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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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)
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.
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'? ;)
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.
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!
What actually killed Origin was EA. EA purchased Origin in the same year that Ultima 7 was released--and coincidentally, Ultima 7 was the last really good Ultima game. Ultima 7 part 2 was fun and a good story, but it was far too linear. It also never felt like an Ultima. Ultima 8 was rushed to keep EA's stockholders happy. Ultima 9 was simply a travesty. The constant delays, rewrites, and fighting between Garriot and EA turned what could have been a fantastic ending to the series into a pile of poo.
That said, Origin's always made some poor design choices. The Voodoo memory manager caused no end to problems, and required that the computer be rebooted in order to play the Ultima 7 games (for most people.) Later on, Ultima 9's engine was written with the Voodoo series of graphics cards (no relation) in mind, and DirectX support was tacked on at the last minute. The upshot was that the game played reasonably well, if slowly, with 3DFX cards, and had tons more bugs and horrible performance with anything else. Ultima 8 didn't seem to have any voodoo problems, but they went and changed the format of the game (iirc, at EA's behest) to include action elements in a hope that it would appeal to more gamers. This alienated the core fans, and I suspect that new players were put off by both the paganism/symbolism and the fact that this was the 8th game in the series.
Blunder's all around, but really, it's all traced back to EA.
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.
Actually you cannot blame everything regarding U9 on EA (and also not everything from U8). The jumping which made the initial U8 so lousy was simply that Garriot wanted to have more jump and run elements in there and the missing content was ort of additional packs (since they worked out so well for U7). Problem simply was the everyone hated the jumping, Origin fixed that in the first patch. The missing content never appeared because EA axed further works on the game due to the financial dive it caused. As for U9 if you have followed the game then you would know there was a lack of direction. The early version was supposed to be sort of an U7 with a top down 3d engine underneath, then a programmer played with the camera Garriot saw that (according to some interviews I read back then) then suddenly it had to be full 3d with all consequences at a time where no one has done that before and no one really had the hardware to do it decently. Then the game constantly was on and off in EAs and also Garriots attention etc... it was sort of an endless story until EA had enough and gave it a last chance (after 5-6 years of on and off development)
U9 could have been good, and turned out to be lets say too much ahead of its time and mediocre in many ways, but only blaming EA is wrong in this case.
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!
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.
I bought it when it first came out. I played it for maybe two days before giving up on it. The game play was so radically different from MOO2 that I just couldn't figure out how to make it work the way I wanted. I guess it was closer to MOO than MOO2, but I was really hoping for a more refined version of the sequel not the original.
Things I would have liked as improvements of MOO2:
Better AI for space battles, both on the enemies part and when you told it to fight for you.
Better build que management, longer build que so I didn't have to update it every dozen cycles or whatever and or being able to save a given que and apply it to other colonies.
Making ground combat more interactive, sending your troops and just having them land to duke it out was lame.
Remove some of the broken things like combinations of equipment on ships that granted infinite turns.
Add more technologies rather than half the possible research being minor improvements of existing stuff en mass.
I think I might actually be willign to pony up some money for a mod of MOO2 that offered most of that.
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.