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The 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming
Gudlyf writes "GameSpy has a multi-part series this week titled The 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming, highlighting some of the biggest debacles ever to plague our beloved pastime. While only the first part of the series is present, I can already think of a few that the list wouldn't be complete without. Anyone care to offer their own picks?" Predictions for the Top 5 also welcome, we'll run another story at the end of the week to see how people did.
Daikatana?
"They told me it was impossible. I replied with maniacal laughter." http://www.mydailyrant.com/
when they released starcraft and C&C for the console... what an atrocity that was... the horror... dragging units with a gamepad...
Great Atrocit
#26 - Gamespy decides that all gamers run their desktops at 800x600, and forces all their pages to be 800 pixels wide.
Wowbagger - Yes, obviously gamers don't buy high-end video cards and monitors that can run at higher than 800x600. Gamers like to see lots of wasted space on their screens.
</gamespy>
Criticize the
forcing
all your
text into
a few words
per line
because you are
running high res
and larger fonts
so as to have
a cleaner
display.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Some mention of the companies "Mystique" or "Playaround" must be in the top 5... these are the companies responsible for the X-rated Atari 2600 games, including Custer's Revenge, a game where you control Custer and rape an indian woman tied to a cactus. Why they even thought a game like this could work is beyond me... How can something even be erotic with such a low resolution?
Although it's not as well known, Atari also made a video game called "I, Robot". In fact, it was the first game to use 3D filled polygons I believe. Unfortunately, the game wasn't accepted very well, and people couldn't figure it out I guess. So, out of the 1,000 machines they made, only 500 even sold. The rest were sitting in a warehouse. In order to get rid of them, Atari sent them to Japan... but none of the machines ever got there, as the crew of the ship were given orders to push the machines overboard on the way! I believe the point was to make sure that stockholders didn't see warehouses of unsold machines. In any case, this deserves at least a part in this list.
And I didn't think the US Saturn pads were that bad... in fact, I like them better than Japanese ones. But then, my favorite controller ever was the enormous Jaguar controller, so what do I know?
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Not in any order, but these ones cames to mind quickly...
1) Intellivision II coming out and being non-backwards compatible with some of its own library in an effort to break Coleco's Intellivision releases.
2) John Romero's magazine ad that ran pre-Daikatana that said "John Romero's going to make you his bitch." (I can't find the image, but I know it's kicking around somewhere on the net)
3) Sega's "blast processing" commercial in which they claim Sonic the Hedgehog's fast scrolling is due to some neat-o feature in the Genesis' processor which the SNES lacks.
4) Making a movie that's basically one huge commercial for the NES, the Power Glove, and Super Mario 3 (shamelessly savvy moment?).
Those are about all that come to mind...
...I'd like to see Sierra's decision to can the Babylon 5 game on the list. Then, I'd like to see, at the next "worst" position, Sierra's decision not to sell the completed portions of the game property to the developers (whom Sierra had earlier also canned) who were trying to pick up the game and finish it. Now it's all gathering dust, and the idea is being left up to the mod community and a few guys in Russia who have been working on a standalone game for some time now.
Virtual Boy
Other possibilities: Daikatana, 3D0 (the system, the company, the Army Men...ugh), BMX XXX, maybe some of Acclaim's advertising practices (though not likely), and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (though technically not a game, it's massive failure certainly had repercussions for Squaresoft).
on-line, in public, after taunting a crowd "you can't kill me". The online character of lord british was actively being played by Richard Gariott.
Classic moment in online history. I remeber the kid who used the fire-scroll on him to that day "Rainz". Lord British (Richard Garriott), Blackthorn (Starr Long), and a few others were on a balcony as LB gave a 'speech' for the end of beta. Next thing you know, the balcony is incased in a fire 'field'. Then LB taunts that fire doesn't hurt him (""nice try..."). 2s later his corpse is on the ground.
Someone responds to LB's death by summoning 4 powerfull deamons, who slaughter the innocent crowd.
A developer had made a mistake and not flipped his invlunerability flag (Developer name: "Grimli" what ever happened to that kid).
Ahh the good old days.
Rainz was banned for it, but it was the end of Beta.
google for "Rainz" "Lord British" for pictures.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Nintendo's Japanese office received a telex from MCA Universal stating that the company had 48 hours to hand all profits earned from Donkey Kong over to MCA and destroy all unsold Donkey Kong inventory. The reason? MCA alleged that Donkey Kong infringed on Universal Studios' "King Kong" copyright.
Unfortunately for MCA, Nintendo had a very good reason for refraining from a settlement: It had discovered that MCA did not own the "King Kong" copyright! Even more shockingly, in a previous lawsuit MCA Universal had actually gone to pains to prove that the "King Kong" property was public domain!
It's at #17. So I figured I'd post the obligitory Penny Arcade reference to BMX XXX
Even my friend Jon, who's a pr0n fiend, said he would never think about buying that game.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
With nethack one stumbles onto some really surprising situations, but this one remains unforgettable.
Several years back, when I hadn't ascended any of my characters, I had a really really good game going on, the kind of game you though might take you all the way. Multiple Amulets of Life saving paving the way. Accidental step into a polymorph trap had caused that I wasn't waring my helmet. Met a mind flayer that started eating my brain.
I didn't realize I didn't have my helmet on and my intelligence startted dropping rapidly. Didn't know exactly what that was about, I figured some "restore ability" and that's it and thought "fsck it, here, take some". Intelligence dropped to 2 or 3 and then...
"You die of brainlessness. But wait. --more--"
(I knew I had several amulets of life savings, so no worries)
"Your medallion begins to glow. Your life has been saved. --more--"
(but little did I know...)
"You still have do brain. You die."
"Do you want your possessions identified y/n ?"
I can't begin to describe my astonishment there...
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Don't know if it'll make the list, but:
What began as what I consider to be a series of colossal mistakes, Nolan Bushnell sells Atari for a mere fraction (who knew?) of what it was worth and signs a non-competition clause for an ungodly time like 10 to 15 years. It probably hurt like hell to watch all that money he lost, but I'm sure it was really painful to stay out of the market when his mind was probably sharpest in the area of innovative video games.
- Bungie's Halo. Cool game? Oh yes. Released for the Macintosh first like Steve Jobs promised at MacWorld, causing Microsoft-based-OS gamers to squirm as they watched the Apple folks have all the fun? Nope. I remember staring in awe at the webcast of the MacWorld show a few years ago when Halo was announced, and was just a teensy bit jealous of Mac users when I saw what the game promised. It came through on the promises alright, all but one of course.
- Verant's Sovereign. I sort-of recall this game being announced not long after Everquest was released. We were going to see an awesome display of massive-multiplayer RTS, all by the fine folks who made the legendary MMORPG, Everquest. Screenshots were released here and there, but news of its advancement slowly petered out. Finally this year -- I'd say at least four years later -- the game was finally announced as dead. Now that I think of it, this might have been a smart move.
The rest have already been mentioned, such as Nokia N-Gage, Daikatana's Ad Campaign, and Duke Nukem Forever. I don't need to go into details about those -- you know what they are.Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Nintendo cancelling the SNES CD and leaving Sony holding a half-finished CD-ROM superconsole. Which they promptly decided to finish by themselves, and used to thoroughly brutalise everyone else and take over most of the console market.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Atari's biggest mistake has to be high up on that list, and I'm suprised nobody here has mentioned it yet.
They had the opportunity to buy the rights to produce and distribute a console from a Japanese company, back in the day when American companies were doing all the game consoles. However, it was during the video game crash, and for some reason, they decided to pass, and stick with their own system they were developing.
The system Atari could have had a huge chunk of? The Nintendo Entertainment System. Instead, they stuck to their own products, which really didn't go anywhere.
One wonders what might have happened if they had made the other choice...
Of course, we're talking about a company that had Jack Tramiel in charge, a man who was personally responsible for destroying multiple companies, and seemed to fight against turing the company around. During the Jaguar days, Atari hired someone to help get the company moving and going, a person who ended up quitting because Jack insisted in having control over everything, down to personally deciding when to approve overnight shipping of packages.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."