Alien: Isolation could prove to be an important sequel for the gaming industry. The sequel was announced ten years after the first, in a series many thought was over due to middling sales (and equally middling reviews, despite having grown since into a cult hit). It breaks the trend of remake and remaster domination, but it's also part of a trend itself. Last year, we got Alan Wake 2, 13 years on from the original. Both Alan Wake and Alien: Isolation have frequently featured in 'Games That Deserve A Sequel' lists, and now it may be fair game to ask for one of their regular dance partners to check out for the evening - LA Noire.

These three games walk very different paths, but all roads still lead to Rome. Alien: Isolation has a huge IP behind it, an IP that has not always fared well in games. Isolation, belonging to the (relatively) niche genre of survival horror, having a now-overlooked weird Kinect tie-in mechanic, and with reviews reflecting that many just didn't get the sort of fear it was trying to build, seemed like a bold use of a franchise that executives might think would be better served in the broader action genre.

Alan Wake, on the other hand, hit its core Remedy audience perfectly, but as a small and obsessive studio, it seemed to have moved on to other ideas, with the general mythos of Alan Wake and other games wrapped up in the likes of Control, and that looked to be its future. Then we have LA Noire.

Why LA Noire Never Got A Sequel

LA Noire sold four million in its first month, and when the VR expansion was announced in 2017, it was also announced that the game had reached 7.5 million in sales. Compared to Alien: Isolation (two million) and Alan Wake (three million), that's a notable success. But while that should have been built upon, instead everything fell apart.

LA Noire is thought of as a Rockstar game, but the development giant only published the game. It was made by Team Bondi, who hasn't made a game since and closed the same year LA Noire released. It was folded into Kennedy Miller Mitchell, the Australian film studio responsible for every Mad Max movie including the recent Furiosa, as well as classics down the years like The Witches of Eastwick, Babe, and Happy Feet. The Miller in the name, as you may have guessed, is from George Miller.

KMM was supposed to step into gaming with LA Noire's spiritual successor, Whore of the Orient. The game was controversial for the words at both ends of its title, and was announced in 2012, with a single scrap of gameplay footage revealed in 2013, and cancelled in 2016 after blowing past its 2015 release window with no further updates since the initial one. Which leads us back to LA Noire.

Because of Team Bondi's closure and the subsequent failure to even get its follow up off the ground, LA Noire has always seemed unlikely to get a sequel despite being one of the best selling Games That Deserve A Sequel we often see thrown around. But then, so has Alien: Isolation. It's recently announced sequel has got me thinking there could be hope for anyone.

Rockstar’s Smaller Games Need A Chance To Live Again

Rockstar is a factor in the equation too. It retains the rights to LA Noire, developing the aforementioned VR expansion itself. LA Noire is not the only game in the Deserves A Sequel club either - Bully is also a frequent flier.

There were reports a few years ago that a Bully 2 had been shelved, and Rockstar's current ethos seems to be an all hands on deck approach to making games like GTA 6 (and Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 5 before it); industry shifting titans that require an excessive amount of development. It's why the disastrous GTA Trilogy was outsourced, and recent reviews of LA Noire VR are Extremely Negative on Steam, all complaining about launcher issues that make the game unplayable.

The chances that Rockstar bothers with an LA Noire sequel (its 7.5 million sales are notably lower than GTA 5's 200 million) are slim. But the chances that Sega would give Alien: Isolation a sequel were slim too, and that bet just came in. I feel like backing a dark horse now I'm flush with made-up cash from this fictional bet. I don't know who would make it, but I'd love for Games That Deserve A Sequels lists to be able to cross LA Noire out once and for all.