Every Evil Dead game: 16 in 40 years, and the biggest one is off sale

There are 11 licensed Evil Dead games, plus five official guest spots where Ash Williams turns up in somebody else's game. The first came out in 1984 on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. The most recent one of its own is RetroRealms, a pixel-art platformer from 2024. In between you get three THQ games for PlayStation and Xbox, four mobile games, a VR runner and the big Evil Dead: The Game from 2022.

And here's the annoying part. Evil Dead: The Game, the best-known and best-selling of the lot, was pulled from every digital store in spring 2025. The servers are still up. Right now you can buy exactly two things with Ash in them, and neither is a full Evil Dead game in the old sense. Below is every game in order: what you actually do in it, how critics scored it, and what you can still play as of October 13, 2026.

How I counted: the main list is games licensed as Evil Dead, the guest list is official crossovers only. Parodies like Ash Brolliams in Broforce and fan mods don't count.

The Evil Dead, 1984: shut the windows before they get in

The first game came from British publisher Palace Software in 1984, three years after the film. It ran on the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro. The Spectrum version wasn't even sold on its own: it sat on the B side of the tape for Palace's Cauldron.

You play Ash in a top-down view of the cabin. The job is simple and stressful. Run from room to room shutting windows and doors before the demons climb in, and beat up the ones already inside with whatever you've picked up. The shovel, rifle and axe also top up your energy. At the end you destroy the Book of the Dead. No voices and no film music, obviously, this is 8-bit.

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This was the height of Britain's "video nasties" panic, and The Evil Dead was near the top of that list. Your Computer magazine actually discussed whether "computer nasties" were a danger, then calmed everyone down: nothing in the game would keep even a twelve-year-old awake. It did like the graphics. The next Evil Dead game took 16 years.

Hail to the King, 2000: Resident Evil with a chainsaw, and a 40 on PC

Evil Dead: Hail to the King from Heavy Iron Studios and THQ came out on December 5, 2000 on PlayStation, on December 19 on Dreamcast, and in March 2001 on PC. It was Heavy Iron's first game. The story is set eight years after Army of Darkness: Ash, for reasons best known to himself, drives back to the same cabin with his girlfriend Jenny, and it all starts again.

The real news for fans was the voice. This was the first game where Bruce Campbell voiced Ash. An IGN preview from early 2000 said he was recording the whole game, and THQ's developer diary mentioned his rewrites and ad-libs.

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Playing it was another story. It's classic survival horror built on the early Resident Evil template: pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed cameras, tank controls, barely enough shells and chainsaw fuel. Critics weren't kind. Metacritic has it at 51 on PlayStation, 49 on Dreamcast and 40 on PC, the lowest score in the whole series, and nothing has gone lower since.

A Fistful of Boomstick, 2003: Ash in Dearborn, plus pinball on a phone

Three years later THQ tried again with a different idea. Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick from Scottish studio VIS Entertainment came out on May 20, 2003 on PlayStation 2 and June 17 on Xbox. Instead of tight corridors you get open districts of the town of Dearborn and crowds of deadites to mow down with the boomstick and chainsaw. There are spells from the book and time travel, to the colonial era and the Civil War.

Campbell voiced Ash again, and the rest of the cast includes Rob Paulsen and Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob.

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Scores went up a little: 55 on PS2 and 58 on Xbox. IGN gave it 6.4 and called it fun but repetitive. My take: this is the first game where Ash actually behaves like Ash and not like a nervous tourist who wandered in from Resident Evil.

The same year, according to GameFAQs, Evil Dead Pinball came out for feature phones, with Necronomicon pages to collect. There's nowhere to play it today.

Regeneration, 2005: the best of the old ones, 69 on PC

THQ's third game, Evil Dead: Regeneration, launched on September 13, 2005 on PS2 and Xbox, and a week later on PC (the port was done by Beenox). Developer Cranky Pants Games went for an alternate history: at the end of Evil Dead II, Ash isn't sucked back into the Middle Ages. He stays in the present, nobody believes the demon story, and he ends up locked in Sunny Meadows asylum.

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The best idea in the game is Sam, a half-deadite sidekick you can literally kick into enemies and into places Ash can't reach. According to Wikipedia he's voiced by Ted Raimi, the director's brother. Campbell is Ash, of course.

Metacritic has Regeneration at 69 on PC, 68 on PS2 and 66 on Xbox, the best of any console Evil Dead game before 2022. The catch is that you can't buy it. It's not on Steam or GOG and it was never re-released, so it's secondhand discs or nothing.

2011-2018: phones and VR, four games that are gone

After Regeneration, THQ dropped the series, and for the next decade Evil Dead lived on phones. You can't download any of the four games from this stretch anymore.

The chart shows where things went: from the 2010s on, Ash shows up as a guest almost as often as in games of his own.

Evil Dead: The Game, 2022: half a million copies in a week, then delisted

The big franchise game was announced at The Game Awards on December 10, 2020 and released on May 13, 2022 on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series and PC. Saber Interactive developed it, Boss Team Games published. On PC it started as an Epic Games Store exclusive and only reached Steam on April 26, 2023, as the Game of the Year Edition.

It's an asymmetric 4v1. Four survivors (several versions of Ash from the films and the series, Cheryl, Scotty, Kelly, Pablo and others) hunt for the map, the Necronomicon pages and the Kandarian Dagger. The fifth player is the demon, setting traps and possessing deadites, cars and the survivors themselves. Single-player missions came later, and so did Splatter Royale for 40 players. Campbell voiced every version of Ash, other film actors came back too, and the score is by Joseph LoDuca, who scored the films.

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The launch went great. VG247 reported more than 500,000 copies sold in under a week. Metacritic has 76 on PC and 72 on PS5 and Xbox Series, the best score of any big game in the series.

Then it went downhill. On September 19, 2023 Saber said there would be no more new content and cancelled the Nintendo Switch version. On April 30, 2025 the game vanished from the Epic Games Store and PS Store, and that same day Saber posted on Steam that it had started removing the game from all digital storefronts. Owners were told the servers would stay online.

As of October 13, 2026 that still holds. The Steam page says the game is no longer available, the Xbox catalog has no purchase option, and the PS Store page won't load. Nobody has announced a server shutdown. Steam reviews are Mixed: 68 percent positive out of 1,213. If it's in your library, you can play it. If not, there's nowhere left to buy it.

Guest spots: Poker Night 2, Dead by Daylight, Fortnite and Call of Duty

Since 2013 Ash has been a regular house guest. There are five confirmed official appearances.

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What isn't real, even though lists keep claiming it. Ash Brolliams in Broforce is an unlicensed parody. I couldn't find an official Ash in Mortal Kombat, Smite or Funko Fusion, or a Zen Studios pinball table. If you have a publisher source, send it over and I'll add it.

RetroRealms: Ash vs Evil Dead, 2024: the only Evil Dead game you can buy

The latest game in the series came out on October 18, 2024 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series and Switch. It's a 16-bit platformer from WayForward, the Shantae studio, based on the Ash vs Evil Dead series: Ash walks left to right with a chainsaw and a boomstick and takes the dead apart. It launched alongside RetroRealms: Halloween, and the heroes cross over: own both and Ash shows up in Michael Myers' game and the other way round. More on the other half of that pair in our rundown of every Michael Myers game.

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On Steam it's set up as DLC for the free RetroRealms Arcade launcher and costs $19.99, down from $24.99 at launch. The DLC itself has only nine reviews, eight of them positive. Metacritic has the PS5 version at 78, but from just four reviews, so I wouldn't lean on that number too hard.

Bruce Campbell: six games with his voice

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Campbell is confirmed as the voice of Ash in six games: Hail to the King, A Fistful of Boomstick, Regeneration, Army of Darkness: Defense, Dead by Daylight and Evil Dead: The Game. Everywhere else Ash either says nothing or talks in someone else's voice, as in Poker Night 2.

The fun bit is that in 2018, after the show ended, he announced he was done playing Ash. Asked by Bloody Disgusting about games, he said that was different: "They are doing a video game... I'll be Ash for that, because I wouldn't want someone else's voice hamming it up." That game became Evil Dead: The Game.

In a 2022 interview with Looper he admitted "I'm not a gamer" and said he'd voice Ash for as long as he's needed. So the forum theory that Evil Dead: The Game was his farewell to the role has nothing behind it.

Every Evil Dead game in one table

Scores: the pixel game beats the big one

Critics rate little RetroRealms highest, but it has four reviews, and comparing it head to head with games that have 30 or 40 isn't fair. Take only the big games and the line makes sense: from 40 for Hail to the King on PC to 76 for Evil Dead: The Game. Every attempt came out better than the one before.

Players see it the other way round. Evil Dead: The Game comes last on Steam at 68 percent, and the poker game where Ash just sits at a table comes first. One caveat: for RetroRealms the chart uses the whole Arcade launcher, because the DLC itself has nine reviews.

What to play today

If you like this kind of rundown, we also have every Jason Voorhees game, which has its own Dead by Daylight chapter and its own delisted multiplayer game.

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