Chevron-locked games

Chevron-locked games🔗

Stargate fans don't have too many video game options these days. Most Stargate games were multiplayer-only and were shut down after a while. Currently, the only option to try is Timekeepers.

On the other hand, there are plenty of Stargate-like games to choose from if you'd like to enjoy something similar. I'll collect some options I came across.

Exogate Initiative🔗

If there is a game that is only a graphics pack away from being a Stargate game, Exogate Initiative is the one. Someone aptly called it a General Hammond-simulator in the reviews, but we can also call it Stargate Tycoon.

There is an actual gate in the game, and you have to manage the teams, the people, the research, the politics and finances. Not everyone likes to bother with management, leaving the action to the others. Colonel O'Neill certainly doesn't.

But where the game excels is exactly the part where you start caring about your procedurally generated team members. At first, it's hard to even memorize the names, but by the endgame, you know exactly which team has become your SG-1, the one you can trust with the impossible missions. I loved it when teams reported back and asked for advice. There were no flashy graphics for the missions, but by listening to the reports and making the decisions, it all started to work.

I loved how the developers cared about small details in the game, like making the player extend the archaeologists' lab to store artifacts and fill it with bookshelves, all of which served a purpose. Having all teams' mission status always on the HUD gave you control and created atmosphere at the same time.

A screenshot from Exogate Initiative showing the base from an overhead perspective through the roof. You can see the open gate and the archaeologists' lab in the background.

Stargate Adventure🔗

I found this short unofficial point-and-click game by chance. It looks a bit like a Broken Sword title or The Dig. The graphics can't compete with those of a triple A title, but the dialogues captured the characters' way of speaking well, and it was really fun wandering around with Jack, solving everything.

Daniel, Jack and Teal'c talking with a forest in the background. Jack sarcastically says "Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence, Teal'c."

Outcast🔗

Since there is no squad tagging along in this game, it feels more like a solo adventure of Jack O'Neill. The protagonist, Cutter Slade, however, has exactly the same temperament Jack has.

The game has small stone gates called daokas which make travel between the maps of the game possible. A daoka looks like an always-open two-way stargate. Their blue semi-transparent event horizons slightly ripple.

There's also a larger dysfunctional gate deserted in the jungle. Based on its marking of a planet with a single moon, it must have once led to Earth. The first of the following pictures is from the original 1999 Outcast, the second one is from the 2017 remake Outcast: Second Contact.

The end scene of the original installment featuring the large broken daoka with a river flowing through it. There's also a bridge in the background.

The same gate from the remake with higher-resolution graphics.

The game also has a new installment titled Outcast: The New Beginning, but I haven't played it yet.

XCOM: Enemy Within🔗

To a certain degree, even the oldest squad-based XCOM titles resemble Stargate: you send teams to save Earth from aliens. Where Enemy Within goes beyond that is that the organization starts out with realistic army equipment, and just like in the SG-1 series, humans learn and adopt one technology at a time. It also features internal competition, EXALT. It's a similar organization to NID in the series: they reuse and sell technology collected by XCOM, and try to route funding to themselves. They also have a similar goal of using the crisis to build a shadow state to rule the world at the end.

The game also features a big underground base. The player sends squads of 4-6 people on missions from there. Unfortunately, the crew, being procedurally generated, has no personality whatsoever.

An XCOM soldier hiding in a futuristic structure targets a flying saucer with heavy weapons.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified🔗

I like The Bureau, but I understand that it is quite unpopular. It's a third-person, squad-based game like the Mass Effect series, which itself also shows similarities to Stargate. You have a small team, and you go on 30-40 minute-long missions to save humanity.

By being set in the 1960s rather than a space opera-like future, The Bureau shares more similarities with the Stargate franchise than the Mass Effect universe.

In this game, XCOM operates more similarly to Stargate Command than in other installments. And the developers might have felt the same. Having a Carter and a Dr. Weir among the playable characters always felt like a wink towards Stargate fans. But there are more similarities where that came from:

We meet an alien made of pure energy, just like the ascended Ancients.
There is another creature, once mortal, now a half-energy being, and he is evil like Anubis.
The evil creature calls itself Origin. Even fighting against Origin sounds also Stargateish.
A Steam user also pointed out that enemy ships look like Daedalus-class warships and even feature details like the docking bays.

A street of a small American town from the sixties. A deer casually walks across the empty streets, hinting that the town became unusually calm in recent days. On the left, a man stands in army camouflage. In the center, an agent uses his radio. He wears a fedora, white shirt and dark brown vest.

Three men infiltrate an alien landing pad. They wear shiny retrofuturistic space suits without helmets. They have hard metal backpacks and hold futuristic weapons.

Games I tried, but didn't work for me🔗

There are also two Unreal Tournament mods with a Stargate theme.

The first is a single-player map pack called Stargate: Talisman. It works for both Unreal and the original Unreal Tournament. It has some nice ideas, like the interior of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, and it featured a nice Stargate and a DHD. But there are no custom character or weapon models other than a single staff weapon. (But that one was fun.) Also, there were plenty of missing asset files which I had to debug and replace one by one.

It still worked better than the Special Unit mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. Based on the trailers, it featured many factions, game modes and cool character and object models. Too bad I didn't have any luck making it work. I tried 3 different versions of UT2004, from disc, from GOG and from the OldUnreal git repo, but based on the logs, it didn't find one of its own assets.

I wrote about them because perhaps you already played with them, or might have better luck than me launching them.

I hope this list gives some ideas to fellow Gaters. And if you have your own suggestions for how to extend it, share them in the comments. I'm curious to dial addresses I've never explored before.

The original version of this post is part of the Blaugust 2026 series on my blog along with:

📆 Posted:️ 2026-08-30

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🏷️ Tags: Blaugust2026, Gaming, Stargate