Update: When Alpha Protocol was removed from Steam, Sega said the publishing rights for the spy RPG had expired, kicking off some speculation about Obsidian, now a Microsoft studio, getting the rights back. It turns out Sega still owns Alpha Protocol, however, and the statement was not accurate. 

"Due to the expiry of music rights in Alpha Protocol, the title has been removed from Steam and is no longer on sale," a Sega spokesperson said in a new statement.

An expired music license doesn't mean Alpha Protocol is gone for good, however. Alan Wake, for instance, reappeared on Steam and GOG after a year of absence when Microsoft renegotiated the music rights. It's not clear if Sega intends to do the same. 

Original story: Alpha Protocol, one of the best spy games on PC, has been removed from Steam. The page is still live, but it's no longer available for purchase. "At the request of the publisher, Alpha Protocol is no longer available for sale on Steam," a notice reads. 

When the notice was spotted (cheers, Nibel), there was some speculation that a remaster or something new was coming, but unfortunately it's a much less exciting reason: the publishing rights have expired. 

"Following the expiry of Sega’s publishing rights for Alpha Protocol, the title has been removed from Steam and is no longer on sale," a Sega spokesperson told me.

If you own Alpha Protocol, you'll still be able to play it, and you'll keep being able to download it whenever you want. If you never picked up this gem, however, you'll need to find other ways. 

Phil revisited Alpha Protocol in 2017 and found it hard to stay mad at its missteps, even after taking off the rose-tinted goggles. 

"It throws a lot of design spaghetti at the wall, and some of it sticks. More importantly, there are lessons here that should be learned from and built upon. There’s potential in the idea, be it of letting players experience a more open, branching form of spy fiction, or just not letting RPGs languish in the realms of fantasy or post-apocalypse. Alpha Protocol isn’t a classic, but it’s earned a place as a cult favourite—just like everything Obsidian does."

It's unlikely we'll ever get a sequel, but even now I'm going to keep dreaming. 

Spies come in many forms, so the best spy games on PC could be tense games about intrigue and infiltration, or high octane adventures starring a special agent. It would be good to see more games focusing on spycraft, espionage, and subterfuge, but we can make do with putting on some cool glowing goggles to infiltrate a base. Here are some of our favourite games starring awesome spies.

Alpha Protocol

A gloriously janky RPG from Obsidian that casts you as crack spy Michael Thorton. This was a brave attempt to combine Mass Effect style conversation and branching plot systems with a cover-based shooter. The combat side of things is a mess, so it’s worth looking up the different weapon classes so you know which disciplines to avoid (I found pistols worked well enough). It’s worth playing through the dodgy action to roleplay your favourite flavour of spy—pick your JB: Jason Bourne, James Bond, or Jack Bauer. 

The best thing about Alpha Protocol is the branching plot. The alliances you choose will change the order you visit each continental hub, and can have a huge impact on the characters you meet and the endings you unlock.—Tom Senior

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

This classic stealth sandbox came out 13 years ago, but still perfectly captures the thrill of being an action movie covert agent. It’s like Hitman, but you have cooler gadgets and the ability to suspend yourself above guards by doing the splits. 

This is Sam Fisher’s finest hour thanks to Michael Ironside’s performance and a darkly humourous script. Chaos Theory features some exceptional level design, and a decent co-op campaign that encourages you to co-ordinate sweet simultaneous takedowns from the shadows. —Tom Senior 

No One Lives Forever

One of the few spy games to draw influence from the cheesy Man From Uncle meets Austin Powers 1960s idea of a spy adventure. As the glamorous Cate Archer you fight through jump out of planes, race bikes, scuba to sunken ships and other antics you might expect from Roger Moore era Bond. Every mission is different, and the whole adventure is played for laughs. It’s a difficult game to get hold of, and tough to get fully working on current machines, but it goes down as a great spy game in the PC gaming canon.—Tom Senior 

SpyParty

Paranoia is an important part of being a spy. Your cover could be blown at any moment, and the consequences are drastic. In fact someone could be watching you through a high-powered scope right now. SpyParty captures this feeling in a series of small scenes—a party in a pub, a penthouse party, a boat party (spies love to party). One player plays a sniper, assessing the scene for any signs of spy-like behaviour. The other player is the spy. As the spy you have to blend in with NPCs as naturally as you can while you saunter around completing secret objectives.

As the spy you can see the sniper’s targeting laser moving through the room. It’s terrifying to see it flick from one side of the room to your forehead after you make a sloppy move. On the plus side you can see when the sniper is obsessed with innocent NPCs and use them as cover to plant that bug you need to win.—Tom Senior 

Invisible, Inc

Infiltrate high-security environments as a group of specialists in this hybrid of stealth game, turn-based strategy and roguelike. Get in, run the job, then get out again, and use your agents' different abilities to make it happen. This is a meticulous spy game where every wrong move can cost you dearly (you can rewind a turn if you've messed up that badly), but every well-executed strategy will make you feel like a badass. 

The best thing about Invisible Inc is that you can customise the parameters of a campaign to your preferences—adjust the amount of credits you get, how long each campaign goes on for and how many guards you can expect to find in each mission. Even though it gets real tricky, the difficulty is very much in your control. On additional playthroughs, you'll unlock new agents who provide you with a different power base.—Samuel Roberts

Covert Action

Sid Meier’s spy game was remarkably ambitious for 1990. You investigate randomly generated missions by infiltrating facilities, planting bugs, stealing files, tailing suspects and decrpting codes. Each of these activities has its own minigame. To decrypt a code you have to decode a scrambled message under time pressure. To infiltrate a building you pick a loadout, slip into the premises and start photographing documents with a microcamera.

It looks ropey by today’s standards, but Covert Action has remarkable breadth of scope that few games attempt today. There’s a reason for that, perhaps. Sid Meier was unhappy with the disparate nature of the Covert Action’s minigames, and felt as though the activities detracted from the overall mission, which involved tracking down spies in a network to find the mastermind.—Tom Senior 

KGB

Set in Russia during the last days of the Soviet Union, this brutally difficult point-and-click adventure sees you investigating corruption within the KGB—at least to begin with. Over the course of the game, protagonist Maksim, a KGB captain, finds himself swept up in a conspiracy involving the murder of a former agent.

It’s from 1992 so it’s hardly the most slick or accessible of adventures, but its depiction of Cold War espionage is brilliantly done and uncompromisingly realistic in places. There are numerous ways to suddenly die, including being executed for speaking out of turn to your superiors. KGB was also released on CD-ROM under the name Conspiracy, featuring FMV cutscenes that starred Donald Sutherland as Maksim’s late father.—Andy Kelly

Gunpoint

Steal secrets in (former PC Gamer staffer) Tom Francis's stealthy puzzle/platformer, where you play a spy who can hack and control different parts of a building's security system. What I remember liking about Gunpoint more than anything is its length—you'll clear it in about three or four hours, but in that time you'll go from being shot dead a bunch of times by guards to perfecting its systems and skilfully bounding in and out of buildings. It's perfectly paced, with no unnecessary levels or dull bits. 

If you like immersive sims, this reframes most of their core elements into a 2D game. Plus you can smash your little spy guy through windows, which feels really good.—Samuel Roberts

Metal Gear Solid

“Tactical Espionage Action” is Metal Gear Solid’s tagline. In some ways the first game captures the spy fantasy better than the rest of the series, because in MGS Snake is an underdog rather than a legendary battlefield soldier. Snake’s hushed conversations with his handlers over intercom create a sense that you’re camped behind enemy lines, and it’s a dedicated stealth game. The worst thing you can do is get spotted by a guard. That brash alert noise is burned into my brain.

It’s a good introduction to Kojima’s brainverse. Expect bizarre bosses and a tendency to reach through the fourth wall. The spy fantasy starts to falter when you get into the extraordinary melodrama of the finale, but overall it’s a clever spy game that stands up today. Now we just need the brilliant Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater to make the leap to PC.—Tom Senior 

Neon Struct

A cyberpunk spy thriller that pays homage to Deus Ex, Neon struct is a slick heist game that challenges you to complete missions non-lethally. You have a bunch of sci-fi gadgets that can scramble gadgets and turn lights off at range, but its best move is a totally silent slide move that can get you out of trouble. 

You explore city hubs between missions. That’s where you buy gadgets and stims that make you invisible in short bursts. It’s a neat little spy game with a stylish low-fi look, though Andy found the sparse sound design offputting in our review.—Tom Senior 

Alpha Protocol is peak Obsidian—or, at least, peak Obsidian before Pillars of Eternity set a new, more stable direction for the studio. It’s a wonderful mess, full of great ideas, but hampered by the sort of behind-the-scenes development troubles that plagued the studio for so much of its life. It was delayed multiple times, spent the early part of its production cycle with no project director or lead designer, faced numerous production issues, and, due to differences in opinion between Sega and Obsidian, had time consuming, pricey scenes cut. 

All of this shows in the final product, and yet it’s still full of things that make it memorable. This was an ambitious undertaking, and the ideas shine through even as the execution is so obviously lacking. 

The first, best idea is the setting. Alpha Protocol is an RPG about espionage, in which you play a Bourne-style rogue agent attempting to thwart a global conspiracy. This is fertile territory for an RPG adventure—a fiction that lends itself to complex stories full of branching possibilities. And it works. There’s intrigue and drama, and a cast of people all with hidden motivations. How your character, Michael Thorton, navigates these relationships is one of the best parts of the game. 

Unfortunately, Thorton himself is not a great character. He comes in three basic flavours, depending on your dialogue choices: professional, suave or aggressive. Too often those choices manifest as bland, smarmy or needlessly psychotic. Thorton is, it has to be said, a bit of an asshole. At times, it fits the tone—I found a decent balance alternating between suave and professional, roleplaying a cocky jerk who nevertheless knows when to break character and get down to business. But looking back from the perspective of multiple Bourne, Bond and Mission: Impossible films, Thorton’s act feels stale.

Alpha Protocol wastes no time in laying on the conspiracies and intrigue that prop up the dialogue system. It opens to a fake kidnapping, in which Thorton is drugged for the purposes of an extended tutorial. Soon after, a handler challenges him to retrieve information pertinent to an upcoming operation—a covert side-op that suggests you’re not being given the full picture. And, of course, there’s a narrative framing device, with Thorton debriefing to an unknown figure. It’s a blunt-force intro to the world of skullduggery. 

Untangling this mess, however, takes time. First, you’re forced through a lacklustre opening that forgoes much of Alpha Protocol’s best systems. In place is a series of infiltration missions set across Saudi Arabia. The mission structure works well—Thorton must take on various preparatory missions to track down a shipment of missiles stolen by the terrorist organisation Al-Samad. There’s an airfield to bug, a weapons stockpile to investigate, and an arms dealer to intercept. The problem is Alpha Protocol gets more interesting later on. The structure becomes more varied and freeform, and everything you choose has an effect. 

Saudi Arabia has none of this—the most subversive thing you can do is talk your way past an opening fight—and it makes for a monotonous opener. It’s a problem heightened by the fact that Alpha Protocol’s combat is not very good. Remember in Deus Ex, when shootouts involved standing still while your reticule slowly targeted the person you wanted to shoot? It wasn’t a good system then, and, unsurprisingly, hadn’t become a good idea a decade later—years after the third-person cover shooter craze of the late-aughts. 

This is one of the problems of pairing shooter design with RPG mechanics. Mass Effect had shields, and monstrous enemies that could support lots of hit points—shifting the levelling focus to sci-fi skills that caused major damage. But Alpha Protocol is predominantly an RPG set in the real world. Most of the enemies are lightly armoured humans, easily killed by anyone proficient at aiming a mouse. Alpha Protocol attempts to redress the balance through limitations—artificially lowering your aim, and offering skills designed to reduce its self-imposed handicaps. Unsurprisingly, it makes combat inherently unsatisfying. That’s bad news for the Soldier class, but the other two styles benefit from some more rounded specialisation trees. The Tech Specialist is able to use more gadgets, which is a more enjoyable way to play—albeit one hamstrung by the need to predict and manipulate enemy AI. The best, Field Operative, favours stealth, and is comfortably the most powerful build.

While a pure non-detection run is difficult—a casualty, again, of the AI—the pistol and stun gun are both so overpowered they negate much of the challenge. An upgrade, fairly early in the pistol skill tree, lets you line up shots from cover. With this, and a couple of damage upgrades, you can reliably, quickly and silently take down enemies with a single headshot. It’s absurdly effective and allows you to concentrate on exploration and the challenge of bypassing security systems. 

I’ll get to Alpha Protocol’s laudable qualities soon, but I can’t skip over the hacking system, which is among the worst minigames I’ve ever encountered. It’s one of three you’re regularly asked to complete, but the other two—lockpicking and bypassing—are inoffensively bland. Hacking, meanwhile, requires you to find two passwords in a grid of scrolling numbers. Once found, you need to overlay the corresponding number string—one controlled by WASD, the other by mouse. To add a fun extra wrinkle, the mouse string doesn’t keep pace with the cursor. Also, failing triggers an alarm. It’s a spectacular failure—an important part of the challenge of espionage reduced to a finicky abstraction. 

After Saudi Arabia, and the reveal of the conspiracy that leaves Thorton a rogue agent attempting to bring down the corrupt Halbech corporation, everything changes pace. Thorton is no longer following the agency’s guidance, and instead builds his contacts by delving into each location’s murky underworld. Do you bribe a Triad leader, securing his short term co-operation at the cost of a more long term friendship? Do you play along with a psychotic and possibly delusional CIA operative in order to secure his explosives expertise? Do you befriend the Russian informant, or smash his face in with a bottle? These are all interesting questions and, while the overall plot is broadly fixed, individual story arcs can resolve in a multitude of ways. 

This globetrotting second act ups the mission variety, too. There’s still plenty of infiltration to be done, but each mission is a different length and intensity. There are some real highlights, from taking out a hit list of Triad lieutenants across the streets of Taipei, to bugging a small CIA listening post in Rome.

Other missions are simply dialogue and choices. Another, also set in Rome, requires Thorton to steal evidence from an NSA outpost. He goes in disguised as an IT guy, armed with a passphrase that should get him through the door. But the NSA agent doesn’t respond to the phrase the way he should, causing your handler to question whether something is wrong. Do you hold your nerve and possibly walk into a trap, or take action at the cost of a potentially useful lead? Alpha Protocol’s most memorable moments are all clichéd spy fiction scenarios, but made more powerful by the branching dialogue. It’s a system that rewards exploration, too. By completing dossiers you can unlock special conversation options that can alter your relationships. 

Early on, you’re taught that befriending people isn’t always the best tactic, and that angering contacts can be a powerful tool. For the most part, that just means that whatever you do, there’s always a way to progress. But the fine details feel important. Major characters can be killed or spared, and some can even be persuaded to switch allegiances. On paper it’s an elegant system, although—this being Alpha Protocol—the execution doesn’t always work.

Unfortunately, the ending feels rushed. The final act threatens the imminent arrival of WWIII—a scenario that never felt earned based on my broadly competent handling of previous missions. The conspiracies start to collide, from Halbech’s corruption of Thorton’s bosses, to the treachery of journalist Scarlet Lake and the manipulations of your primary handler, Mina—something you never get the chance to resolve, even if you end up riding off into the sunset together. Some of this works. The revelation of Scarlet as the assassin you were chasing in Taipei has a nice payoff, and checks another important spy cliché off the list. But everything else feels like it needs more time to breathe. The final revelations come quickly, reducing their impact, and are paired with a final mission that features multiple, terrible boss fights. 

But it’s hard to stay mad at Alpha Protocol. It throws a lot of design spaghetti at the wall, and some of it sticks. More importantly, there are lessons here that should be learned from and built upon. There’s potential in the idea, be it of letting players experience a more open, branching form of spy fiction, or just not letting RPGs languish in the realms of fantasy or post-apocalypse. Alpha Protocol isn’t a classic, but it’s earned a place as a cult favourite—just like everything Obsidian does.