5 Best Single-Player FPS Games Nobody Played At First

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.

System Shock 2 Popularized Immersive Shooters While Being Played By Nobody

The True Innovators Often Must Wait To Get Their Flowers

• Struggled to sell 50K copies in 1999.
• Terrible marketing and legal hell made System Shock 2 both unknown and obscure.
• 2013 was the turning point.

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.

Nobody “Officially” Played Postal 2 In 2003

But Everybody Got A Copy Anyway

• Legal physical copies were in very short supply in 2003.
• Didn’t become widely available until 2012, at least legally.

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.

Metro 2033 Was Just Another Eurojank FPS Game With Low Expectations

Somehow, It Went On To Create A Beloved And Long-Running Franchise

• THQ was spiraling into oblivion.
• Modest success, but nowhere near massive.

Sometimes, word of mouth just takes a while to reach peak loudness. Metro 2033 wasn’t a flop at launch, but it was a small Eurojank shooter that pulled modest numbers. By this point, THQ was in complete freefall, leaving little cash to push the game in North America. THQ basically dropped 4A’s game on shelves and hoped for the best, ultimately settling for “fine, considering the context.”

Before the Redux version smoothed things out, Metro 2033 suffered from inconsistent mechanics, not-great voice acting, and surprisingly high PC requirements for an AA release. Still, the original game was a masterclass in atmosphere and a great survival shooter that predated the genre’s explosion in popularity. After the release of its remake and sequels, Metro 2033 far exceeded its initial performance and expectations.

At this point, I’d be surprised if somebody who loves FPS games said they haven’t played Metro 2033.

Ultrakill Took 6 Years To Reach Its Peak

And It Isn’t Done Yet

1. On September 3, 2020, Ultrakill entered Steam early access, peaking at 712 players for that month.
2. On June 23, 2021, the Layer 4: Greed update was released, allowing the game to exceed the 1K concurrent player limit.
3. On August 16, 2022, Ultrakill Act 2 debuted, causing a massive surge that brought concurrent players to more than 16 K.
4. On March 16, 2023, The Wait for the World update launched, sparking another surge that surpassed 15K concurrent players.
5. On December 20, 2023, Patch 14: The Violent Night Update blew up, resulting in more than 27K concurrent players.
6. On February 25, 2026, Ultrakill introduced Layer 8: Fraud, reaching an all-time peak of just under 70K players on Steam.

Ultrakill is still in early access, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t surpass its current threshold in the future.

Singularity Stuck Around To Become A Cult Classic

Just An Awesome FPS Game That Everyone Should Play

• Thrown out without too much care and attention (from the publisher, not the developer).

Let’s end with a different example. Singularity has never really become a significant success, and it’s still one of the more underrated FPS games of the early 2010s. Famously, Activision almost canceled the game, and then gave Raven Software less than a year to shift an open-world project to a linear shooter. The developer did the impossible and put together a genuinely top-notch release, only for it to get basically no market and a quick death.

Since then, Raven has worked exclusively on Call of Duty games, despite having a wildly varied resume before 2010. Although still a hidden gem to an extent, Singularity gradually reached cult-classic status thanks to its time-manipulation device, fun weapons, and alternate-history Cold War setting. Unlike so many AA games from this era, Singularity is readily available to buy on Steam, allowing new generations to experience a mid-budget darling that was never permitted to shine.