Disney suddenly pulls 14 games from Steam, including a childhood favorite, and the preservationist in me is wincing

More than a dozen Disney-published games have just been pulled from sale on Steam, and it’s yet another mark of disappointment for the age of digital preservation. While most of those that vanished aren’t to be found on our best Disney games list, having them suddenly stripped away feels bad, especially given that there was no prior warning to give players a last chance to grab them. The move has also affected some classic LucasArts games, and I’m particularly sad to see 1996 god sim Afterlife among them.

The vast majority of the titles affected are old licensed games that are, in most cases, pretty bad movie tie-ins for the likes of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Winnie the Pooh. Even though you wouldn’t have exactly rushed out to grab them, it’s still frustrating that they’re simply gone from Steam now. However, there’s an even stronger case to be made for a handful of other games that got caught in the crossfire, such as Afterlife, a childhood favorite of mine.

Afterlife is dubbed a ‘world-building sim’ but with the twist that you’re actually building the infrastructure of both heaven and hell simultaneously. Think Theme Park, or more recent offerings such as Two Point Hospital, but with the usual rides and attractions replaced by various eternal rewards or punishments. Ideally, you want to match each inhabitant to the sins or virtues they exhibited while alive, but as the numbers rack up you’ll just have to do your best to make sure everyone is attended to.

Also on the chopping block here are two more LucasArts classics. 2003’s Armed and Dangerous is a third-person shooter packed with pop-culture references to the likes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, while 2009’s Lucidity is a puzzle-platformer reminiscent of the likes of Limbo from those early days of the Xbox Live Arcade.

Then there’s The Assembly Line’s Stunt Island, a 1992 favorite which offered a more high-octane alternative to Microsoft Flight Simulator. It had a lot of the same attention to detail in its simulation, but challenged you to pull off high-stakes moves like landing on a moving train or playing ‘chicken’ with trucks. It even had the tools to set up and ‘film’ your own stunts and edit them alongside its pre-built campaign missions.

Here is the full list of Disney-published games that have been delisted from Steam in this January clearout:

• Afterlife
• Armed and Dangerous
• Disney’s Cars Radiator Springs Adventures
• Disney’s Chicken Little Ace in Action
• Disney Fairies: Tinker Bell’s Adventure
• Disney’s Hercules
• Disney Pixar Finding Nemo
• Disney Pixar Toy Story Mania
• Disney Planes
• Disney The Princess and The Frog
• Disney Winnie the Pooh
• Lucidity
• Phineas and Ferb: New Inventions
• Stunt Island

Ultimately, we’re unlikely to see some great outcry over this delisting the way you might when bigger or more notable games suddenly vanish, as we saw with Deadpool or the Scott Pilgrim game (although the latter eventually made its return in 2023). Nevertheless, it always hurts a little to see games be made unavailable to buy.

Afterlife would eventually drift out of my rotation as my desires to play god were fulfilled by Black and White (another game that’s also incredibly difficult to get your hands on in 2026, and has long sat atop GOG’s Dreamlist). But it’s a bit of a bummer that, if I suddenly had the desire to revisit it, I couldn’t just drop a couple of bucks to do so on Steam. At least there’s always Sintopia, which is due to launch in 2026.