No, seriously. The Transformers games have gotta be here somewhere. Probably.
Update 8/3/2023: Hasbro has issued an apology to Activision over alleging that they lost the games. “To clarify, comments that suggest Transformers games have been lost were made in error,” Hasbro’s official statement reads. "We apologise to Activision and regret any confusion – they’ve been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together.”
Nothing in the statement says that it isn't necessarily true. But, they're sorry that they said the quiet part out loud. Maybe one day Microsoft will get those games onto Game Pass for Hasbro.
Original Story:
There have been quite a few Transformers games made over the years. Activision made a good handful back in the days of the Xbox 360. But, allegedly, Activision may have misplaced them.
Hasbro’s team was doing an interview over on Transformers World about their new Game Edition lineup of toys and let out some frustrating news about the state of previous Transformers games. “Sadly,” the Hasbro team admitted, “apparently Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building. When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating.”
There are multiple games that come to mind during this discussion. Transformers: Devastation, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark, and Transformers: War for Cybertron are all well-made games in digital format that have just been lost to time.
Unfortunately, we also recently reported on the Video Game History Foundation’s recent study as well. 87% of older games are entirely unavailable nowadays. It appears that they may all just be in a storage box somewhere in Activision’s mom’s attic.
The problem here is knowing that these games exist and haven’t been available for play for years. Xbox had already made them backwards compatible. But, you have to have the physical disk for that.
They agreed with Transformer World that the games that the Gamer Edition toys were based on would have been great to re-release. But, they have hopes that they’ll eventually be playable again.
Hasbro offered a solution, now that Microsoft is going full steam ahead on the purchase of Activision Blizzard. They should rummage through the archives and drop it on Xbox and PC Game Pass.
“Hope is that now that the deal is moving forward with Microsoft and Xbox,” the Hasbro team thinks, “that they’ll go through all of the archives and every hard drive to find it all, because it’s an easy Game Pass add.”
The Transformers Gamer Edition toys are currently available in participating stores. But, the games they’re based on? Maybe we’ll see them one day on Game Pass. Maybe we won’t.
We’d make a joke about the entire story being “more than meets the eye”. But, this is just a case of lost media that everyone hopes will be found eventually. You can read all about Hasbro’s additional thoughts on video games, toys, and more over at their interview with Transformers World.