Gadgetory

let's talk about some shitty games and I mean really shitty games the kind of games that cause companies to go into millions of debt ruin reputations and in some cases bring down entire industries first off is one of the most notorious games ever to claw its way out of development hell Duke Nukem Forever the original Duke Nukem 3d was a big deal for its time and obviously it needed a sequel and the one planned was going to trump the original in every conceivable way or at least that was the plan forever started in development in 96 originally slated for a release in the holiday season for 97 or 98 the game's first push back happened when the lead designer realised how the game was falling behind its competition technologically and decided to change from using the original engine from Duke Nukem 3d over to the newer quake 2 engine this was the first of many changes that became a vicious cycle throughout the years as 3d realms tried to constantly change and adapt the game to whatever big successful titles came out eventually the team sunk 20 million of their own dollars failed to finish the game in time and almost everyone was let go and downsized the scraps of what were left of the game were brought to gearbox who convinced take-two interactive to let them finish it finally releasing the game in 2011 15 years after development first started and sadly the game we got was well just awful the years of push backs showed obvious signs of aging as just about everything in game was outdated from its visuals and sound to gameplay mechanics to even its writing with jokes referencing pop culture from as early as 2000 is for pussies it was considered by many to be the worst game of 2011 and one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history second up is daikatana this was another mid-90s experiment that tried as hard as it could to be the next huge game only to crash and burn pretty magnificently the original big push for this game came from the fact that its lead designer John Romero was something of a game dev celebrity at the time having been one of the leading minds behind the games that pioneered the FPS genre like Wolfenstein doom and quake daikatana was going to be the first huge game to come from him and his new dev team at ion storm and his aspirations for it were pretty lofty planning to have 24 levels taking place across four different time periods with huge weapon variety for the time just like with Duke Nukem Forever the game hit pushbacks when the team decided to change engines Midway pushing its release back to 2000 along with releasing a demo at e3 that only played at 12 frames per second despite the name power and promises behind it the game was terrible with one of its biggest downfalls coming from focusing on protecting and working alongside a pair of AI teammates who were complete idiots and their deaths would cause a game over it also doesn't help that this game had one of the dumbest and most offensive ads ever that even Romero wasn't a fan of which was a simple all Dredd page saying John Romero's about to make you his bitch suck it down because there is no better way to advertise your game than to trash-talk your entire consumer base number three is one of the most recent failures in gaming memory now sonic is a franchise that's had its fair share of ups and downs starting in its glory days on the Sega Genesis to a weaker spin-off on the Sega Saturn a kind of mini revival on the Dreamcast and GameCube with Sonic Adventure and then back-to-back disappointments like Sonic oh 6 and Sonic Unleashed despite this though the series has survived but is now reeling from the abomination that was sonicboom rise of lyric on the Wii U this was the result of Sega's misguided attempt at trying to make a Sonic game directly pandering to Western audiences the entire sonic boom franchise consisting of a TV show Wii U game and 3ds game was meant to not reboot the series but rather be an offshoot that Westerners would enjoy more and in fact the games weren't even originally planned to see a release in Japan but they ended up not being lucky enough to avoid it the game's development was outsourced to an American dev team red button games the logic being that a Western team could do a better job of making a game Westerners would want what we got instead was one of the glitch iasts and worst written Sonic games ever with bugs so aplenty that they were even easily exploitable like being able to jump infinitely by just pausing the game sonic boom ended up being the worst reviewed Sonic game ever and the least selling with sales from both the Wii U and 3ds game combined barely hitting over 600,000 total which is abysmal ehlo for a franchise so well known next up is a port of a video game classic that on the surface might sound as though it did really well but in fact it helped lead to the ruin of an entire company and that's pac-man on the Atari 2600 pac-man was a huge hit in arcades in the early 80s and as a way to try and cash in on it Atari got the rights to make a home console version thinking it would be a pretty simple task considering the simplicity of the game development took four months and during that time one particularly big problem showed up the hardware pac-man arcade cabinets ran with four kilobytes of RAM whereas an Atari 2600 only had 128 bytes this led to the Atari version of the game cutting all kinds of corners and doing weird tricks to work on the system this included replacing the game's white pellets with orange blocks the same ones used to create the game's walls and only displaying each of the game's ghosts at a time each and every frame causing them to flicker rapidly needless to say the game wasn't received well by critics but did go on to sell really well being the biggest selling game on Atari at the 7 million units sounds great right well the problem is Atari made 12 million copies of this game meaning they only sold a bit over 1/2 which is especially bizarre when you figure that at the time only an estimated 10 million Atari 2600 s were in active use the company assumed the game would easily sell to every current owner and drive demandin purchases for new systems and coupled with the licensing fees to Namco and the marketing for the game Atari ended up losing a lot of money and this goes hand in hand with number 5 on the list easily the most well known financial flop and one of the worst games ever made bTW the video game the entire project was doomed from the start with the CEO of Ataris parent company Warner making a deal with Steven Spielberg that the game would be a huge hit due to the movies success and could be made in as little as five and a half weeks to be ready for the 82 holiday season it's been estimated that the license for this game costs twenty to twenty five million dollars and even Atari CEO Steve Ross thought this was a bad idea from the start the lead man in charge of development Howard Scott Warshaw took the short dev time as a challenge and was convinced he could build an epic movie based game in time with all kinds of grandiose plans like searching a planet for collectible pieces avoiding obstacles and solving puzzles fun story spielberg himself didn't think this route was a good idea wondering why they just couldn't make a simple fun game along the lines of pac-man Warshaw ignored this criticism pushed forward with his plans and the rest is history et only sold 1.5 million units of the estimated four to five million made and a lot of those copies ended up getting returned as scathing reviews and disappointed customers acted years later an urban legend surfaced that Atari buried unsold copies of the game in the middle of the desert which actually ended up being proven true in 2014 when the landfill in New Mexico was dug up stuffed with copies of ET and other games and systems pac-man and ET combined did so much damage that Atari reported a quarterly loss of 536 million dollars which adjusted for inflation today comes in at just under 1.3 billion while not the only causes these two games played the largest hand in the game crash of 1983 in which Atari was split up into multiple smaller companies and home console market was basically dead for two years until Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sega started bringing their systems and games over so those are 5 of the biggest failures in gaming history if you enjoyed the video hit that thumbs up button to let me know as well as subscribe and as always guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you later