But sometimes, those delays just keep piling up, until the game has essentially become an industry myth. And when at long last they see the light of day, they don't always measure up to the expectations or time that's gone into them. Here are games that had ridiculous delays yet still turned out terrible.
Too Human was mortal after all
Silicon Knights' Too Human never lacked for ambition. It drew from the third-person shooter and action genres, involved a complex loot system and multiple classes, told a sprawling science-fiction story rooted in Norse mythology, and was contained within a whopping four CD-ROM discs. Simply put, the game wanted to go big in every way. So big, it was supposed to start a trilogy. All that ambition came at a cost, though: the game, first unveiled at E3 1999 for the original PlayStation, didn't come out until 2008 as an Xbox 360 exclusive.
Perfect Dark Zero was far from perfect
Coming into the seventh-generation of consoles, Rare was one of the hottest first-person shooter developers in the world. Their legendary GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64 had redefined how a PC-bred genre could be transported onto consoles. Rare made a spiritual successor to that game with their own new intellectual property, Perfect Dark, in 2000. Perfect Dark was widely hailed as a masterpiece and even today is considered a landmark title.
To no one' surprise, Rare began working on a sequel -– or actually, a prequel –- right after the first game launched. With their long-running relationship with Nintendo, this new game was intended for the Nintendo GameCube. But a hungry Microsoft, looking for top-tier talent to produce both children's and action games for the Xbox, acquired the studio in 2002. The new game, Perfect Dark Zero, shifted development to the Xbox. However, with the new console generation on the horizon, the development shifted again to become a launch title for the new Xbox 360.
Mighty No. 9 didn't live up to its own name
Capcom's long-running Mega Man series is a pillar of the action-platformer genre. Over the decades, however, the franchise has spun-off many sub-series and shifted into a variety of designs very different from those simple, stellar, early titles. So when long-time Mega Man series producer Keiji Inafune left Capcom to found his own studio, he tried to return to the roots of what made that series great in the first place.
Of course, Inafune couldn't take Mega Man himself with him. But he did turn to the public for financial assistance in creating a brand new hero who looked a whole lot like the old one. Mighty No. 9 was announced as part of a Kickstarter campaign, which blew away its original fundraising target of $900,000 by garnering nearly $4 million instead. Clearly, anticipation was sky-high.
Galleon lumbered ashore late
After leading the design of the smash hit Tomb Raider, Toby Gard left developer Core Design to start his own studio, Confounding Factor. Tomb Raider went on to be a breakout hit, a game with crossover appeal that brought in casual and hardcore audiences alike. As Gard began work on a new game, he wanted to preserve that sense of adventure and fun that he'd built into Tomb Raider, while opening it up with a much larger world to explore and a richer narrative for the player to experience.
APB: All Points Bulletin never caught anyone
David Jones had produced a number of hits at a young age, including the lovable Lemmings and the original, top-down Grand Theft Auto. He eventually founded his own studio, Realtime Worlds, to produce the kinds of games he'd been dreaming of his whole career. After the blistering success of the Grand Theft Auto series, Jones was considered one of the hottest developers around. So his new game, APB: All Points Bulletin, which would return to the idea of open-world design and the criminal underworld, could be the next GTA-sized hit.
0 comments:
Post a Comment