up about most of these disappearing. That's no statement on their quality; I've just never heard of most of them.

There are a couple of exceptions to that, though. Disney's Hercules was a childhood staple of mine, back on my dad's bulky Fujitsu PC all the way back in the late '90s. Was it good? No idea. But it did have 2.5D elements that blew my tiny mind when I was five years old.

I think the real loss here is Armed and Dangerous, though. I confess, almost all my experience with this one stems from an old Official Xbox Magazine demo disc, but it too was quite impressive to a much younger version of myself. Not because its third-person combat was especially mindblowing, but because it had a gun that would turn the entire map upside down and make all your enemies fall off it. You just don't get innovation like that these days.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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