On January 30, X gaming account Wario64 noticed one thing unusual: Yager’s seminal cult basic Spec Ops: The Line had been unceremoniously faraway from on-line storefronts without warning. Developers who made the sport had been simply as baffled as followers. “Makes no sense,” tweeted the sport’s director, Cory Davis. “Especially because the themes portrayed in Spec Ops: The Line are more relevant now than ever.”

In 2012, Spec Ops was not on the forefront of the navy shooter style, the place franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield had been pumping out titles yearly. It had been a decade for the reason that final Spec Ops sport, and The Line was meant to reboot the sequence. Set in Dubai, it follows Captain Martin Walker and his squad by means of the decimated metropolis; as its story ramps up, gamers are confronted with more and more horrific situations, like deploying white phosphorus, as Walker’s grasp on actuality begins to deteriorate.

Its promoting level, as argued by its creators, was that the sport was doing one thing totally different than its friends—tackling a narrative that was extra Heart of Darkness than navy propaganda. The sport’s launch was not a business success, however a vital one. “It was culturally significant, tectonic in terms of how we think about creativity and critical conversations about war games,” says Mitch Dyer, a former online game critic who reviewed The Line in 2012.

“For it to just disappear overnight—it’s a little bit traumatizing for people who it meant something to or had interesting things to say about it, because now it’s inaccessible,” says Dyer. Not that it’s not possible to play—those that bought bodily copies can nonetheless expertise it—however future generations received’t be capable of uncover it anew. Looking again on the sport now, 12 years later, Dyer describes its achievements as “kind of quaint” in hindsight. “It wasn’t just the story itself. It wasn’t just the script or the words, which were all fantastic. It was the execution and presentation,” he says. “It starts asking questions that you kind of become too numb to [or] bother to think about.”

Dyer, now a video games author himself, and among the builders who made the sport consider its fingerprints nonetheless exist within the trade at this time. It stayed within the cultural dialog for greater than a decade. Now, it’s gone. The cause for its disappearance? A licensing concern. Publisher 2K confirmed that a number of of these partnerships, doubtless ones associated to music within the sport, have expired. The Line isn’t coming again—and there are worries its cultural influence might disappear too.

Preservation is the concern previous video games face at this time because the trade grapples with the dilemma of waning expertise and a deepening backlog. Video video games disappear for a wide range of causes: shuttered on-line providers, previous tech, new console generations, broken bodily media, storefront removals, and sure, expired licensing offers. Last 12 months, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network launched a staggering study which discovered that 87 % of basic video games have been misplaced through the years.