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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.'"
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.
Goldeneye N64.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
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
Quite enjoyed Ghostbusters. The 1984 version on the C64 that is :)
The recent PS3 game was also fun, but not earth shattering.
even with no staff the development will continue at the same pace it was before. actually, it may improve considering there's no one to force a do-over.
How about the original Star Wars vector graphics arcade game (Death Star run?) I always enjoyed that one.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I have yet to find a game based on a movie that hasn't sucked.
ET For the Atari 2600?
And it seriously damaged Atari (and the whole game industry). I think we've got a winner.
From Wikipedia:
E.T. is often cited as one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming history, as well as one of the worst video games released. The game is frequently cited as a contributing factor to Atari's massive financial losses during 1983 and 1984, and an unspecified number of unsold copies of the game are said to have contributed to the video game industry crisis of 1983. As a result of overproduction and returns, unsold cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill.
I am not a crackpot.
You heard wrong. It was to be the last game created by Hironobu Sakaguchi - his Final Fantasy, as it were. After that he was going to quit the game industry entirely.
But it became a great success, and Square has gone on to continue to release countless sequels and rereleases of the same damned games to this day.
Warcraft III released in July 2002. Before that was Diablo II in 2000, and Starcraft in 1998. So up to WoW (which released in 2004), they were pretty consistently hitting a game every two years. Since WoW, it's been five.
I belive Maxis was infact saved from near bankruptcy by EA just before Simcity 3000. Infact I believe the EA acquisition is probably what enabled to push Dollhouse (The Sims) from idea to a full game. Will Wright mentioned the idea of The sims in a old interview done shortly after Simcity 2000, but it's possible staff in Maxis either didn't believe in the idea or didn't have the funds for it.
Simcity 3000 development wasn't really going anywhere apparently. They were originally planning to make the game fully in 3D, but changed their mind and made it isometric 2D.
Simcity 4 with it's expansion pack is probably the peak of the Simcity series (anyone saying Simcity 2000 probably hadn't seriously gotten into Simcity 4). Sadly EA thought the Simcity series needed to be more casual (as it's easy to screw up in Simcity 4 for a newbie), and the result was Simcity Societies which got a fairly lukewarm reception. I yet have to see a city simulator to replace Simcity 4 (open source clone developed by fans would be really nice).
Maxis always been bit of a cash cow milker even when independent from EA. There were a lot of Sim games in the early 90's, some good, some bad ones.
It's a given that games-after-movies will have a higher chance of sucking.
1) IP price. The rights to the game cost a fortune. And while you can surely cut cost on the advertisment side, the rights usually cost more than you save on ads. That money is missing in the development process.
2) Time constraints. Face it, the game has to hit the street NOW. Not in a year. Not in half a year, even. NOW. Nobody cares about a game to a movie that ran 6 months ago. The movie is now, so the game has to be now. Else you can bundle it with the DVD and still won't get it sold. And NOW is not necessarily when the game is ready.
3) Hype. It's tempting to release a sucky game, because people could get irate if they just got an empty box, so you have to give them something at least. They'll buy it anyway because of the movie, so why bother with quality?
You have to admit, though, that at least number 3 diminished in the last decade or two. Until then, a game based on a movie was GUARANTEED to suck because the game makers relied entirely on the movie hype. I can't remember any good movie games (aside of the Lucasfilm brand, who made their own games and didn't want to tarnish their own IP... note the past tense) before about 1995. In the meantime, movie studios do care a little more about games. It's no longer just a quick buck to milk the name while it's hot and get a few more dollars from whatever game maker pays the most.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If they had used leaked code, Valve's legal department certainly would have killed their company. They licensed the Source engine, it's just that when HL2 was first released, it was buggy, and only Valve had the knowledge to get it working properly, rather than a 3rd party developer.
Actually, as someone who was an avid gamer at the time (I had a VIC20 plus a Coleco with the Atari adapter so I could play most games) I would say what caused the "big crash" of 83/84 was a combination of "games" like chase the chuckwagon and "The A-Team" (Lord that one was bad) combined with retailers going "balls in" and investing WAAAY too much money and floor space to games.
I remember when the crash happened I went to the local Magic Mart (anybody remember that chain?) and I was snatching up Atari games 10 for a buck and Coleceo games at 5 for a dollar. And this wasn't some quick sale, you could score games at that price for nearly a year, due to how much they overstocked. The local chains literally had huge bins like Walmart does for cheap DVDs stacked 4 and 5 deep with NOTHING but games in them. I got classics like Yar's and River Raid for $0.10, along with Zaxxon and many other Coleco games for $0.20.
The problem was, just as with the housing and many of the other bubbles we have seen, everyone developed gold plated dollar bill fantasies around video games and bet the farm on the fact that "there will always be people willing to pay" and thus you had companies like General Foods owning game houses and companies like Magic Mart buying 1000+ copies of any piece of trash that had an Atari or Coleco or Intellivison logo on it, and soon the market was overflowing with crap worse than a backed up sewer pipe. Sadly some companies didn't learn from that mistake and repeated it, see Sega with the whole 32x/Sega CD fiasco. I personally think we may be heading to another fall with the "rise of the mega corps" who simply buy franchises and then run them into the ground with sequels. Again you have a business being run by PHBs that listen to marketing instead of their customers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.