Trivia / Psychotoxic

• Creator Killer: The game's financial failure left a bloodbath of casualties.
  • Vidis lost a ton of money from Psychotoxic, as this was the last game they would publish before returning to producing gaming accessories.
  • Whiptail Interactive, the game's American publisher, assumed that they could use the money gained from Psychotoxic to pay Nuclearvision the final third of their contractual payment. But because Whiptail didn't even have the money to market the game, months after the game's release, the company went insolvent, then filed for bankruptcy.
  • And finally, Psychotoxic proved to be Nuclearvision's final game, with the company disbanding years later.
• Screwed by the Network: The ultimate reason for the game's infamy lies in the poor business decisions of original publisher CDV Software, Vidis, and Whiptail Interactive.
  • CDV, despite being a well-respected publisher in the German game industry, gave Fitzner and his team a pathetically small budget of 1.5 million Deutsch Marks (1.1 million short of what Fitzner would've used to make the game how he wanted), then almost cancelled the game due to the company suffering from financial peril, only to instead slash the game's minuscule budget in half as a compromise.
  • Despite being aware of the Starforce anti-piracy software making the game unwinnable, Vidis refused to disable the software and fix the issues for fear of piracy. And upon the game's poor sales, Vidis slashed the budget from 60 euros to 30, then used the price drop as an excuse to deny payment to Nuclearvision, which resulted in a lawsuit.
  • Whiptail denied Nuclearvision the final third of their contractual payment under the assumption that Psychotoxic would make a ton of money, and that the profits earned would be used to pay the studio back. But once the game proved to be a bomb, Whiptail, who didn't even have enough money to market the game, filed for bankruptcy months after.
• Troubled Production: The game took six years to make and shipped in an Obvious Beta state, as elaborated upon in this video from DXFan619, who refers to it as "The Craziest Game Ever Made".
  • The game got its start in 1998 when Frank Fitzner, a German game designer who had made a number of edutainment games before then, recruited a number of people from the Half-Life modding community to form Nuclear Vision Entertainment and begin work on what was then called Psychotoxic: The 4th Horseman. The first levels they made for the game were originally created as tech demos for Vulpine 3D Technologies' Vision game engine, with an eye towards later using them for their game to attract the attention of publishers. It worked, and they were picked up by CDV Software, one of Germany's largest game publishers.
  • CDV, unfortunately, would only spend 1.5 million Deutsch Marks on the game, enough to recruit a team of six people and one part-time freelancer, far less than the 2.6 million Marks (enough to hire eleven people) that Fitzner felt was necessary to bring the project to fruition. That said, Fitzner took the deal, and sure enough, the lack of budget forced Nuclear Vision to cut many corners, leaving multiplayer, a number of the protagonist's angelic powers, and numerous other features on the cutting room floor. Furthermore, Vulpine's planned update for the Vision engine fell far behind, delaying production to such a degree that CDV at one point asked Nuclear Vision to inquire about what it would cost to license the Unreal Engine.
  • Work started in earnest in late 2001, and went smoothly through 2002 and early 2003 despite the prior problems. In August 2003, however, things began to fall apart virtually overnight as Nuclear Vision realized that CDV, having expanded far too quickly in the last several years, was in a perilous financial state. Psychotoxic only avoided the waves of cancellation and firings that befell CDV's other games and staff by virtue of the fact that Nuclear Vision had met all of its milestones for the game's development, but that didn't stop CDV from cutting the game's budget in order to stave off bankruptcy.
  • By September, Fitzner, seeing the writing on the wall, was searching for a new publisher, and seemed to have found one in Ubisoft. However, this led to a breach-of-contract lawsuit from CDV, forcing Nuclear Vision to pay 30,000 Marks to get out of its old contract, a bill that was paid for by Fitzner and other project leaders going for three months without pay while borrowing from family and friends in order to keep the studio running. Worse, the lawsuit also killed the deal with Ubisoft due to how long it dragged on for, causing Ubisoft to lose interest and move on. The only thing that stopped the game from getting canceled outright was when Vidis, a gaming accessories company that mostly published smaller titles before then, agreed to publish the game.
  • Psychotoxic finally staggered into stores on September 3, 2004... just in time to get run over by Doom³, which had come out a month prior. Its behind-the-scenes woes and shoestring budget were evident in the amount of Game Breaking Bugs that it shipped with, the worst of the bunch caused by a faulty batch of DVDs that made the Starforce copy protection system go haywire. Fitzner was willing to make a patch to disable Starforce, but Vidis, afraid of piracy, wouldn't let him do so. Furthermore, due to the game's lousy sales, Vidis cut the price to 30 euros (which Fitzner had originally wanted) — and used that as an excuse to deny Nuclear Vision the rest of the money promised to them in their contract, as Nuclear Vision had agreed to the price change. This led to another lawsuit.
  • Nuclear Vision closed its doors the following year. Fitzner left video game development to become a graphic designer before suddenly passing away, while the other developers went to work for other companies.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A large chunk of the game's content was cut due to time and money, which would've included more weapons, power ups, multiplayer, and more.
  • At one point the Unreal Engine was to be used due to the Vision engine falling behind in updates.
  • Had things gone smoothly, Ubisoft would've published the game instead of Vidis.
  • The game's title was originally Psychotoxic: The 4th Horseman.