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7 Game Franchises They Drove Into the Ground
Via the ever-excellent Game|Life, a post on Games Radar that details seven destroyed game franchises, taken from us in their prime by callous game publishers. Running the gamut from the venerable Sonic (of whose decline we've already spoken) to the good-to-crappy-in-two-years Viewtiful Joe, these are all games that just deserved better. I personally lament the decline of the Tomb Raider series (number 7 on the list) the most. Her most recent outing was much better than previous iterations, and I definitely hope that Eidos can keep up the momentum. Are there any series that you feel have fallen from heights that should have made the list?
Aside from games that have fizzled, I lament the passing of both the Thief and System Shock series. Company (mis?)managment has probably killed most of the great gaming franchises that died in their prime. Hopefully Bioshock will make it to release and System Shock will kinda, sorta live again...
Remember that several game developers had their funding cut so Daikatana could see the light of day ( at a burn rate of $1,000,000US per month).
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Wing Commander - We should have had Privateer Online. Instead, EA dropped it for their new hotness over at Blizzard. Thus one of the greatest series of all time ended.
Command & Conquer - C&C was good. I mean, darn good. But then Westwood failed to deliver Tiberium Sun as promised, and gave us Red Alert instead. Ok, fine. A lot of people liked Red Alert even though it wasn't as good as the original. So we kept waiting for Tiberium Sun. 4 and a half years later, Westwood just kicked it out the door, merely a shadow of what it was intended to be. From then on out, C&C was nothing more than a "property" in which vaguely related games were released one after another, with no real connection to the gameplay that made the original famous.
Graphical Adventure Series - While not really a game series in of itself, the concept of Graphical Adventures has been mostly dropped by the industry, depsite the fact that it was a great way to tell a story. Nearly all the Lucas Arts games sold well, and never really showed a decline in the market. The concept just... fell into the ether, seemingly in favor of "more adult" gameplay. (Boo! Hiss!)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Star Control: good first game, fantastic second game, AWFUL third game by different developers, then Accolade dies and we're done. More than TEN YEARS LATER, the source code for the 3DO version of Star Control 2 is released and turned into a great open source game for multiple platforms. That's love.
On the PC you can't forget Masters of Orion. Versions One and Two were great, and then they waited several years before coming up with a crappy version 3.
*snaps fingers*
That's right. It's coming back to me now. It wasn't Westwood that was the problem, it was Ultima Online. EA decided that they'd rather sink the money into the Ultima series than into the Wing Commander series, which they felt hadn't been doing so well since they took over Origin. (Gee. Surprise, surprise.) So they killed Privateer Online in favor of doing the sequel (WTF?) Ultima Online 2. In the process, EA made a huge mess of things.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade