Slashdot Mirror
Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies
An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"
If you consider crashing every 20 minutes, losing any save data you had, and having some video sequences prevent any further progress due to crashing.
...and that was on a console!
Something witty.
...making a game is hard work. I can't imagine what it would feel like to see your hard work (even if the result of that work is suckage) result in the ending of a developer.
Living With a Nerd
This is just what we needed around here!
Another chance to moan about Duke Nukem Forever!
Hopefully someone bought rights to the title so we can continue to write about DNF. We need more server space dedicated to DNF writing! It's always just around the corner.
E.T. nearly killed off an entire industry. Though I'm sure that's just what history remembers as its death blow.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
once EA buys them it's game over.
If The Fourth Monkey Island game hurt Lucas-arts. Not that it was a terrible game, but I definately doubt it did as well as its predecessors.
I'm not surprised the rights to make it went off to Telltale games. They have done a decent job with the episodic content of it. I have an itching feeling it won't be the end of that series though.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was another game that killed the company. There's even an interview about it somewhere here on Slashdot.
Apparently it went way over budget, was laden with game breaking bugs, and had copy protection problems.
It's a shame, really, because the last 5 years of fan patching have made it kind of enjoyable.
Daikatana became synonymous with failure. But the cause of its failure can be traced back to John Romero's giant ego. He had convinced people that everything he wrote was worth gold. It's only fitting that in Doom 2, you had to shoot him in the head to beat the game. He's since retreated into obscurity, occasionally popping up in small gaming shops to assist in off-beat platforms.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Haze was supposed to be one of the top games of PS3 and it totally sucked a lot!! bad graphics , bad controllers, stupid story and really short game.
The first one was good given the era it came out in. The second one was a simultaneous improvement and a flop. And the new one looks to be alright.
The video game itself was tedious, but the that mini game off the main menu where you could hack the terminal was awesome good fun. Without checking YouTube first, I say aloud to no-one that a cut together edit of all of the cinemas would be nice to watch through. Now I just need to care enough this much later to bother looking.
Shenmue. ;*(
"By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'""
But not before they squeezed out a cult favorite, Deus Ex.
Infocom made a great series of text adventure games, so they logically moved into the database arena, which sank the company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_(software)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Myth 3 was originally done by MumboJumbo games and was so badly done that the dev team was fired the week it was released. Fortunately, there are some (mythwolfage.com) that are still doing stuff with it. MumboJumbo later resurfaced as some lame casino game making company... with an entirely different staff
TFA mentions Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness as the game that tipped Eidos/Core over.
I first discovered the series with Tomb Raider 2. Since then, huge fan! I bought all the games for PS1, and a few for the Mac as well (I'd re-play the game on my in-laws' computer sometimes.)
When Eidos announced Angel of Darkness for PS2, I was obviously caught up in the hype. More memory and higher res meant more intricate puzzles and larger levels - this would be an amazing game. Or so I thought. Aside from buggy gameplay (and there was a lot of that) they changed the game mechanic to the point that it was like playing an entirely different game, but with Lara Croft in it. No tombs, no puzzles, just a lot of running around shooting things.
I quit the game before I got very far in it, the same sucked that bad. I recall making it just past the cemetary - which I understand is still pretty early in the game.
Still, good things came out of this fiasco: Tomb Raider: Legend was actually very good! Amazing what a new developer can do to breathe fresh life into a project. (That said, Uncharted is a better series.)
it pretty much tanked and Atari quickly parted ways with them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I really did, it wasn't great but it was interesting in the Matrix Story to see parts from other point of view.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
To make the assumption a "bad" game sank a company is hard to justify, considering "bad" games often sell much better than "good" ones.
There are a lot of companies that make bad products that are profitable (mine, for example) and many that make great products that can't stay in business.
In many cases, I would bet that a game company runs the risk of going out of business because their product is too good (or bent on being too good, and never hits the shelves in time to start making profit).
MYST
I don't think Ubisoft helped turn out a profitable title.
Ah but the first game (and I believe the second game) came out well before the movie.
Surprised they didn't mention Vanguard. It killed Sigil software and the only reason it's still on Life Support is SOE bought it out on the cheap. (See also: Matrix Online before that one was finally killed)
Umm, you may want to double-check your chronology there.
The AvP game (based on the DH comic) came out 10 years before the movie.
I tried out Tabula Rasa a few months before it was shut down, at a point when most of its serious problems were sorted out. But poor game mechanics was its biggest weakness.
What annoyed me most was how it was touted as a FPS/RPG hybrid. IMO for anything to be deemed an FPS, it must rely on players to aim their weapons and the game would utilize collision detect to ascertain hits. Tabula Rasa did not do this - you had to select what enemies to shoot at, and it was all chance based like most MMOs out there. To make things worse, you had to look at your opponents in order to select them - you couldn't do it explicitly by clicking on them with your mouse.
I think the game would have been successful if they figured out how to do a proper MMO FPS with proper collision detect. Even if the world was largely instanced, and they limited player numbers in these zones, it would be a good start. It doesn't even need complex character builds.
It just wasn't good enough to get them to where they could release Mythos which would have been the cash cow. Like many small businesses their essential failing was being under-capitalized, not necessarily a terrible product.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Try a 12 year delay for a racing product, any product, especially when it comes from the West Brothers. "Who are the West Brothers" you ask? Sit back and let me tell you a quick tale about a long piece of vaporware.
Backstory: Two decades ago in the late 90s, the West Brothers were contracted to do a game called "World Sports Cars". They had previously been on the development teams of such arcade classics as "Hard Drivin" and "Race Driving". Chris and Tony were certainly at the forefront of realistic driving sims. Games like these certainly influenced later PC sims such as "Grand Prix Legends". So when time came for a GT style game, the Wests were a natural fit. And so the development started on WSC. After numerous DNF styled delays, they were told by their publisher to take off. Then in 2001 they announced Racing Legends, a sprawling race sim that would encompass careers, cars with lifespans. It was an ambitious project, especially for a 2 man team. Their last update was in October 2003, their last communique was in January of 2004. Since then? Nothing, nada, zilch. Once in a while their 3rd member (Gregor Veble, physics consultant) will respond to a jab with a very vague answer that does not even confirm it is still being worked on. Here's what you need to read:
http://www.racing-legends.com/news.htm [racing-legends.com]
http://www.west-racing.com/forum/index.php?topic=2395.0 [west-racing.com]
Google up on WSC to gain a greater understanding of the Wests, and how they are the rightful heirs to the DNF vaporware crown. People have gone to college, graduated with Comp Sci degrees and actually put out multiple games in the same time that the West Brothers have delivered...NOTHING. The multi-class racing sim has been ursurped by Dave Kaemmer (of Sierra/Papyrus NASCAR Racing fame) and his iRacing game.
What movie was that based on?
Duke Nukem Forever didn't kill the studio; the studio killed themselves off without the need of any additional assistance.
The other examples are cases of products being buggy, or misguided, or overzealous... but any project is doomed to fail when the project team doesn't have a goal, and doesn't really work on the project.
From what I've read, the whole reason it was called Final Fantasy in the first place was that the company was planning to close and Final Fantasy was their swan song. They weren't expecting a miracle since they were treading in new waters and just decided to publish their last game. And lo and behold, their final game that was supposed to be the end of the company turned out to be their saving throw.
It single handedly killed one of the most beloved franchises in computer gaming history (that and EA that is who still has not figured out which gem they had bought with the Ultima franchise)
C&C: Renegade was Westwood's attempt to make C&C a FPS. It took forever to develop and the game looked dated by the time it came out. It had a lot of gameplay that we later saw in the Battefield series (but it was done right there).
Elite came out in 1984, and was one of the first (if not THE first) truly open-ended game. So you would think the fifteen year gap between Elite III (Frontier: First Encounters) and now would be enough time for Braben to release The Outsider and get working on Elite 4.
Nope. That's why it's an inside joke in Oolite that Elite 4 is STILL coming soon!
What, no TA: Kingdoms and Cavedog? No Master of Orion III and Quicksilver? Lovell must be new here.
This doesn't take a huge heap of imagination, but I'm going to go ahead and predict that the unexpected, unprecedented success of WoW will be the end of Blizzard. This seems like a really safe bet based on any of the following scenarios:
1) Activision big-brothers them into oblivion
2) They get caught up making bad movies, rather than good games
3) They are never able to make a successful sequel, or even another really profitable title
4) Creative differences, anti-user angst, or other mis-management runs it into the ground (e.g. NGE) and the shop never recovers
There's just too many dollars riding on WoW. Too much momentum. Surviving the end of that is going to either require masterful leadership or gigantic catastrophe.
Come to think of it, didn't they name their next expansion 'Cataclysm'? ;)
Earth and Beyond was the last game for Westwood. I loved Legend of Kyrandia and Nox was incredibly fun. I even had a subscription for Earth and Beyond for a while. That was a great example of what happens to an MMO that doesn't receive content updates. Three classes were missing from the game, which actually prevented a significant portion of content to be accessible and the in-game events never went anywhere. They would happen, then would kind of repeat on their last stage until the game was cancelled. I'm not sure if that was a case where Westwood didn't know what they were doing, or just another name to add to the list of companies that EA bled dry.
Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies...
As opposed to failed games that helped their company?
Just the unit responsible for TR.
Unfortunately they didn't do it BEFORE sinking a metric assload (as opposed to an imperial assload) of extra cash into it, too caught up in the development cycle to call it quits when it wasn't done, wasn't working, and wasn't any good.
At least they're out of TR-rehab and back to putting support into the games that ARE paying their bills.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What was wrong with Enter the Matrix? It killed a company?
You got to jump off walls, shoot agents, and look at women in fetish gear. There was bullet time. It was full of Matrix-universe fluff.
It sold something like 5 million copies. Shiny (EtM's developer) was rewarded for this success by being purchased by Atari (nee Infogrames).
I think this games should not have been included on the list of games that killed companies.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Seriously, Company started with one of the best RTS ever, Total Annihilation, then followed up with a two expansions, one that added a slew of multiplayer maps and units, and another which added tons of single player maps. Seemed they were destined for greatness.
Then came TA: Kingdoms. Wow, what a disaster. It was medieval in looks, but played just like any tank based rts. It felt almost like a palette swap, rather then a new game. When it bombed, all other titles got scrapped, even Amen: The Awakening, which sounded phenomenal, so they could rush off and make TA2, which was still years away.
It should be noted the death of GT Interactive also had it's hand in the death of Cavedog. But had TA: Kingdoms been a better game, they may have had the money to break away and fund the rest of their games.
I still dream about someone picking up Amen's license and remaking the game. The premise and characters sounded fun.
How about successful games that damaged or killed their companies?
Tetris was so insanely successful that the rights were blatantly stolen and restolen endlessly.
The creator didn't get squat.
The self-appointed Tetris Company is a piece of shit that is ruining Tetris. Infinite spin? Holding pieces? WTF is this shit and why is it required to be in all Tetris games?
The first one was good given the era it came out in. The second one was a simultaneous improvement and a flop. And the new one looks to be alright.
The old one is out and available on steam for $5. No multiplayer (yet?) though. Still scary to play as a marine.
no TA: Kingdoms and Cavedog
I would guess the reason they didn't mention this was that the article is only for games released after 2000 and because it didn't really bring down a strong studio with a string of hits behind it.
I had erased MOOIII from memory. I loved MOO1&2, i told my roomate how great the games were, so we went half in on 3 and got it, played it for a few days, and i think i actually threw it away after about a year of it sitting on my shelf. they ruined the best part of the game, massive ship battles!
I think one of my all time favorite "Crappy game that helped kill a company" is Heroes of Might and Magic IV. 3DO had always had success with the M&M and HOMM games until that epic fail came out. I'm just glad that Ubisoft bought the rights to the series after 3DO went bust.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
And their game, Bionic Commando.
It failed (technically and critically) and they were a young studio. They couldn't survive.
Total Annihilation was better than a mere string of hits. It DEFINED THE STANDARD for RTS games, and is still the litmus test over a decade later.
Well, not really. Nobody followed it; the only game to follow in TA's footsteps has been Supreme Commander. Not even Kingdoms really followed TA's lead (one reason it flopped, I think; there were others). The standards were defined by Warcraft/Starcraft and Dawn of War.
It's a hell of game and has fanatical followers. I like it myself--in fact, I was playing it just a few days ago. That's staying power. Heck, I even kinda liked Kingdoms. But it didn't define a standard.
Ye Gods TA: Kingdoms was horrible. I had forgotten about that one, even though the box is still sitting on the bookshelf at home.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Short of a few mega franchises (EA Sports, Halo, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, etc..) can a company send out a bad game and not be substantially hurt? There are certainly those rare gems of vapor where the anticipation is just so far beyond what the game delivers or in some cases could possibly deliver but just the nature of the buisness with studios and then distribution publishers makes it difficult for a company to really thrive. If you make a crappy game, your studio dies. If you make a great couple of games, the publisher will essentially buy your studio and your studio as it was kind of dies. Look at rockstar, seemed like they could do no wrong 7 years ago, today what are they doing?
Kingdoms didn't kill Cavedog. Chris Taylor leaving to start up GPG killed Cavedog. The vision he had left with him, and it was all over at that point. Even had TA:K been moderately successful, Cavedog would've gone under. TA:K needed to be a smash hit, and without a visionary, there was no way it could be.
Now, say what you will about Supreme Commander, but that's a completely different story.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
What, no TA: Kingdoms and Cavedog? No Master of Orion III and Quicksilver? Lovell must be new here.
That game didn't kill Cavevdog. They got killed by success of TA and then allowing everyone and their brother to have their own project... most of which went no where.
The AvP Games are also not related to the movies - the only obscure reference amongst any of them is the "Weyland Yutani Corporation" - wheras the AvP games have all been set in the future the AvP movies have been set in present day.
The movies I was referring to were "Aliens" and "Predator" respectfully, which both came out before the game (obviously).
... of Lode Runner, Arcanoid, Zac McCracken, Monkey Island, Thexder, Lemmings, Prince of Persia (the old one!), Ultima (Underworld, ..), Kings Quest and many more.
I used to be addicted at games, mostly Lucasfilm/Lucasart and Sierra games but occasionally also Dynamix and others...
Now, there seem to be only a few games really attracting me, although the goal to reach end-game-content has been shifted entirely.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The writer needs to check the facts. While 'Enter the Matrix' was a critical failure, it sold extremely well. From Wikipedia: "It sold one million copies in its first eighteen days of release, 2.5 million over the first six weeks, and eventually 5 million copies."
5 million copies sold does not sound like a financial failure.
Kingdoms was my immediate thought too. Even today there are people who still play Total Annihilation, 13 years after its release and a decade after Kindoms' failure killed off Cavedog. TA was phenomenal, and had all sorts of excellent features that were well ahead of its time (it was also the first game to ever make me wish I had better hardware). It takes some stupendous sort of failure to drive a company into the ground after releasing a game like TA, but TA:K killed Cavedog in marely a year.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It's a hell of game and has fanatical followers. I like it myself--in fact, I was playing it just a few days ago. That's staying power. Heck, I even kinda liked Kingdoms. But it didn't define a standard.
TA introduced many features which are now standard in RTS games. It's just wrong to say that Warcraft/Starcraft and Dawn of War (wtf?) defined the standards for the genre.
For example - 3D terrain, the left click/right click interface, unit queuing, units guarding other units or structures, complex patrol paths and waypoints, polygonal units, etc etc etc etc...
Back in the day, Imagine Software pretty much set the standard for this in the UK.
I consider Enter the Matrix to have been a surprisingly good movie tie in; in fact, I'd consider the game to be the true spiritual successor to the first Matrix film. Missions like the post office and the airport missions has the feel of what you sort of expected was the kind of thing the rebels actually got up to in the Matrix. The game only fell down mission wise when it stuck too close to the film it was bound into supporting.
But let's talk gameplay.
In my opinion, Enter the Matrix gets over looked an awful lot, despite the fact that it did bullet time combat right. Yes the game had glitches. Yes the animations were not the best. Yes the game was short. But the sheer fun and depth of the bullet time and combat system give it a lot of kudos in my eyes. There was a wealth of close combat moves, weapons, takedowns, gymnastics, etc all of which took on a new depth once you pressed the focus button. If you look at the bullet time in titles like Max Payne or Bayonetta, you see its really just a slowdown button and not the "Devil Trigger"-esque upgrade it should be; your short burst of super power, called upon in a pinch.
In addition, the sheer scope of your abilities in that game is matched by very few other titles. When you find yourself thinking "Hmmmm, what way will I kill the next group of enemies", you know the developers did something right. The blending of ranged and close combat worked well, as it the ability to interact with enemies and the environment to pull off stunts and takedowns.
Enter the Matrix had its flaws, but it went on to form the core of the The Path of Neo, which was probably the definitive Matrix title, which took all the concepts from the first game and gave them the polish that was needed.
May the Maths Be with you!
As stated, this was an industry killer (or at least the last straw). But, fortunately, the industry bounced back, and the Atari name lives on.
I worked at Atari as a lead tester for the Nintendo titles when they put me on the Driv3r PC title for a few days. I bugged ~200 falling out of the world incidents that were never classified as fixed when the game was released.
IIRC, either Driv3r PC or another racing title, the developers guessed the bug database password, went in to marked all the bugs fixed, and tried to pushed for code release to save their delivery bonus. The QA team had to re-verify the status of all 4,000 bugs before a code release meeting could be scheduled. The developers and the producer lost their bonuses.
The good old days at Atari. My first novel that I'm now revising is based on my misadventures at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crises). You have never worked in a screwed up company until you spend six years at a video game company.
Oh God, i nearly forgot MoO III. Part II was awesome, and 3 completely killed the series! Good call.
I was also going to add Dragon Age to this list (not the RPG that's out now and doing well, but the MMO that was supposed to release in 2006/2007 that made it into beta, and then got canned because the server-side code was so bad it couldn't handle 100 concurrent users... The game looked AWESOME, had great content, and some real nice ideas, and serious promise, but when they asked the company for $3Mil more and a 9-12 month launch delay to fix the serverside issues, it got panned. too bad. Now, i can't even find links to it.... (was hoping they'd open source it there for a while)
I'm also afraid, after a couple days playing the Beta, Cryptic is going to end up on the street panning for change over Star Trek. OH GOD it's awful... Imagine flying around space (that acts like youre in an atmosphere, no momentum) in a ship that can only pan on 2 axis instead of 3, and that it flies at 1MPH in combat. Then add on top a first person exploration and combat system (when you beam down) that any of the freeware FPS games on the market have both better play experience, better graphics, and more function. The entire game engine is horrible. The ONLY thing it;s got going for it is that they effectively communicated the "treckie" experience of walking around, talking to people, scanning things, and it sorta feels like a real slow replay of some classic trek episodes. If it wasn;t for the AGGONIZINGLY slow and overly simple interface it might not be a bad game, but after just 3 hours at it i had to log into something else and just smash stuff... They really could have used the CoH engine for this game with only a skin modification and it would be light years better. STAY AWAY!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I thought 'Why does that guy have egg on his face?". Then I put down the box and bought Fall of Man, instead. That game cover had a skull in an army helmet with fangs. I found that intriguing. I enjoy the game. My character doesn't have to wear an egg.
What about Aussi made Fury - I thought that had some potential :( hmmpft.
For those in the UK who were around in the early 80s then I'm sure that you remember the most spectacular failure of a games company (and the games it was producing). i.e. Imagine Software and the game Bandasnatch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandersnatch_%28video_game%29
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
"The 11th Hour" killed Trilobyte.
It wasn't the removal of massive ship battles that killed MOO3. It was everything being automated by AI. One of my friends started a game and just kept clicking next turn. After a while he won the game (got voted president or something?).
killing gaming.
just read TFA. it is full of accounts of how shareholder pressure, need to please greedy shareholders, big conglomerate intervention screws potential stellar game titles and through shareholder action forces iconic visioneer/pioneers like founder of atari, origin out of their companies.
really ironic.
we play the games. the games are produced for us. but the shareholders, not understanding, knowing or even caring zit about gaming, or us gamers, not only break our gaming experience, but their own potential profits.
that is nothing less than the failure of capitalism and corporatism. if some idea betrays its own ideas with the very idea itself, it shouldnt be practiced.
Read radical news here
For example - 3D terrain, the left click/right click interface, unit queuing, units guarding other units or structures, complex patrol paths and waypoints, polygonal units, etc etc etc etc..
That's just wrong. 3d terrain was in Starcraft to a limited extent, the left/right click interface was mostly just reversed from what starcraft and warcraft 2 did, and complex patrol paths and waypoints haven't been copied at all. I loved those games, but they haven't influenced the industry even a fraction of the amount that starcraft did.
Yes it did I have 3 + all ones and 4 sucked 6 better be good.
Looking Glass Studios went out of business even though they've produced over half a dozen of the best games of all time. Terra Nova, Thief 1 and 2, System Shock 1 and 2, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Car and Driver, Flight Unlimited. Actually, if you find a list of their games you'll see that they didn't really had any failures.
Black Isle were producing great games and still broke down, although Interplay may not have helped that situation. Troika then died and Obsidian have only really done NWN2, unless you actually want to count unfinished but still released games in KOTOR2.
People always bitch about good games being ignored nowadays as if it's some sort of new occurrence, and how crap games kill companies if they hit hard enough. But great companies can still die purely because you can create games that are simply too awesome for mainstream gaming to handle.
Was the game really a failure or just the way the company ran it into the ground? I rather enjoyed that game (though I only ever played the single player campaign).
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
It was the moron who created it and then mouthed off to gamers that he'd make them his bitch. He's also the conceited fuck who didn't want to make a doom sequel and after being pressured into it and firing one of the employees out of spite crapped DooM3 into another direction. At least there were some people to mitigate his conceited asshatry and doom3, while not a sequel is good.
I'd bought every game up to Doom3. I've not paid for anything else since that ass showed his contempt for the people who pay his bills.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I saw the word 'noughties' and quit reading immediately. Anyone who uses that word can't be a very reliable source of information.
Remember that game that had William Shatner in it. It was sort of a FPS and you had to go around killing drug addicts or some such. It was so bad. I can't remember the name or who developed it but it was probably around 1994. I'm pretty sure I still have the box at home somewhere.
Where's the company that made it today? 'Nuff said.
Furries make the internet go.
notable in that it actually shipped for the pc and later the ps3 and the xbox 360, but managed nonetheless to first kill off the developer. Great game, too.
just-as-essential-as-the-last-three-editions ?
+++OK ATH
No, no, no. If you really want to piss people off give the money to Derek Smart PhD(Fake).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
William Shatner's TekWar is what you're thinking of.
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
Wizardry was one of the 1st software programs I bought.
For the Apple ][+ in 1982. I think it even out sold Visicalc.
I think Wizardry IV was the last Apple ][ version.
5, 6, and 7 were on DOS. Or was it UCSD Pascal like the Apple versions?
There may have been a NES version too.
You could get a CD with 1-7 for PCs.
Version 8 came out 10? years after 7 and the company announced it was ceasing development. and this was the last product.
FWIW, I ended up going to Clarkson, where the two (or one of the?) authors were professor(s).
Let me just say this for those of you who either didn't play Enter The Matrix, or didn't play it as Niobe.
Cutscene with Niobe/French Chick making out.
Conversation over.
I had erased MOOIII from memory. I loved MOO1&2, i told my roomate how great the games were, so we went half in on 3 and got it, played it for a few days, and i think i actually threw it away after about a year of it sitting on my shelf. they ruined the best part of the game, massive ship battles!
There was an awesome game hidden inside MOO3. Sadly, it was impossible to play.
I really really wanted to like MOO3 as it brought the concept of terrain and choke-points back into the series. (Unlike late-game MOO2 where you can pretty much fly over/around any worm-holes or nebula without worries and your ship range pretty much makes all systems within range.)
There were some other great concepts deep within MOO3, but it was badly mismanaged and the UI was horrid at presenting those concepts.
At this point, I'm mostly hoping that Stardock will move GalCiv away from the flat 2D plane in their current incarnation and switch to a flattened 3D universe with star lanes.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
When Oddworld Inhabitants abandoned their PlayStation fanbase and went Xbox-only, they pretty much ensured disaster. Sure enough, the next installment was a flop, and they were bought by the Mudokons... sorry, Microsoft.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I wouldn't call it awful or average or even good. I'd call it non-existant... Still a failure that killed 3DRealms though (or would that have happened without DNF?).