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.
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
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'? ;)
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 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.