Haste or lack of ideas are often bad companions. We review some of the biggest fiascos in video games and consoles.
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What makes a video game a mass phenomenon?
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As cultural and entertainment products, video games are also exposed to criticism from professionals and users who expect more than just a pleasant experience from them . Since the first boom that the industry gave and that placed video games as the favorite pastime of millions of people, so many great games have been made that they deserve nothing but praise that is beyond comprehension.
The constant updating that the industry experiences and the consumption that is made of it cause companies and developers to be constantly working to bring out new products with which to continue feeding the market. Some, as we have already mentioned, go beyond the standard and become works of art, complex narratives and creations carefully crafted down to the smallest detail. These titles usually win the hearts of both critics and players and make a place for themselves in history as classics that are still talked about years after their launch .
Others
on the other hand, either fail to hit the right note or become such huge disasters that, even regretting the effort that the team has put into them, nothing can be saved from them. As happens in cinema or literature, failures are part of the industry and it is impossible not to have a title from time to time that makes us cover our eyes or put our hands on our heads . But as they say, the important thing is not whether they speak well or badly but that they speak. There are games that at the time were so awful that they have become references of bad work and are usually mentioned with a mixture of indignation and humor (almost like what happens with the Razzies in the seventh art).
Whether it was due to a lack of time or desire
a misinterpretation of the public’s wishes, or the simple reason that sometimes things just don’t go right, we’ve reviewed the history of video games since the 1980s to talk about the industry’s most notorious failures.
ET the Extraterrestrial
It was a risky bet on Atari’s part, and the company paid dearly for the consequences. In 1982, after the blockbuster success of Steven Spielberg’s film, Atari paid 20 million dollars (an exorbitant figure for the time and even more so for the video game industry) and commissioned Howard Scott Warshaw to design a video game based on the film in a month in order to take advantage of the success of the feature film. The rush meant that neither the graphics nor the gameplay were worth the effort, and bad reviews rained down on them from all sides. ET the Extra-Terrestrial hastened Atari’s disastrous end and is still remembered as one of the worst games in history.
Pac Man
Yes, it is strange to find a title as legendary as Pac Man on a list of great failures, but that is what happened. We are talking about its version for the Atari 2600 home console from 1982, which was intended to bring to homes the resounding success that Pac Man had meant for arcades. The idea was not bad, but the fiasco came as much due to the high expectations of the company as to the poor conversion. Atari went over the top and ended up manufacturing more copies of the game than the total number of copies sold on the console, so the sales they had (not insignificant) were not enough. To that we must add that the quality of the game on the console was much lower than what people were used to and that is why many returns occurred.
Virtual Boy
In this case, it is not a video game but a console; nothing less than the biggest failure in the history of Nintendo. In 1995, with the Game Boy and the Super Nintendo sweeping the market, the Japanese company launched a console consisting of a controller and a binocular viewer that only sold 770,000 units (much less than the 50 million of the Super NES). Although it was the first time that something like this was seen on the market, neither the console nor the video games designed for it worked.
Trespasser: Jurassic Park
Another one of those cases where it was thought that the success of the brand would serve to alleviate the poor quality of the product. Released in 1998, shortly after the premiere of Jurassic Park II: The Lost World, Dreamworks Interactive launched this first-person game that tried to reproduce the terror and tension of being on an island full of dinosaurs. The intention was not bad but neither the graphics, nor the controls nor the ridiculous mechanics of the game allowed us to take seriously a story that was held together with tweezers.
Superman 64
This title released in 1999 had so many problems that it is currently competing with the ET the Extra-Terrestrial game for the title of worst video game in history. The Nintendo 64 had classics in its catalogue (see Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time), but this version that Titus made of the man of steel was as bad as it could be. With impossible controls, animation that made you want to cry and a level far below its contemporaries in every sense, Superman 64 did not even come close to honoring the great DC Comics character.
MadWorld
It was a risky bet by SEGA that ended quite badly. Mad World was an action video game that stood out for its comic book aesthetic, its black and white underworld in the purest Sin City style and its hardcore tone in which blood bathed everything. The game was released in 2009 for Wii and overall it was entertaining and attractive, but aimed at an audience that did not correspond to its platform. Nintendo’s console had been established as a family-friendly and fun console for young audiences, so that “bloodbath” tone did not find as many buyers as they expected. In this case it was more a failure of foresight than a screw-up in the game’s execution.
U-Draw
In 2010, THQ Studio took a chance on creativity and launched a digital tablet that could be used to draw as part of a video game. It initially appeared as an accessory for the Wii, a somewhat different console on which it found the right market niche and achieved good figures. However, the year after its launch, and thinking that what had happened with the Nintendo console would be repeated, THQ launched U-Draw on Xbox 360 and PS3. The limited catalogue of games that could be used with U-Draw did not help to increase sales either and the tablet ended up being another failure.
Duke Nukem Forever
In addition to being a sales failure, Duke Nukem Forever is one of the games that took the longest to develop. It was announced in 1997 but would not be released until 2011, 15 years later, and with a style and gameplay that were jarring from the start. The game had become outdated even before its release and that meant that players showed little interest. In its first year it did not even reach half of the expected sales.
Sonic Boom
In November 2014, two different titles under this name were released, one for the Nintendo 3DS and another for the Wii U. One maintained the classic 2D platforming approach while the other focused on exploration in three-dimensional environments, but beyond this difference, both agree that they were a real failure for SEGA. With just under 490,000 copies sold between both titles, Sonic Boom is the worst-selling game in the history of the blue hedgehog .
No Man’s Sky
Now we are faced with a somewhat peculiar case. Released in 2016, No Man’s Sky hit the markets promising never-before-seen gameplay and different experiences for each player. The hype was immense and in the first few weeks it sold like hotcakes, so it cannot be said that it was an economic failure. However, controversy came when players began to see that many of the promises that Sony had made (such as the long-awaited multiplayer mode or the quality of the graphics) were lies. There was talk of a scam and many stores allowed the game to be returned, causing a massive refund. While it is true that subsequent patches have improved the experience, No Man’s Sky has a stain that will hardly disappear.
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Fallout 76
This Bethesda title may be (and almost certainly is) one of the biggest botched games in the video game industry in recent years. Launched with the big novelty of online multiplayer, the title received mediocre to bad reviews from the development stages and when it was released things didn’t improve, as it kept the tone of the game in the Beta phase. In addition to the poor performance, the story lost the charm of the previous installments, it eliminated the NPCs with which to interact and it became a journey without pain or glory. Such was the blow that Bethesda lowered the price of the title just a week after its launch.
