• What games were so bad, they crashed the entire video game market?
What games turned decade-long development cycles into underwhelming stinkers?
These are 15 of the biggest video game flops you’ll ever see.
15 – Okami • In 2006, IGN Named Okami their Game of
the Year.
It is a beautiful game with fun gameplay, a compelling story, and art that is truly
one-of-a-kind even a decade later.
• The original release of the game maintains a score of 93 on Metacritic.
• And yet nobody cared.
It sold less than 600,000 units worldwide, earning it a Guinness World Record for least
commercial successful Game of the Year winner.
14 – Shenmue • Shenmue’s greatest misfortune is that
it was a Dreamcast game.
Like Okami, Shenmue is beloved and critically-acclaimed, with sky-high production values.
• Actually, the production values were a bit TOO high.
Shenmue cost 70 million dollars to make, but only sold a little over one million copies.
• That’s not a terrible return for a Dreamcast game, but it was way less than what Sega needed
to turn a 70 million dollar game into a profit.
13 – Psychonauts • Psychonauts might finally be coming around.
Though the game sold only about 100,000 units during its initial release, it has earned
more via a digital re-release on PC than it ever did as a console game.
• Now the quirky Double Fine property has a new lease on life, with a VR game and a
sequel coming in the near future.
• Still, though.
Those initial sales basically drove Majesco out of the video game publishing market.
12 – MadWorld • Sega and PlatinumGames teamed up to create
a masterpiece in Bayonetta.
And hey, MadWorld was pretty good too.
• But Madworld had the misfortune of being an action game beat-em-up on the Wii with
motion controls.
That’s just entirely too much waggle.
• The game sold only 123,000 units in the first six months, and now populates a number
of “Wii Games Actually Worth Playing” lists.
11 – Atari Jaguar • There are plenty of video game console
flops that are well-known, like the Virtual Boy, the Ouya, the Wii U, Sega Saturn, N-Gage,
and countless others.
But the Atari Jaguar deserves special mention.
• The Jaguar was a 64-bit system that came out while the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis
were duking it out, and it blew both away in terms of power.
• However, Atari sort of forgot that people want games to play with their game consoles.
The Jaguar was sunk by a sea of garbage games and a total lack of a compelling title to
drive interest.
Atari itself also went down with the ship, never creating a home console again.
10 – Lair • Hey, you guys remember when Sony saw the
success of the Wii, and then hastily threw together the Sixaxis controller?
• And then they tried to convince us that motion controls in a normal controller were
a good idea, and they should design games around it?
• Yeah.
Lair remembers too.
The short version is, the game that was supposed to show off the Sixaxis as a motion controller
didn’t work properly, and nobody bought it.
It was an embarrassment.
• And then Sony STILL decided to make the Playstation Move, which would have a spot
on this list if not for it being rescued by the PSVR.
9 – Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness • Angel of Darkness is basically the reason
why Tomb Raider stopped being a triple-A franchise for a while.
• It actually sold reasonably well, moving a respectable 2.5 million copies.
• But the game itself was awful, full of bugs and clunky action.
It took years for Tomb Raider to rebuild its reputation after this critical flop.
8 – Duke Nukem Forever • Sometimes games take a long time in development
because the team is trying to polish every aspect of the game and make sure it’s perfect.
• Other times, they’re Duke Nukem Forever, the signature example of “development hell.”
• Gearbox basically just got the game to a completed state so it could die a natural
death in the wild after a 15-year development cycle.
7 – Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal
• Sonic the Hedgehog hasn’t exactly been putting out smash hits over the last two decades.
• But the Sonic Boom franchise managed to dig the franchise in just a little deeper,
creating a game that bottomed out of both sales charts and critics’ rankings.
• The two games were exclusive to the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS, and combined for sales of about
620,000 copies – the worst-selling Sonic games ever.
6 – Beyond Good & Evil • Realistically, Ubisoft was probably asking
for trouble when they named their game after a Fredrich Nietzche book on the philosophy
of individual morality.
• The game itself is great, with interesting mechanics, a compelling storyline, and memorable
characters.
• But the sales were never there for it, which is why Ubisoft keeps teasing a sequel
and then not putting any time into it.
5 – Brutal Legend • Brutal Legend is what happens when an
indie darling like Double Fine tries to join forces with a major publisher to put out a
game with a bunch of celebrities.
It was originally set to be published by Activision, but a complex merger situation led to it being
dropped and later picked up by EA.
• Brutal Legend is a heavy metal-themed game with a mix of action and real-time strategy
elements, starring a beefy Jack Black.
• You’ve probably heard of Brutal Legend, since it got advertising space EVERYWHERE.
It’s not a bad game, but it moved only 215,000 units during its initial release period.
4 – E.T.
• You all know the story, and it’s probably too obvious to be here.
• But come on, Atari literally dumped the overstock of this game in a landfill and helped
crashed the home console industry.
They dumped 700,000 cartridges in that New Mexico landfill in total.
• It would simply have been unreasonable to not include this.
3 – Too Human • Like Duke Nukem Forever, but without the
cult following, Too Human was intended to be a Playstation 1 game, and then it was a
GameCube game, and then finally it released on the Xbox 360, some 9 years after it was
announced.
• The final development cost was about 60-100 million dollars.
• Even worse, the game ended up in a legal battle with Epic Games over its use of the
Unreal Engine.
Epic won the suit, and developer Silicon Knights was ordered to remove the game from digital
marketplaces, and recall and destroy all disc-based copies of the game.
2 – Pac-Man (for the Atari 2600) • Like E.T., this game takes a property
that people already loved, and grinds it into the dirt.
• Also like E.T., this game is largely credited with crashing the video game industry in 1983.
• It’s KIND of like Pac-Man… only with grating sound effects, terrible visuals, clunky
gameplay, a smaller map…
• So basically, it’s NOT Pac-Man.
1 - Daikatana • Daikatana changed the way video games
are marketed, because everyone learned from its mistake.
• The infamous “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch” ad is now a punchline
for a game that swelled to astronomical levels of hype, only to backfire when it turned out
to be a drab, mediocre shooter with frustrating mechanics.
• This is the game that taught developers that too much hype can be a bad thing.
So guys what gaming project is the biggest flop to you?
Let us know in the comment section down below
and we will pin our favourite to the top.