Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies 397
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.'"
Re:Enter the Matrix was OK... (Score:3, Interesting)
I never had a crash for Enter the Matrix, myself. I actually quite enjoyed it. I may have been the only one, I guess.
The bonus footage that fit into "Reloaded" was cool, too. But, I'm in the minority of liking the majority of that trilogy, as well.
Re:Enter the Matrix was OK... (Score:1, Interesting)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Bigger scale (Score:5, Interesting)
ET would have never killed off gaming - all it would have done is tighten the standards on what publishers would ship as acceptable (which actually happened) and people would tighten their standards on what they would buy before trying. ET if anything was probably good for the industry and consumers. Right now I think we are seeing a return of shovelware, and its effects. The economy is bad, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one waiting for COD MW2 to end up in the bargain bin (60$ is just too much to take a chance on).
Same with MMO's - I'm sure somewhere Mythic for instance has a figure on how many box sales they will get on day one, and aren't nearly as concerned with how many people actually stay subscribed (just my observation - they just seem disinterested in actually addressing community concerns).
And yes I bought ET when it came out - its still in my box o carts wherever my 2600 is, and it wasn't the last pile of crap I ever spent good money on, but it certianly made me think more about my purchases after that.
It probably goes without saying that... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Final Fantasy was supposed to kill Square (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It probably goes without saying that... (Score:3, Interesting)
Either I misread you, or you're missing the point. The death of the studio was the desire to make DNF both internally perfect and better than anything else on the market. They wound up chasing from one engine to the next and bled themselves dry.
If you either take Duke out of the picture entirely, or release it as a mediocre game then the dev shop may well still be alive today.
TA: Kingdoms? Master of Orion III? (Score:5, Interesting)
What, no TA: Kingdoms and Cavedog? No Master of Orion III and Quicksilver? Lovell must be new here.
Ten years from now - "WoW killed Blizzard" (Score:5, Interesting)
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'? ;)
Enter the Matrix? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
what, No Cavedog? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:TA: Kingdoms? Master of Orion III? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Infocom (Score:3, Interesting)
Wasn't it inferior, because the entire concept of parsed-natural language commands was boggy and inferior to a GUI for almost all users? There was no way Cornerstone could have been made a serious competitor, but I guess someone had to try. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but assuming even base-line literacy in your customers is a dangerous step...
Re:Enter the Matrix was OK... (Score:3, Interesting)
There was no trilogy. There was one movie, and a script [remoteviewinglight.com] that was sadly never turned into a sequel.
Seriously. Read it and then try to tell me this would not have rocked way more than anything they crapped out after the first movie.
Driv3r PC at Atari... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Quicksilver vanished with MOO3 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What about awesome companies that died regardless? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Enter the Matrix was OK... (Score:3, Interesting)