The gaming industry moves quickly and without compassion. If an FPS game struggles to find an audience at launch, its future probably won't be bright, and many solid releases have come and gone without leaving a lasting impact on the genre. However, every once in a while, the unlikely happens, and a game that nobody knew about or played catches fire months or even years after its debut.
I love writing about relatively unknown shooters that deserve their time to shine, but these upcoming games found the spotlight a long time ago. They might not have reached Call of Duty- or Halo-level fame, but they went from fairly obscure to staples beloved by many FPS fans.
The first System Shock fits this topic, but the sequel is both the bigger name and the better game. Looking Glass Studios and the early form of Irrational Games combined forces to create System Shock 2, an ambitious blend of first-person gunplay, survival horror, cybernetic RPG skill trees, and spatial environmental storytelling, while popularizing the idea of an immersive sim (along with the subsequent debut of Deus Ex).
Timing is everything, and 1999 was a terrible year to drop an experimental FPS follow-up to a niche game that wasn't even that big of a hit. This was the golden age of frantic arena shooters and clean, linear action, and many were still pouring hours into Half-Life or Medal of Honor, playing Team Fortress, or gearing up for Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. A deeply punishing, slow-paced, terrifying space-horror game that demanded inventory management and keycard puzzle-solving was entering a non-existent market.
EA didn't market System Shock 2 very well, resulting in a terrible launch with reportedly about 60K copies sold. While they stuck around for a few more projects, this FPS flop basically killed Looking Glass Studios, which shut down less than a year later. System Shock 2 spent the next decade trapped in legal limbo, and it didn't really become easily accessible until Nightdive and GOG launched a modern version in 2013.
Let's talk about the ultimate special case. Technically, Running With Scissors' Postal 2 was both a financial success, a cultural phenomenon, and a game that nobody owned in 2003. Reportedly, Whiptail Interactive only made 50,000 physical copies for the project's release, which sold out immediately. However, 50K is basically nothing, and Postal 2's traditional distribution quickly hit a wall that was impossible to pass at the time.
Famously, Postal 2 sparked mass hysteria and was outright banned in countries like New Zealand, Australia, and Germany. On paper, nobody could buy this open-world FPS classic, but the quickest way to propel a controversial game into superstardom is to forbid kids from playing it. Nobody "officially" played Postal 2 in 2003, but millions of people "unofficially" shot and burned their way through Paradise.
In 2012, Postal 2 passed Steam Greenlight and became readily available to everyone, and many picked up a copy while it was part of a bundle or on sale for like $0.99.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/best-fps-games-nobody-played-at-first/
