Great Games You Still Can’t Buy
Cannon Fodder isn’t on Steam. It isn’t on GOG. It isn’t on the Evercade. It isn’t in any subscription service. You cannot legally purchase it anywhere in 2026. One of the best games ever made for the Amiga — game that had something genuine to say about war, that made you feel the loss of tiny pixelated soldiers, that caused a national controversy and sold by the bucketload — is simply unavailable.
Not because it’s been lost. Not because the source code is gone or the assets are corrupted. Because Electronic Arts owns it and has no plans to do anything with it.
This is not a niche problem.
How It Happens
Sensible Software made Cannon Fodder. Codemasters bought Sensible Software in 1999. EA acquired Codemasters in 2021 for £1.2 billion. In that transaction, buried among the racing game franchises and sports titles that EA actually wanted, came an enormous library of games from studios Codemasters had absorbed over the decades. Cannon Fodder. Micro Machines. Dizzy. The entire Sensible Software catalogue.
EA didn’t buy Codemasters for Cannon Fodder. They bought it for F1, DiRT, and GRID. The rest came along for the ride and went into the vault.
Jon Hare, who co-founded Sensible Software and designed Cannon Fodder, doesn’t own the rights to his own game. He’d like to see it re-released. There is nobody at EA whose job it is to care about that.
EA’s Vault
EA is the most prominent example of this problem, partly because they’ve been acquiring studios for decades and partly because the gap between what they own and what they sell is so stark.
Bullfrog Productions made Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Populous, Powermonger, and Black & White. EA acquired Bullfrog in 1995 and closed it in 2004. Most of that library is legally unavailable. Theme Hospital briefly appeared on GOG. Dungeon Keeper appeared on mobile in a form that so betrayed the original that Peter Molyneux publicly apologised for it. Syndicate has been gone since a 2012 reboot that nobody asked for replaced it in the public consciousness.
Westwood Studios made Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Lands of Lore, and the Kyrandia series. EA acquired them in 1998 and closed them in 2003. The Command & Conquer remaster was a genuine bright spot — EA did something right there — but most of Westwood’s deeper catalogue remains untouched.
Origin Systems made the Ultima series, Wing Commander, and System Shock. EA bought them in 1992. The Wing Commander games are largely gone. Ultima is gone. System Shock was eventually rescued by Nightdive Studios — independent preservationists who licensed it from EA and rebuilt it — but that required years of negotiation and a separate studio’s entire effort just to make one game available again.
It’s Not Just EA
Activision Blizzard — now owned by Microsoft — holds the rights to an enormous number of dormant franchises. Crash Bandicoot and Spyro got remasters, which is something. But Activision also owns the remains of Infocom, the text adventure company behind Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Planetfall. The games are effectively abandonware at this point — nobody sells them legitimately, nobody enforces against the sites that distribute them, and nobody is doing anything to preserve or re-release them properly.
Atari — which has changed hands so many times the name is now essentially a brand attached to a series of corporate shells — owns hundreds of classic arcade and home computer titles that surface occasionally in compilations but have never received proper modern treatment.
And then there are the games where the rights situation is so tangled that nobody is even sure who owns them. When studios close, rights don’t automatically go anywhere clear. Developers have discovered their own games are legally inaccessible because the company that published them no longer exists, their assets were sold in an insolvency proceeding to a holding company, and that holding company has no interest in gaming whatsoever.
The Abandonware Problem
The practical response to all of this is abandonware — the informal distribution of games that are no longer commercially available. Sites like Abandonia, MyAbandonware, and the Internet Archive host thousands of games that cannot be legally purchased anywhere. The legal position is grey at best: the games are still technically under copyright, the copyright holders just don’t enforce it because doing so would generate bad press for no commercial benefit.
This is not a solution. It’s a symptom. Games distributed informally are often incomplete, occasionally broken, and always one cease-and-desist letter away from disappearing. The Internet Archive’s games collection has faced legal challenges. The long-term preservation of these games depends entirely on the goodwill of corporate rights holders who have demonstrated no particular goodwill.
The video game preservation community has been making this argument for years. The Library of Congress has made limited exceptions to copyright law for game preservation purposes in the US. It’s not enough. The games that defined a generation of computing are rotting in legal limbo while the companies that own them focus on the next quarterly report.
What Would Actually Help
GOG — Good Old Games — has done more than almost anyone to legitimately rescue older titles. Their library runs to thousands of games from publishers who actually want to sell their back catalogue. The existence of GOG proves this is commercially viable. Publishers who engage with it make money. The problem is the ones who won’t engage.
A use-it-or-lose-it provision in copyright law — where dormant IP reverts to original creators after a defined period of non-commercialisation — would transform this overnight. It’s not a radical idea; it’s how some other creative industries handle similar situations. It is, predictably, not on any legislature’s agenda.
In the meantime: if you can find Cannon Fodder running on an emulator somewhere, play it. It’s one of the best games ever made. Jon Hare deserves to have his work seen. The fact that a corporation that had nothing to do with creating it is the reason you can’t buy it legitimately is exactly as absurd as it sounds.
We took a closer look at Cannon Fodder in our Looking Back retrospective. For a different kind of games-as-valuable-objects story, see Is Your Old Game Collection Worth a Fortune?