In the long and sprawling history of Doctor Who video games, there is a curious, near-mythical entry point that sits somewhere between a bold experiment and a forgotten relic: Doctor Who: The Adventure Games . Launched in 2010 by the BBC, this series of four downloadable episodes was a landmark moment—not for its cutting-edge gameplay, but for its audacious goal. It promised something fans had dreamed of for decades: fully canonical, original Doctor Who adventures, starring the actual stars of the show, playable on your home PC. And for a brief, brilliant moment, it delivered.

If you can find a way to play them, temper your expectations. You won’t find Uncharted or The Last of Us . What you will find is a warm, wobbly love letter to the Eleventh Doctor era, complete with all its heart, wit, and occasional jank. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to stepping into the TARDIS and pulling the lever yourself. Allons-y—but save often.

In a way, that ephemerality feels appropriate. Like a forgotten planet or a deleted timeline, Doctor Who: The Adventure Games now exists only in the memory of those who played it. It is a flawed, charming, and deeply earnest artefact—a reminder of a time when the BBC saw gaming not as a cash grab, but as another room in the TARDIS, open for exploration.

The puzzles are largely logical for a younger audience—aligning satellite dishes, matching symbols—and the stealth sections are often frustrating. The Daleks in City of the Daleks , for example, are laughably myopic, and being caught means restarting a lengthy checkpoint. The combat (or lack thereof) is pure Doctor Who : you don’t fight, you run, hide, or outthink. That’s faithful to the show, but the execution is often clunky. What elevates The Adventure Games above most licensed tie-ins is its canonical status. Moffat confirmed that these events happened to the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond. The voice work is not soundalike—it’s Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, recording original dialogue. The music is by the show’s composer, Murray Gold. The cutscenes are animated with a stylised, cel-shaded look that captures the actors’ likenesses surprisingly well.

For fans, this was a revelation. Here was a piece of interactive media that didn’t just reference The Pandorica Opens or The Big Bang —it existed in the same timeline. You could witness the Doctor’s grief over the loss of the Time Lords, explore the TARDIS’s deepest rooms, and face monsters in stories too small (or too expensive) for television. Alas, The Adventure Games are now largely inaccessible. The BBC took down the original downloads years ago. The Steam version was delisted in 2017 due to compatibility issues (it was built on DirectX 9 and relies on deprecated web plugins for its launcher). Physical copies exist but are rare. For a modern player, getting the games running requires fan patches, virtual machines, or old hardware.