Saved From Development Hell / Video Games

Every once in a while, a game manages to condense from the vapor.

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• I-Mockery's Roger Barr had the idea for a giant NES fangame starring Abobo back in 2002. The project came to a halt, but in 2006 new developers came to the rescue and thus Abobo's Big Adventure was born. It was finally released as a Flash-based game in January 2012, ten years after the initial drafts.
• Alan Wake was first announced way back in 2004, and after several years of trying to come up with a comprehensible story that would accommodate an open-world survival horror setting and redoing the game almost from scratch three years into development into the linear action-adventure with horror elements seen in the final product, it finally released Spring 2010. The PC version took two years longer, only finally seeing light in 2012. Remedy Entertainment always intended to have a proper direct sequel to the game beyond the Gaiden Game Alan Wake's American Nightmare, but it wouldn't be released until thirteen years later because the first game didn't initially sell well enough for Microsoft to give them the go-ahead, and then Remedy had to buy back the rights to Alan Wake from Microsoft. Finally, Alan Wake II was announced properly in 2021, and released in October 2023.
• Aliens: Colonial Marines was stuck in development for nearly six years before being released, due to Gearbox focusing most of their efforts on developing their other games like Borderlands 2. Subcontracting game development to a different design studio didn't help either.
• American Hero is an adult-oriented Interactive Movie starring the likes of Timothy Bottoms, Daniel Roebuck, and Musetta Vander that was originally intended for release in 1995, was cancelled, but eventually saw release in 2021. It was originally filmed as a Tech-Demo Game of Atari's nascent proprietary interactive movie format, GameFilm, to be released on the Atari Jaguar, but due to the Jaguar's commercial failure, the game was canned. Most of the project was already complete, and director Jeff Burr planned on reworking the project to be a traditional linear feature film, even filming additional necessary footage, but the film negatives were damaged during the cutting phase, it was deemed a loss for the producers, and the project remained unfinished. However, the footage and source code kept circulating among Atari enthusiasts and archivists (unauthorized fan recreations of the game existed and were shown in conventions from as early as 2003), eventually falling into the hands of retro publisher Ziggurat Interactive and developer Empty Clip Studios in 2021, who did a proper restoration of the game, even managing to get Timothy Bottoms to reprise his role for newly-recorded dialogue. Later that year, the game was finally released on PC on GOG.com alongside a console release by Limited Run Games.
• The Atari VCS console. Originally announced in 2017 for a 2018 release, the release was pushed back to March 2020. Numerous delays (one to change CPU) have made it a mockery of the PC gamers as well as by fanboys of other consoles. And then, in October 2019, the lead designer of the project quit, leaving Atari with only a prototype motherboard and the schematics. While Atari insisted that the project was on schedule and that they'd contracted a different company to do debugging and troubleshooting work, the project backers were starting to grow restless and some wanted their money back. The first units of the console finally made their way to backers in December 2020, with the console publicly releasing in June 2021.
• Bee, an Interactive Fiction game by Emily Short, was released in 2012 for Varytale. When Varytale shut down, its lead developer recreated Bee for the Dendry platform, but in incomplete form. However, in 2022, the project was finally finished by a new developer working alongside Short, along with general polishing of the game's text and mechanics.
• Black Mesa, a free Fan Remake of Half-Life, started development after the release of Half-Life 2 in 2004. The mod's first release came in 2012, 8 years later. The game was released without the last chapters of the game taking place on Xen, as the developers want to take extra care to avoid the problems most players had with the original game's Xen levels. After a few more delays, the Xen levels were finally officially released in early access in December 2019.
• Two Blizzard sequels got shelved for ~12 years to devote resources to the Warcraft franchise, more specifically World of Warcraft. StarCraft II was finally released in July 2010, and Diablo III in May 2012. A trailer for the former famously has Tychus Findlay saying, "Hell. It's about time." To put this into context, after the release of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction in June 2001, Blizzard would release Warcraft-related games exclusively for the next 9 years, until the aforementioned Wings of Liberty.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm was to be released in 2014 but spent 4 years in Development Hell due to changes to the project as well as real life-related unforeseen circumstances. It was finally published in 2018.
• Brütal Legend originally had a publisher in Vivendi Universal, but once they merged with Sierra (who later merged with Activision), developer Double Fine was left out in the cold and had to scramble around for a publisher. They found Activision, who tried to turn it into a music game, so then DF left and went to EA instead. Activision tried to cancel the game and then they and EA fought for quite some time. EA won the battle, and so the game was finally released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009. A PC port was considered, but wasn't released until February 2013, long after EA dropped the rights to the title.
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, originally announced in 1999 and set for release in 2001, until the original publishers went under. Luckily, after seeing the success of Morrowind on the Xbox and PC, Bethesda picked up the publishing rights, so long as they made an Xbox version - which tacked on another 6 months. By the time it finally came out (fittingly in October) in 2005, it would become the last marquee title released for the Xbox, where it promptly languished with sub-standard sales. After which, the developers Headfirst Interactive were subsequently shuttered and their other two titles planned as sequels, Beyond The Mountains of Madness and Sanity's End, which would form a trilogy were forgotten. The team responsible for making the game splintered off and joined Codemasters, Eurocom and Sega Racing Studio.
• Chip's Challenge 2 by Chuck Sommerville was finally released on May 28, 2015, after a successful five-year long negotiation with the trademark owners. It had originally languished for 23 years when the new owners wanted him to fund the publishing.
• Chocobo Racing 3D for the Nintendo 3DS was announced at E3 in 2010, and then supposedly cancelled three years later. It finally came out in much different form as Chocobo GP for the Nintendo Switch twelve years later.
• The Closure, a Fan Sequel to Half-Life 2: Episode Two, was in development since 2010 and delayed many times, finally being released on February 27th, 2016.
• Cube World was released as a purchasable playable alpha in July 2013 where the game received a few updates and then stopped getting updates for six years. The developer basically went into radio silence mode and gave rare updates on his Twitter showing screenshots on what he had planned for the game, but nothing on if the current game itself was getting any updates anytime soon. In September 2019, the developer finally showed off a trailer and a release date of September 30th of that year on Steam with a playable beta on the 23rd for those who purchased the game during alpha. The developer also went on to post an update on his blog to explain why he was silent for so long; he'd gotten anxiety and depression after his site got DDoS'd when the game's alpha launched and he also restarted the project several times due to him being a perfectionist and feeling that his previous builds of the game weren't good enough to release to the public.
• D2, the sequel to D, was first announced for the stillborn Panasonic M2, and then for the Sega Saturn. Several years and a "Wired Vaporware" award later, it finally was released for the Sega Dreamcast.
• Daikatana from ION Storm. The initial design was done in 1997 and the finished game came out in the year 2000. Horrible publicity and John Romero's decision to switch to the Quake II engine after eleven months of work was already done did not help matters.
• Darksiders series developer Vigil Games had wanted to keep the franchise going, but THQ shut down and ceased all development of its video games in April 2013, auctioning off their intellectual properties - as such, Vigil Games was dismantled. THQ would be purchased by Nordic Games (eventually becoming THQ Nordic), and a Sequel to Darksiders II was left in limbo for five years until May 2017, when online retailer Amazon leaked a product listing for Darksiders III. THQ Nordic officially announced its return, developed by Gunfire Games, comprised of ex-Vigil Games staff members who worked on the previous releases, set for a 2018 release.
• Dead Island 2, the third game in the Dead Island series, was announced in 2014. In 2015, the original developer was dropped and replaced. In 2019 the second developer was removed and replaced with the current one, Dambuster. The game was given a March 2021 release, which came and went. By August 2022, the publisher targeted the game to be released in February 2023, only to later delay it. The game was finally released in April 2023.
• Diddy Kong Pilot was first revealed in 2001, but was nearly scrapped due to Rare being bought out by Microsoft, and thus losing the rights to use Diddy Kong. It would be reworked into a GBA game making use of the developer's own Banjo-Kazooie characters, reappearing in 2005 as Banjo-Pilot.
• LucasArts' The Dig began in 1989 and looks like it - the graphical style and serious tone are more similar to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Loom than any of the comedic games LucasArts was later known for. The game was written by Steven Spielberg and intended to tell a movie over a game, though this meant that the pacing frequently did not work. Over the years, the game was passed through several development teams, with the graphics, story and interface changing a little, though the bulk of its later additions were voice acting and FMV sequences. A novelization of an early draft of the game was released, featuring a character cut from it. When The Dig was finally released in 1995, it failed to attract popularity except from hardcore LucasArts fans, and the development history suggests that the developers were not hugely enthusiastic about it either. Despite this, it does have a following among fans of hard sci-fi.
• Doom 4 was first announced in 2008, but repeatedly hit delays due to id Software being bought out by Zenimax, as well as development resources being channeled into Rage (2011). As the years went on, leaked concept art, screenshots, and later a development video of pre-rendered cutscenes came out from a version of the game that was canned as by Bethesda's own admission it was basically Call of Doom. A completely new version of the game was shown to a tightly controlled private audience at Quakecon 2014 where any video recording was banned. The word from those who saw it was that it was much closer to the first two Doom games in style. At E3 2015 the game was finally shown off to the public, now simply titled Doom and finally released on May 13th, 2016.
• Doom game mods:
  • In the Doom community's annual Cacowards, the Mordeth Award (named after a community-famous example of Vaporware) is awarded to examples of this trope with Doom WADs. The first recipient was 2004's Hellcore, which not only spent a record nine years in development, but was started in 1995, a year after the modding community began.
  • 2005's Jägermörder 02 Terra Nova is no slouch either. It was developed for six years starting just after the original Jägermörder, which seems paltry compared to the above—until you learn that it's a single level that took that long to make.
    Build Time: Started in 1999. Yeah.
  • While not a Mordeth winner, the 2015 arcade-style mod Skulldash was initially created for the Skulltag source port and took "Over Seven Years" to develop, during which Skulltag died and its off-shoot Zandronum took its place. This technically means Skulldash took so long to make that it outlived its original target engine by just over three years. For all its effort, Skulldash was met with critical acclaim and one of the Cacowards of 2015.
• Dragon Quest VII entered development in 1996 for the Nintendo 64DD, but switched to the PlayStation in 1997. It was not released until 2001, and its release basically let it get Overshadowed by Awesome considering that the Xbox and PlayStation 2 were already out and the GameCube was just around the corner. Not to mention, it was complained about because it looked dated, and still does seem quite dated translation-wise with the engrish-y names for some things.
• The PlayStation Plus edition of Driveclub was meant to be launched along the main game on PS4's launch day. Then, the main game got delayed until October 8, 2014, and then the disastrous online launch saw the PS Plus version delayed indefinitely until they could fix the servers. Finally, it saw the light on June 25, 2015, eight months after the main game launched, and two years since it was announced.
• Dreamfall Chapters, the third game in The Longest Journey series, was first mentioned in 2007 and only started production in November 2012, due to designer Ragnar Tornquist working on The Secret World (itself also delayed frequently). Also, it's apparently not even going to be the proper conclusion to the series, which is going to have to wait for The Longest Journey Home... expected to be released some time around 2030—if at all.
• Duke Nukem Forever is the most infamous case of development hell in video games. First announced in 1997, it wouldn't be released until 2011. Here an incomplete list of things that happened during DNF's development.
• Elite IV was announced by series creator David Braben back in 1997, and languished for 17 years before Frontier Developments (the company working on the game) announced an endeavor to fund the final development of the game via crowdfunding in 2012. The effort succeeded, and the game released in December 2014, under the title of Elite Dangerous.
• Roughly half of the plots and quest lines from the canceled Interplay Fallout project Fallout: Van Buren made their way into Fallout: New Vegas after being stuck in limbo for about 15 years.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy XII started development as early as the beginning of the 2000s. It had originally been slated for release in 2004, but then was pushed back to 2005 due to the lead designer leaving the project, but was pushed back again and finally saw release in late 2006, after the Fabula Nova Crystallis (see below) metaseries had been announced.
  • The Fabula Nova Crystallis media project, announced at E3 2006, was so fraught with internal issues that all of its debut games experienced significant delays in some form, and the franchise ended up effectively dead, its installments all being distanced from one another.
    • Final Fantasy XIII was revealed for the first time via a CG trailer. It had already been in development for at least a year prior to its announcement at the E3, and later interviews revealed that the game had been in development even longer (the battle system had existed on a PS2 as a prototype). It got into development hell right after its initial trailer, reasons varied from an underdeveloped Crystal Tools engine to late play testing. Every subsequent year they released a slightly modified version of the same trailer with a few new scenes mixed in, any new information being slowly drip-fed. It wasn't until 2009 that Square Enix showed some actual gameplay footage and revealed significant plot details, the game finally seeing retail later that year.
    • Final Fantasy Type-0 was announced as Final Fantasy Agito XIII and initially envisioned as a mobile phone game. Like XIII, its development was halted right at the beginning, because its developers were busy working on Crisis Core. When it was put back on track in 2008, Square Enix decided to redevelop it for PSP, owing to the scale of the project posing serious difficulties had it remained on mobile phones. Then it was delayed again as the developers were diverted to work on The 3rd Birthday and came close to being cancelled. Finally, it was "reannounced" in 2011 as Final Fantasy Type-0, as Square Enix disclosed that the change to PSP had made the lore incompatible with XIII. It finally saw release later that year. The original mobile phone project was later resurrected, simply named Final Fantasy Agito, and released in 2014 (although only in Japan).
      
      Type-0 deserves another mention because around the time of its Japanese release, Square-Enix had planned for an English version of the game as well. Unfortunately, perhaps largely due to the flagging PSP market in the U.S., the effort stalled and no word was spoken of it for years. It got to the point that a fan translation of the game which took over two years managed to be completed. THEN at E3 2014, a mere few days after the release of the fan translation, Square Enix made the announcement that Type-0 was getting an HD Remastered release on the PS4 and the Xbox One, and this did get localized.
    • Final Fantasy XV was originally named Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Following its announcement at E3 2006, it changed enough over the years that it was made a separate title entirely. Actual discernible information on the game for a long time after 2006 was very sparse, and up until early 2010, trailers for it only contained CG and cutscene footage. The game languished for so long that the main character's costume hadn't even been finalized until some time in late 2009. Development picked up after the release of FF XIII, and really got into gear after its team, also a part of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, fully switched over to it around 2011, though it also switched from the PlayStation 3 to the PlayStation 4. E3 2013 confirmed its name change to FF XV, with a few subtle jabs to its own lengthy development cycle. The game was finally released on November 29, 2016, over a decade after its initial announcement, making it the most delayed Final Fantasy game ever.
      
      Following this, elements of Versus XIII (with the Serial Numbers Filed Off) show up prominently in Kingdom Hearts III as a Game within a Game titled Verum Rex and again in its secret ending, which itself is named after a character seen earlier in Verum Rex. Although series creator Tetsuya Nomura has stated on multiple occasions that Verum Rex is not Versus XIII, it's clear that future Kingdom Hearts games will incorporate ideas planned for Versus but dropped in the game's transition to being XV.
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake. The game was planned since the early 2000s as a PS2 release, but nothing came of it, because everyone was too busy with Fabula Nova Crystallis. It was then teased in 2005, with a CGI test project of the Final Fantasy VII opening rendered in the Crystal Tools engine. An official announcement finally happened in E3 2015, where a teaser trailer showing cutscenes and some gameplay footage was released. Then a four-year silence ensued, broken only by occasional reveals of screenshots. It wasn't until May 2019 that it got a release date and significant gameplay coverage, before seeing retail March the next year.
• Fire Emblem 64 was a game intended to be released for the 64DD expansion pack for the Nintendo 64. When it first started development in 1997, it was planned to be released after Super Mario RPG 2 (Now Paper Mario 64). However, it was hardly brought up in interviews, and development was further stalled due to the game being too overly ambitious for its time. At the turn of the millennium, it ended up getting pulled from release, and the game shortly after became Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade for the Game Boy Advance, released in 2002.
• Cliff Johnson began work on The Fool and His Money, a sequel to The Fool's Errand, in 2003. Nine years and countless delays later, the game was finally released in October 2012. Even more unbelievably, according to nearly all fans, it was still well worth all the wait.
• Freelancer was announced in 1999, and the first demo was shown at E3 in 2000; back then, Digital Anvil promised entire worlds with moving transports, changing weather, dynamic economies, lots and lots of side quests and a non-linear story, NPCs with their own personalities, and the ability to buy and set up your own base. However, Digital Anvil soon ran out of money, the owners had to sell the company to Microsoft Games, and while they were gathering up the needed money, they had to stop and scale down the goals of the project. Four years later, in 2003, the game was finally released: the economy was now static, the NPCs had a painfully generic personality, the worlds were reduced to pretty-looking menus, the storyline was made 100% linear (and oddly ends fairly early in the game before 80% of the content is even unlocked), and the side quests were removed. However, the final product did not suck, and still stands today as an example of excellent game design. The graphics were extremely outdated though.
• Goodbye Volcano High was conceived of in 2018 and revealed during Sony's June 2020 "Future of Gaming" online event with a release window of 2021. Complications immediately followed; remote work due to the COVID-19 Pandemic slowed production, anti-LGBT+ harassment afflicted the team's mental health, and the developers let go of their lead writer and replaced her with a new team that wrote a heavily revised story with a rebooted narrative. The game was delayed first to "late 2022", then to "summer 2023". The trailer from the February 2023 "State of Play" gave a release date of June 15th, but this was delayed again to August 29th, with the devs stating they wouldn't meet the date without crunch. The game went gold on August 21st, and was released eight days later.
• Gran Turismo 5 was revealed at E3 2005. In 2008, a demo version, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue was released and sold well. In 2009, the full version was announced, and got a release date for February 2010... which was then delayed to November 2010 due to technical issues.
• Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, a Wizardry-styled game, started development in around 1997. A crowdfunding campaign from 2012 promised a May 2013 release date, which didn't pan out as planned, but the game was finally released on Steam in 2017.
• Half-Life 2:
  • For several years, it was considered one of these, due to the mysterious nature of the release dates and an infamous delay announced on the day it was supposed to come out. That the game not only came out a year later but turned out to be one of the greatest games of 2004 is truly mind-blowing considering its difficult development cycle. A common rumour alleged that the game was delayed so that Valve could restart development due to a leak of half-finished code. The truth is, no power in this or any other universe could've got a game like that out in the timeframe Valve set themselves.
  • The Half-Life 2 sequel episodes (Episode One, which came out in mid-2006, and Episode Two, a year and a half later), while they were greatly praised by critics and players, lasted only a few hours each and there were no justifications for such delays. Multiple critics noted that content of this type was designed to be released quickly. With that in mind, the final entry (Episode Three), has firmly been in the realm of Vaporware since 2007.
• Heart of Darkness took six years to develop, and had its release date reported over and over for four years, before finally being released in 1998. In France, its development hell was so well known the game was sarcastically nicknamed "L'Arlésienne des Jeux Vidéo" ^note "The Arlésienne of Video Games", referring to the character in the play of the same name who never actually appears in it by the French video game press.
• Imperium Galactica III: Genesis, was being developed by Digital Reality. However, the publisher GT Interactive went bankrupt, and the title was "borrowed" by Philos Laboratories. When their lease expired, the project was renamed to Galaxy Andromeda. Then Philos Laboratories went bankrupt, and Mithis Entertainment picked up the development, resulting in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. While the game in its current state has nothing to do with the Imperium Galactica series, its storyline remained largely unchanged from the original project, becoming the unofficial prequel to the series.
• Kameo: Elements of Power was originally announced as a launch title for the GameCube. It later came out as a launch title for the Xbox 360, four years after it was supposed to come out (having a cancelled Xbox development on its way). The same thing happened to two other Rare games, Perfect Dark Zero and Banjo-Threeie (renamed to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts), which were also planned to be GameCube games, but were shelved when Rare was sold to Microsoft, and then cropped up on the 360.
• Kingdom Hearts III was teased way back since Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep was first released, but was continuously delayed because of series creator Tetsuya Nomura's interest in expanding the lore around the series, his erstwhile focus on Final Fantasy Versus XIII (which was redeveloped into Final Fantasy XV after he left the project), and the switch to Unreal Engine 4 midway through development. It didn't get an official announcement until E3 2013^note as a fun piece of trivia, the TV Tropes page for the game was created the same day it was announced at the E3. Needless to say, it was collecting dust until 2017 or so. and didn't see release until 2019.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby Air Ride was in development since 1995 for the Nintendo 64 as Kirby's Air Ride, shelved a few years later, and surprisingly resurfaced in 2003 on the Nintendo GameCube.
  • The infamous Kirby game planned for the GameCube would be revived in 2011 as Kirby's Return to Dream Land. A lot of the ideas that didn't get salvaged for that would appear in later entries, such as the "Helpers" concept becoming a core mechanic in Kirby Star Allies, not to mention the 3D level environment feature being fully realised when Kirby and the Forgotten Land released in 2024.
• L.A. Noire. It was released in 2011 after a seven-year hiatus. One of the reasons behind the delay was because they were trying to master the new technology of facial reading to make the characters look as realistic as possible.
• The Last Guardian had been in development since 2007 and was first announced in 2009 with a target release year of 2011. Instead, the game was delayed for several years. It got to the point where fans were wondering if the game had been cancelled. It wasn't until E3 2015 when The Last Guardian was re-revealed as a PlayStation 4 game, with actual footage, and was finally released in December 2016.
• League of Legends has been constantly updating with new content for over a decade, but among them were several projects that were announced but then took a really long time getting off the ground:
  • Lee Sin is a playable champion that was teased since the game's early alpha in 2009, but he didn't make it into the playable roster due to his design being not seen as that interesting enough. He ended up going through a series of internal reworks, and after some quiet mentions of him in the game's lore, he was properly released in early 2011 with a brand new model and gameplay kit.
  • Ao Shin was an Eastern-inspired serpentine storm dragon teased in 2013 as being a major new character, effectively confirmed to be an upcoming champion, only for him to never see release. By 2016, Riot admitted that Ao Shin's design simply caused too many problems technologically and balance-wise (namely from implementing and getting use out of his lengthy body), but the concept was reworked and salvaged into an entirely new character: Aurelion Sol, a space dragon whose gameplay revolves around creation of stars whose design is nowhere near as elongated. In 2020, Ao Shin's design was recycled for a chibi-sized Little Legend character and for the "Storm Dragon Aurelion Sol" skin, which is even identified in gameplay as "Ao Shin".
    Storm Dragon Lee Sin: You're late, Ao Shin! Seven years too late!
  • Ornn was the end result of a long development period since 2013 to create a "living forge" champion who could create his own weapons. After the concept was greenlit, Riot underwent many troubles figuring out what to even do with him, experiencing cycles of delays and reschedulings, to a point that he was "recycled" into the art update of a different preexisting champion, Sion, before resuming as his own entity. It wasn't until Riot scheduled a "vanguard" champion for development and devs applied the pitch onto it again that substantial work began, and he was finally released in 2017.
  • Dragon Master Swain (a skin turning the usually crow and raven-themed Sorcerous Overlord into a dragon mage) was pitched by fans on the official League forums in 2011, which caught so much traction that Rioters all but confirmed it would eventually be real. However, it ended up experiencing a hectic production cycle, having been cancelled twice over the course of several years due to Swain turning out to be a rather unpopular champion with loads of design issues (visually and mechanically). However, Swain would eventually receive a full relaunch in 2018 to rebuild his cosmetic assets and gameplay, and as part of it, the Dragon Master Swain skin launched along with it, which was even announced by Riot as "old promises to players."
  • Pizza Delivery Sivir (a skin turning the boomerang-throwing Treasure Hunter into a delivery girl who chucks out boomeranging pizzas) was another monumentally popular fan concept pitched in the official League forum in 2010, and Riot teased official art concepts for it at a panel in 2013. After staying oddly quiet for a few years, the skin was finally released for the 2018 April Fools' Day patch.
• Legends of Runeterra had a hugely long development cycle. Riot had been working on a League of Legends-inspired Card Battle Game since as early as 2012 (codenamed "Bacon", uncovered in leaks at the time as League of Legends Supremacy), but they quietly shelved the project — approximately 6 months before it was ready to be shipped — after several developers played the newly-announced Hearthstone and realized it already accomplished virtually everything they wanted to do, and better. It took Riot years to regain the confidence to create more supplementary projects for League, including the TCG, where it was substantially retooled and then formally announced in 2019 as Legends of Runeterra.
• Lily Bergamo was announced in 2013 as a "super action game" by Suda51, featuring artwork by Yusuke Kozaki. One trailer was released before the game re-surfaced in 2014 as Let It Die, which is... very different than the initial product.
• Limbo of the Lost. Given the quality of the game, you could argue that this "game" was not saved from hell and it would have been much better if it had never been released. A demo of the first version of the game was released in 1995 (for the Amiga), while the game was finally released in 2008.
• The Magic Circle is an in-universe example. After waiting twenty years for the promised sequel to one of her favorite games, Coda joins the developer team as its newest intern to make sure it finally gets done. She does so by manipulating Ishmael into making a laughingstock of himself at E4 and outright threatens him (along with an entire audience room full of frustrated former fans like herself) into making the game open source. Unfortunately, the fans she brings in to code the game immediately make a huge mess of everything. Ultimately, it's up to you to code a decent "Episode One" to salvage the game. Even then, the game's future remains uncertain since the entire old development team — along with all of their old baggage and bickering — returns to "help" you.
• Working Designs initially announced a United States release of the Sega Saturn version of Magic Knight Rayearth in 1995. It was delayed for three years before finally being released after the console itself was officially dead in America (for six months). The first year of delay was for mostly unknown reasons (most likely relating to the vast amount of voice work involved), but the other two years were no doubt due to Bernie Stolar (head of Sega of America at the time) and his draconian policy towards third party developers. The game was actually finished for a good amount of time, but due to Stolar's involvement, it took a large amount of time before it was finally released - so long that it ended up the last Saturn game ever to come out in the United States.
  • Another part of the problem was a hard drive crash that deleted sections of the source code for that game (and several other Working Designs projects), forcing the developers to replace the lost sections from scratch.
  • Another possible part of the problem was the fight between WD and Sega over names. You see, Sega had thought Rayearth would be an awesome series to bring to the US and the game would be one way to bring the anime over. However, as it was common in the day, they wanted the names changed in the game to match it. Working Designs, originally planned to change the names in a different way but eventually fought to use the original names.
• Max Payne 3, being released a whole nine years after its predecessor, was announced multiple years before its release and delayed multiple times as well.
• Metroid Dread made its first appearance in a leaked 2005 internal Nintendo document of Nintendo DS games set for future announcements, and was later teased in June by gaming magazines as being in development. Excitement only grew as Metroid Prime 3: Corruption featured a hidden message that "Project Dread" was "nearing the final stages of completion", although there are conflicting statements as of if this relates to Metroid Dread or not. In 2010, Metroid series producer Yoshio Sakamoto would reveal that while Dread did exist, it was scrapped on two different occasions (specifically around the beginning and the latter half of the DS's life) due to him being unsatisfied with technical specifications of the handheld. After MercurySteam helmed Metroid: Samus Returns in 2017, Sakamoto was convinced they could successfully deliver his vision for Dread. The project would be revived, and the game finally saw an official announcement in June 2021 at E3 and released 4 months later in October, a whopping sixteen years after its existence was first revealed.
• Mirror's Edge Catalyst was released in 2016, eight years after the original game. The first Mirror's Edge was intended as the first part of a planned trilogy, and less than a year after its release, Electronic Arts confirmed that the sequel was in full production. After that, various announcements popped up online every few months, usually with one or more EA executives or developer staff members saying that, yes, the game was being worked on. More than one prototype for the game was scrapped by the publisher, and despite the dev industry generally knowing that the game was in development at DICE, there was no announcement for months as to the overall status of the game. In the end, Catalyst was pushed back for a next-gen release on the Frostbite 2 engine after DICE finished Battlefield 4, serving as a Continuity Reboot for the Stillborn Franchise.
• Mother:
  • An NPC in EarthBound Beginnings wonders when EarthBound is going to be released, and for good reason: Mother 2 was in development for a then-unheard of four years. In Shigesato Itoi's book, Iwata-san, the creator of the franchise states the late Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata single-handedly salvaged the project in less than a year.
  • Mother 3 was originally planned for release on the Nintendo 64's 64DD peripheral. Unfortunately, the 64DD was a market failure and the game was scrapped after attempts to turn it into a standard N64, then a Nintendo GameCube game. It was later revived and became one of the last releases for the Game Boy Advance. There was no official English translation, which American and European fans continue to campaign for to this day, though it does have a well-done Fan Translation that allows foreign players to finally experience the game for themselves.
• The Nameless Mod, a Game Mod for Deus Ex, was in development for 7 years before being released.
• Natsuki Chronicles, a spin-off of Ginga Force, was announced in 2016 before it was delayed several times, from a 2017 to a 2018 release. It was eventually released on Christmas 2019.
• Neverwinter Nights, originally announced with a 1998 release date, was delayed until mid-2002. Along the way, production company BioWare broke off its collaboration with publisher Black Isle, an entirely new engine was written for the game, and the Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released, necessitating a reworking of nearly all the game's mechanics. In this case, however, the finished product was a popular success. Furthermore, the Mac and Linux versions were originally going to ship in the same box as the Windows version, as full versions with development tools. About a week before release, Bioware announced that the Mac version was going to be a separate SKU after MacSoft Games ported it, which they were going to start doing Real Soon Now, the Linux version would be available for download eventually, and neither would include the development tools. Mac and Linux users were a bit upset.
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams was in development hell ever since the 1996 release of the original NiGHTS into Dreams… and was originally going to be for the Sega Saturn using a tilt sensor in the Analog Pad under the working title Air Nights. It was ported to Dreamcast development then shelved. Then it was planned for a multiplatform release on Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, but eventually escaped hell in 2007 as a Wii exclusive.
• "Ni-Oh" was supposed to be based on an unfinished script by Akira Kurosawa entitled "Oni". Koei (pre-merger with Tecmo) announced the game in 2004, set for a summer 2006 release on the Sony PlayStation 3, except it missed its launch window with no comment from Koei until 2009, despite Koei insisting the game was still in development. A year later, the merged Koei Tecmo brought in Team Ninja (makers of Dead or Alive and the modern day Ninja Gaiden games) to help with development, which Koei Tecmo later admitted they had suspended previously; even Team Ninja went on record to say they had to go through multiple trial-and-error tests to decide what sort of genre would fit Ni-Oh. News of more development trickled out slowly in 2012 and 2014, until September 2015, where the game is re-branded as Nioh, released for the Sony PlayStation 4 on February 7, 2017, almost 13 years in production, making this one of the longest Japanese-developed video games. Fortunately, it was enough of a success that a sequel was announced and did not experience the same fate as its predecessor, being released on schedule.
• The survival horror series ObsCure had two games released in 2004 and 2006, with the second game ending on a cliffhanger revealing the existence of a Greater-Scope Villain. The sequel went through multiple incarnations before its developer, Hydravision Entertainment, went bankrupt in 2012. Ex-Hydravision employees reformed the company as Mighty Rocket Studios and released the game in 2013, by which time it had become a non-canon spinoff/Continuity Reboot called Final Exam.
• OMORI was in development for six years, and during that time, it had to be ported to a new engine, the Nintendo 3DS port was cancelled, and with silence between developers and backers, didn't make things look any better. Fortunately, it came out on Christmas 2020 to highly positive reception, and a Nintendo Switch port was released to make up for that.
• One Must Fall launched in 1994. The sequel, Battlegrounds, was announced in 1996. It didn't arrive until 2003, seven years later. Unfortunately, the result was a cumbersome mess.
• Paprium, a side-scrolling beat'em-up made for the Sega Genesis by Watermelon Games, the same people who released Pier Solar and the Great Architects for that system, required four years of development. Pre-orders were launched in late 2017, but apparently problems with PayPal caused even more delays and there were talks of refunds from the devs. Watermelon's Facebook page and this article have more info about it. Eventually the game's release was called into serious question by the "Paprium Fiasco" documents — but despite that pessimism gamers were stunned by a sudden announcement in December 2020 that the finished game was preparing to ship; within a week many who had given up on ever seeing the title finally received it.
• Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Hothead Games canned the series after Episode 2 (released in fall 2008) because it didn't sell as good as the first episode, so it seemed that the story was never going to be finished in game format. However, the series was later picked up by Zeboyd Games (of Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World fame), allowing the last 2 episodes to be released during June 2012 and 2013, respectively.
• Phantasy Star Online 2 is one of the most infamous cases of a Schedule Slip in the 2010's: the game was slated for a release in North America in 2012, which was eventually pushed back to 2013 before all mention of a Western release vanished. After seven years of radio silence, Microsoft stepped up and announced at E3 2019 that they would publish the game at long last in North America the following year.
• Phantom Breaker: The game was originally planned to see an overseas release in 2012 by 7sixty (a subsidiary of Southpeak Interactive), and even had some gameplay videos and review copies, while physical copies were on display at an anime convention in Houston, Texas, but due to the English version's constant delays and 7sixty later folding, it was quietly canceled. It had a updated re-release, Phantom Breaker: Extra, that also never left Japan but was available for PlayStation 3 and region-free on Xbox 360. After a decade since the original Phantom Breaker's release, it finally saw the light of day overseas in 2021 with another updated re-release in the form of Phantom Breaker: Omnia, expanding on Extra's revisions, adding a remixed soundtrack with the original, the original and Extra's story modes, and dual-audio support.
• Pokémon:
  • The very first Pokemon game went through a number of title options due to trademark issues and was rejected several times by Nintendo who didn't understand the concept. It took some help from Shigeru Miyamoto to get Nintendo on board. It was also Miyamoto's idea to split the cartridges into Red and Green to aid in the trading aspect of the game. They were initially announced in an early form in 1990, and didn't come out until 1996. The six-year development period resulted in the source code being a total mess, which had to be cleaned up for the Blue version. The localization team then reverse-engineered the Japanese Blue to create the international Red and Blue — as a result, the US release was two and a half years later, in 1998.
  • On the other side, there's Detective Pikachu. Revealed in October 2013, no development news until January 2016. Most thought it was cancelled until it was formally announced out of the blue.
  • Pokémon Picross was originally announced for the Game Boy Color in 1999. It then spent almost 16 years in Development Hell and was presumed cancelled until a freemium 3DS version finally appeared in late 2015.
  • Pokémon Sleep and Detective Pikachu Returns were both announced during the 2019 Pokémon Business Strategy Announcement alongside Pokémon Masters and Pokémon HOME. Notably, Sleep was accompanied by a concept video that heavily focused on the fact that it's a Spiritual Antithesis of Pokémon GO and didn't feature Snorlax at all (to the point where Pikachu was the Character in the Logo), while Detective Pikachu Returns didn't even have a proper title. While Masters would launch a few months later, followed by HOME in early 2020, Sleep and DPR would remain quiet until 2023, with Sleep re-announced during the Pokémon Day edition of Pokémon Presents and released in July, and DPR was properly announced during Nintendo Direct on June 21 and released on October 6.
• 3D Realms' game Prey began development in 1995, and was finally released in 2006 after they farmed out development to another team. The release of Prey served to give fans hope that 3D Realms' other long-awaited title, Duke Nukem Forever, would eventually find its way out of Development Hell as well (which it did).
• Princess Maker 2 was originally slated by Softegg for an American release on PC in the mid-90s, but a combination of factors (the growing obsolescence of DOS, the domination of first-person shooters on PC, and the publisher going under) led to Softegg's localization never being released.^note A mostly-complete beta of the localization found its way onto the internet around 2000 An official international release of the game finally came about in 2016 when CFK localized the Windows PC remake, Princess Maker 2 Refine.
• Psychonauts was originally going to be a horror-like platformer published by Microsoft, and was going to be an Xbox exclusive. A trailer was shown at E3 (and can be found on the discs of Blinx: The Time Sweeper and Voodoo Vince) in 2002, and the game was originally set for a 2003 release. But later into development, Double Fine decided to change the game's mood from scary to funny, and Microsoft refused to publish the game because of this, so the game was delayed as Double Fine scrambled around to find a publisher, until they found Majesco in '04. The game was then announced for PC and PS2 as well as Xbox, and was finally released in '05.
• Red Dead Revolver was originally announced in 2001 as a collaboration between Capcom and Angel Studios, with Akiman, of Final Fight and Street Fighter II fame, providing the character designs. The game was shelved in 2003 after the preview build received lukewarm reception at E3. After Capcom and Akiman dropped out of the project, Rockstar Games bought Angel Studios, turning them into Rockstar San Diego, and resurrected the game's development. It was eventually released in 2004.
• The Red Star was rescued by XS Games after Acclaim went under and released in May 2007.
• Repton: The Lost Realms. Originally titled Repton 4, the game was written in 1988, too close to Repton Infinity for publication. Abandoned, then rediscovered in 2008, by which time the game's home platform (the BBC Micro) was extinct and the source code lost, meaning the entire game had to be reprogrammed from scratch. Even that didn't stop a dedicated team designing additional levels and graphics via emulators, eventually getting the game ready for its release on 6 November 2010.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 0 has perhaps the lengthiest development history of any Resident Evil to date, as it was initially conceived as a future title for the 64DD add-on for the Nintendo 64 as early back as 1995, a whole year before the first Resident Evil game was even released. Five years in development and a demotion down to the regular N64 in the wake of the 64DD's failure later, Zero was slated for a late 2000 release, and even had a playable N64 demo at the Tokyo Game Show that year. However, with Nintendo announcing their plans for their succeeding console around that period, they completely discarded all the work they had done for the N64 version and repurposed the game as a GameCube to bring it more in-line with the Resident Evil remake being developed at the same time.
  • Resident Evil 4 officially began development for the GameCube in 2001 (not counting an earlier PS2 version which eventually evolved into Devil May Cry instead). The game originally had Hiroshi Shibata attached as director and after three rejected builds (including one that was never shown to the public), Shinji Mikami took over the directorial duties from Shibata and ended up working on the final version that was released in 2005.
• Work began on Return to Dark Castle, a modern sequel to the beloved classic from the monochrome Macintosh era, by a two-man team in 1996 (a decade after the first game's release.) First announced with a late 2000 release date, development and occasional beta releases dragged on for years while news petered down to nothing, causing most fans to write the game off. It ultimately made a surprise reemergence in 2007 as "nearly done" and was then delayed again until 2008 due to legal issues, when it was finally released. The level editor promised at launch wouldn't release until 2013, five years later.
• Moonrat has stated that Ruins had gone through five phases of development before reaching its current version.
• Run Like Hell began development in 1998 as a survival horror game with a planned 2001 release date. However, constant production delays and a myriad of people being fired by the publisher (along with a genre change to third-person shooter) lead to the date being pushed back several times. Finally, the game was released in 2003 to mixed reviews and weak sales (which in turn led to it becoming a Stillborn Franchise).
• A Sakura Wars game has been on and off in development ever since the last game, Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Wars — Because You Were There, was released in 2008. Takaharu Terada, the current series director, offered yearly proposals for a new game but the franchise's owner and developer, Sega, repeatedly declined them and the game went into Development Hell. It wasn't until 2016 that development of the new game, titled Sakura Wars (2019), finally began; the game was released in December 2019.
• Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution's development started in 2002 and lasted through 2004 to the point where a fully functional demo was completed, but because of poor sales of the original Shantae, WayForward was unable to find a publisher willing to launch the game as originally intended, causing them to archive the project and carry forward some elements to the development of Risky's Revenge. Although WayForward showed footage of the completed demo, the game continued to stay vaulted until 2023, when the original team decided to complete development of the game and release it as a passion project long after the Game Boy Advance's actual lifespan.
• Skullgirls' Downloadable Content character Squigly was sent to development hell in the game's post-release Troubled Production. The developers made a crowdsourced fundraiser in an attempt to get the funding to create the character. The goal was $150,000 in thirty days. It was raised in a single day. Truly, she was Saved by the Fans. By the end of the fundraiser, they had managed to get $829,829 out of the original $150,000, enough to create five new characters,^*Squigly, Big Band, Eliza, Beowulf, and Robo-Fortune. If you count Fukua, then the total is actually six. new stages and story modes for all of them, eight alternate voice packs for several characters and the announcer, and two extra stages.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter spent ten years in development, thanks to Bandai Namco Entertainment insisting that CyberConnect2 continually tighten and tweak the world and gameplay due to Tail Concerto's low sales and their reluctance to back a Spiritual Sequel to such a game. The result, however, is one of the most beautiful for the DS.
• After SpaceVenure's successful Kickstarter's campaign, the game's developement progressed very slowly. Many people gave up on it, when 10 years later, in 2022, it was finally released... for backers only. Gamers now impatiently wait for a release on Steam and other online platforms.
• Will Wright's Spore was once considered by many to be vaporware, as it was announced in 2000 under the title "Sim Everything" and wasn't released until September 2008.
• Star Fox Adventures was announced in the late 90's as an N64 title called Dinosaur Planet, and was essentially Rare's answer to The Legend of Zelda, but with foxes and dinosaurs. Then when the GameCube came out, Executive Meddling caused them to hastily put Fox McCloud in place of the male fox as well as putting in other Star Fox characters (they still kept the female fox, who ended up becoming Krystal, but made her Hotter and Sexier), and the game finally released in 2002, as Rare's last game for a Nintendo home console.
• Shira Oka: Second Chances is a stat-driven Dating Sim inspired by the Tokimeki Memorial series, but written originally in English. Development began around 2005. A demo was released to the public in summer 2010. The full retail game was released on Impulse Driven on December 10th, 2010.
• Swordquest: Airworld was cancelled very early due to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. And then in 2022, using the original concepts by designer Tod Frye, Digital Eclipse created a version (still with Atari 2600 graphics and gameplay) for the compilation Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration so that the whole four Swordquest games would appear.
• System Shock, the remake by Nightdive Studios. It was announced in November 2015 with a mid-2018 planned release date, but it had a very troubled development that had to be stopped and restarted from scratch twice. It finally came out in May 2023, to very positive reviews.
• Team Fortress 2 was announced in 1999 as "Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms", but the final product didn't show up until 2007. Also, the game went through many changes during this time. For example, the early incarnation of the game featured a realistic artstyle like Team Fortress Classic, a more serious tone, and a modern setting (one version even called for an alien invasion), while the final product features a cartoonish artstyle, a more comical tone, and is set in 1968.
• The Toki HD remake was announced in 2009 by French development team Golgoth Studio. Five years passed, making it increasingly clear that the game was never going to be released: Golgoth folded in 2013, rendering their project of a Joe & Mac remake vaporware and never releasing the promised patch for Magical Drop V. Eventually however another French studio, Microids, took the matter in their own hands and Toki was finally released on Nintendo Switch in 2018, and on Steam and all the major consoles in 2019, a full decade after the initial announcement.
• Too Human, which started development in 1998 as a PlayStation game. In the early 2000s, Silicon Knights partnered with Nintendo and released Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002) and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (2004) instead. Sometime after the release of The Twin Snakes, Silicon Knights were bought out by Microsoft, and so the game finally saw release on the Xbox 360 in 2008.
• Until Dawn is a Survival Horror game that was first announced in 2012, with heavy use of PlayStation Move controls, a plot inspired by teen horror and slasher flicks, and a planned 2013 release date on the PlayStation 3. Two trailers were released... and that's about all the substantial information that was heard about the game for the next two years, the only news being an announcement from the developers in late 2013 that, yes, they were still working on the game. It wasn't until 2014 when it resurfaced at Gamescom as a PlayStation 4 title, having been heavily overhauled from its original design. Move controls have been dropped, while the campier elements were largely replaced with a Darker and Edgier approach and a Hollywood voice cast. It finally came out on August 25, 2015.
• Ultima IX was stuck in development for five years, as conflicts between Richard Garriott and EA hampered production, much of its staff was diverted to Ultima Online, and the advent of 3D graphics caused the original Ultima Online-like version of game to be scrapped for a new 3D one. Upon its release in 1999, it was poorly received and is generally considered one of the worst games in the series, and certainly not the grand finale that long-time fans were expecting. Many fans prefer to ignore its existence, and one group of fans is currently developing their own Ultima IX as a mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
• Uma Musume was originally supposed to come out in Fall of 2018, some time after the first season of the Anime came out. However, the devs realized that the game were developing resembled very little to the Anime (allegedly the final product would have been much less serious on the sporting front unlike the Anime), leading Cygames to essentially start from scratch. The game only came out in February of 2021, during the Anime's second season, to massive critical and commercial success.
• X: Rebirth was delayed for three full years due to a Troubled Production.
• Yoku's Island Express: Jens Andersson and Mattias Snygg, the founders of Villa Gorilla, originally set out in 2013 to make the game in one year. It took five, but it eventually did come out to critical acclaim.

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