Troubled Production / Video Games (# to M)

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#-B

• 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand started life as a tie-in for a TV series based on Robert Ludlum's Covert-One novels but the show was scrapped and so was the game's original incarnation, which was also set in a Middle Eastern locale. Vivendi had the licence to make games based on Fiddy's likeness and stage persona, and offered Swordfish to develop a sequel to Bulletproof, much to the shock of the team. Not wanting to leave the Covert-One work to waste, they retooled the project into an absurd, over-the-top romp of a rapper and his posse staging a concert in a war zone of all places, fighting his way through just to get a diamond-encrusted skull he was promised as compensation. Even with the shift in tone in place, Swordfish had to muddle through with development, particularly when 50 Cent's son insisted on helicopter sequences and the rapper himself wanting to have vehicle chases thrown in, something which Swordfish had to implement despite it being a total headache to code and incorporate. Vivendi then merged with Activision, and the game was left in limbo again when it was not included in the IPs Activision acquired during the merger. THQ finally picked up the rights to the game, with Swordfish folding around that time.
• The much-anticipated mystery game 1666, that was being developed by Patrice Desilets of Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time fame, has been delayed due to conflicts between Patrice and Ubisoft due to Ubisoft acquiring the rights to the game after THQ's bankruptcy. Since Patrice had left Ubisoft for THQ due to creative differences, Ubisoft wasted no time in firing Patrice over "creative differences". However, as one final act of spite, Ubisoft did not outright cancel 1666, since that would revert ownership of the rights back to Patrice. Instead, they put development "on hold" indefinitely just so they can keep the title out of Patrice's hands. Patrice pursued legal action to force Ubisoft to release the property (which eventually did happen, though what will happen next is anyone's guess).
• While prior games in the Ace Combat series had relatively smooth productions, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown had serious troubles that nearly killed the project and the series.
  • As explained by Producer Kazutoki Kono, the concept of the game sat on the shelf for two years due as Bandai Namco Entertainment focused on the free-to-play business model of Ace Combat Infinity. After 7 was finally given the go-ahead, the project was restarted after the game's announcement at PlayStation Experience 2015. Kono was dismayed at the lack of progress or a clear design goal and felt that the game was "boring", all of which led to several delays.
  • Bandai Namco grew restless with the chronic Schedule Slip and production troubles. Multiple attempts to have Kono removed from the development team were made, and Kono was eventually confronted by executives who were considering cancelling the game and shelving the series. Kono convinced them to let the game's development continue, a process that reduced Kono to tears.
  • It was only in late 2017 that the game began to take shape, with the team expanding and Manabu Shimomoto joining as a second producer. The team worked in a frenzy to complete the game, breaking through the game's VR troubles as well as redoing work on various elements to a higher standard of quality. When Ace Combat 7 released in January 2019, it was met with a level of critical acclaim and commercial success the series hadn't seen since the PlayStation 2 era, selling 500,000 units in Asia during its first month. By August 2021, the game had become the best-selling installment in the series with over 3 millions copies sold worldwide, vindicating Kono's struggle.
• The Act, an Interactive Movie arcade game with hand-drawn animation from ex-Disney animators, was cancelled when its location test failed, and publisher interest never materialized. Developer Cecropia closed afterwards. Only a handful of conversion kits and dedicated cabinets exist. The game's sole port to iOS devices was delisted from the App Store in 2015 when third-party company React Entertainment shut down.
• Action 52, an unlicensed 1991 NES compilation of 52 games on a single cart, became one of the most infamous games of its decade due to this. Vince Perri, head of Active Enterprises, hired 4 college students and gave them only three months to make the compilation, a laughably short timespan for a single game let alone dozens. Despite this, Perri was so confident in the game that he announced it at CES with plans for a portable game system and multimedia franchise based on Action 52 title The Cheetahmen. The final product dashed away such ambitions, as it contained extremely basic games plagued with technical issues as they had no time for bug testing. In fact, some games would crash when trying to start rendering them unplayable. Critics and consumers alike were viciously negative (especially as its price point was $200 USD), and Active Enterprises would close down in 1993.
• The Amiga adaptation of AKIRA is considered one of the worst games ever released on Amiga computers. One intrepid writer for games set out to find out exactly how the game wound up so dismal, and the small handful of members of the development team that he managed to make contact with recounted how they worked well into the night to try to bugfix the game and how their bosses were completely incompetent. Attempts to contact said bosses were met with demands for the writer to "FUCK OFF".
• Alan Wake, as detailed by this War Stories video from Ars Technica, was an unusually rough production for Remedy Entertainment that took six years of development.
  • Having finished work on the Max Payne series and parting ways with Rockstar Games, Remedy decided that their next title would be an open-world Survival Horror game, where the player would spend the in-game daytime preparing for combat against shadow enemies at night. Remedy immediately encountered problems; the studio had never developed an open-world title before, and Remedy's small team (roughly 55 full-time developers) were woefully understaffed for the demands. Not wanting to hire more developers for the sake of one project, Remedy spent a year building technology to expedite the process of building the game world.
  • Showing off the game with a next-generation technological demo at E3 2005, Remedy quickly generated interest from publishers and by 2006 found a partnership with Microsoft, who won Remedy over by allowing Remedy to retain ultimate control over the Alan Wake property. Despite the impressive demo, Remedy had only began prototyping gameplay with Microsoft's partnership.
  • With the game now in full development, Remedy slowly realized the fundamental design of the game had critical issues. The open-world structure clashed against Remedy's attempts to write a storyline, while various gameplay elements were not proving to be engaging. Three years into development, the game had fallen out of the public eye and was missing internal milestones, creating tension between Remedy and Microsoft.
  • Having decided the game's structure was fundamentally unworkable, Remedy effectively suspended development on the game for two months while the lead developers formed a "sauna" group to internally Retool the game's story and design. By the end of the process, the game was now a linear psychological action thriller and the open-world was cut down into traditional levels. While less ambitious and requiring content to be cut, development resumed at a brisk pace.
  • But with the game having slipped to 2010, Microsoft began imposing their will on the game in what Remedy's Sam Lake described as a "too many cooks" situation. This included canceling the Windows PC version of the game as Microsoft's gaming division had shifted away from Windows in favor of the Xbox consoles. Alan Wake released in May 2010 to positive reviews, but initial sales were weak due to releasing next to Red Dead Redemption. The game eventually turned a profit thanks to steady sales, strong word-of-mouth from fans, and a Windows PC port in 2012.
• Alien: Resurrection: While the film's production was calmer than its predecessors, the production of its video game tie-in is another story, as documented by Matt McMuscles here.
  • Fox Interative contracted Argonaut Games to produce an Alien game during the development of Croc but gave them no directive beyond that. Assuming it was for a prospective Alien vs. Predator title, Argonaut developed a prototype whose engine was based on the recent game Loaded. Fox was impressed with the prototype and greenlit the game, which they clarified was a tie-in to the upcoming film. They also assigned Argonaut to develop an in-movie game, Atom Zone, which they finished in three days. Fox soon announced the game would debut on PC, PlayStation and Sega Saturn in time for the film's November 1997 premiere.
  • Once production on the real-world game began, Fox sent Argonaut relevant production materials for inspiration. The task of watching hours upon hours of dailies proved tedious for the production staff. It didn't help that the film was rewritten constantly, which made it difficult to produce something faithful to it.
  • By the end of 1996, and with 60 percent of the game done, Argonaut realized their Loaded engine was outdated next to the newly released Tomb Raider and retooled it into a 3D third-person shooter. At least thirty percent of the staff quit the project, which was then pushed back to Spring 1998.
  • Things got worse when Argonaut was given an early screening of the film. They were not impressed. They were especially disappointed that Atom Zone had only eight seconds of screentime. Nevertheless, they continued production, albeit with lowering morale. Fox continued to promote the game, whose release date was getting delayed again and again, while its Saturn and PC ports were canceled.
  • It didn't help that the 3D engine was difficult to work with. While the Loaded engine allowed up to 100 enemies to appear on-screen, the Tomb Raider engine only allowed for three. These enemies had only basic "walk-in and attack" patterns. They also dealt with a limited draw distance and a camera system that made it impossible to not see new foes coming. Argonaut solved these problems by turning the game into a First-Person Shooter, which limited players' POVs, and therefore, made enemies scarier. This meant things like fully voiced cutscenes had to be scrapped, but it meant the game didn't have to be restarted from scratch either.
  • When the game finally made it to stores in Fall 2000, three years after the film, it was met with mixed reviews. Gamespot, in particular, took umbridge with its unconventional Dual Analog control system, which would be adopted by the FPS genre down the line. Nowadays, it's been Vindicated by History as being better than its associated film.
• Aliens: Colonial Marines spent six years in Development Hell, and it shows in the finished product. Reportedly, the game's sorry state involved a clusterfrak of epic proportions on the part of publisher Sega and developer Gearbox Software alike.
  • 20th Century Fox had tried to get production rolling for many years, beginning with an aborted attempt by Check Six Games (which was intended to be released for the PS2 at one point) in 2001, and culminating in their hiring of Gearbox Software in 2006.
  • However, production was very slow for the first four years, and there were a lot of "cooks in the kitchen" with different ideas about where to take the franchise. Allegedly, Gearbox was using money Sega paid them to work on other projects, including Borderlands 2 after the first game became a surprise hit. They eventually farmed out the game to TimeGate Studios (makers of Section 8 and the non-canon F.E.A.R. expansion packs) so that they could meet their obligations to Sega.
  • The first indication that something was wrong happened when TimeGate got their hands on Gearbox's assets for the game. What they found was a hodgepodge of barely functional code that clearly wasn't the result of four years' worth of work, forcing TimeGate to scrap most of it and rebuild the game from scratch. Complicating this was the fact that the script had not been finalized yet, so content was continually being scrapped or changed due to last minute story changes. The creative process was also hampered since TimeGate had to pass all decisions through both Sega and Gearbox for approval, leading to multiple conflicts. Finally, Gearbox and TimeGate had wildly different design philosophies, with Gearbox being more content with delaying games to ensure quality, while TimeGate being more concerned with shipping games as quickly as possible.
  • During this time, an amazing-looking teaser reel was released at E3 2011 showcasing sections from the Hadley's Hope stages, helping to get people pumped for when the game came out. This video was made of nothing but lies. The demo was cut together using pre-release code running at a higher framerate than the finished game, polished to a greater extent, and featured gameplay elements and setpieces that were not present in the final product. Furthermore, the demo was a prelude to another series of delays, as the release was eventually pushed to February 2013.
  • By 2012, most of their replacement assets were still incomplete. Sega was becoming impatient with the game's progress, to the point that they could threaten legal action for contract breaching. Gearbox had to step up, try again from an incomplete product, and rush the game out the door despite knowing it was in no condition to hit the market in order to get their contract fulfilled and avoid the aforementioned legal action. This retrospective by Youtuber DK makes the argument that a large number of game mechanics and setpieces were cribbed wholesale from F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin by design director John Mulkey, who also helmed design on the latter title.
  • After the game's critical drubbing, a planned Wii U port was scrapped, and Sega and Gearbox were hit with a class-action lawsuit for knowingly misrepresenting the levels, graphics, and AI in previews and press demos, as well as restricting reviews until after the game's release. Sega agreed to a $1.25 million settlement, but not before accusing Gearbox of lying to them as well by presenting the demo as indicative of their progress.
  • Years later, it was revealed by modders digging around in the game's code that one of its most infamous flaws, in which enemies would appear to dance around without ever attacking, was caused by a one letter typo on the word "tether" in one line of code, without which the enemies would have no idea where they were or what they were supposed to be doing.
• Two conflicting accounts exist over the indie game Ant Simulator's troubled development and eventual cancellation:
  • One developer, Erik Tereshinski, alleged his friends/business partners Tyler Monce and Devon Staley spending most of the Kickstarter and investment money on "liquor, restaurants, bars, and even strippers." Other claims included: Monce was incompetent with submitting the game to Sony for a software development kit; Staley lied regarding conversations with Sony; Monce and Staley overspent on setting up an office in the basement of Staley's mother's home.
  • Monce and Staley claim Tereshinski egotistically monopolized their company's bank accounts, social media accounts and website. They also accused him of embezzlement and have considered pursuing legal action.
• Development on Anthem was characterized by near-constant upheaval up to a few months before its release, as detailed in this article by Jason Schreier for Kotaku, who described its development as "a story of indecision and mismanagement" that characterized the troubled state that BioWare was in at the time.
  • First teased in 2012 and originally known under the codename "Dylan" before it was titled Beyond, the game spent years in pre-production. The team wanted to break away from their traditional role-playing formula and quickly settled on the idea of an online multiplayer action game set on a hostile "Bermuda Triangle in space" alien world, with the Player Characters piloting suits of flying Powered Armor and a Hard Science Fiction approach that was said to be "less Iron Man and more NASA". Development suffered a blow when Casey Hudson, the Mass Effect creative director who was slated to take on that role in Beyond, left the company in 2014. Hudson played a major role in development on the games he worked on, and without him the team felt directionless. Regardless, morale on the Beyond team was high, especially compared to the Montreal team behind Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was in a state of internal crisis.
  • Very quickly, the same problems that plagued development on Andromeda hit Beyond. Many BioWare employees blamed the creative leadership team for the turmoil, as they seemed to be designing the game by committee and agreeing on little in the way of a coherent vision. Ideas for the gameplay, setting, and lore of the game were frequently brought up, worked on, abandonned and then brought up later on without a leadership to give them clear directions. An internal mandate was made forbidding examining or even discussing the similar game Destiny. While this was done so that in theory BioWare would avoid even subconsciously mimicking Destiny, it also prevented them from learning what it did right and wrong, especially as various changes made Beyond resemble Destiny anyway. Several developers expressed concerns that Beyond was repeating the same development mistakes as Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition, but were brushed off by management.
  • Their ambitions also faced technical limitations. Just as with a slew of other EA projects, the proprietary Frostbite Game Engine proved to be a nightmare for the team to work with, forcing them to cut back their ambitious Survival Sandbox plans for the game. BioWare staff with experience working with Frostbite were often shuffled over by EA to work on the FIFA Soccer series and salvaging Andromeda, leaving the studio understaffed. BioWare's internal policy of not sharing technology between projects resulted in the team effectively redoing work that had already been done for Andromeda and Inquisition. After the Montreal studio that worked on Andromeda was shut down, most of its staff was moved over to work on Beyond, giving the team a much-needed boost to its workforce.
  • It was just in time as EA executive Patrick Söderlund, highly disappointed by progress on Beyond, demanded they put together a more impressive demo build in six weeks — one that led BioWare to reintroduce flying to the game, a feature that had been heavily debated by the team. This demo wowed Söderlund and became the basis for the game's reveal at E3 2017. Just days before the reveal, EA forced BioWare to change the title from Beyond to Anthem as they couldn't secure the trademark for Beyond, a change that disappointed many on the team.
  • BioWare's Austin, Texas studio was also called in as reinforcements - and they quickly clashed with the main team in Edmonton, Alberta. Edmonton saw itself as BioWare's "A-team" and the Austin team as a bunch of upstarts, while the Austin team was bitter that their input was being dismissed, especially since they had experience working on an online game in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic and had gone through many of the same problems. Production sprawled into further chaos as 2018 approached, and EA would only delay the game until March 2019 at it marked the end of the fiscal year. The troubles began to take a toll on other projects within BioWare's walls, with a version of Dragon Age 4 codenamed 'Joplin' scrapped to reassign its team to assist with Anthem.
  • The arrival of Mark Darrah as the game's executive producer is credited as a major turning point in the game's troubled history; he gave clear direction to the development team, committing them to getting the game released even if it meant that they had to cut features that had been profiled in previews or leave Plot Holes due to last-second story changes. The final year of development happened at a breakneck pace, and the team was hit with crunch time so brutal that some employees suffered mental breakdowns and were given "stress leave" for the sake of their mental health; many wound up quitting due to burnout. Casey Hudson also rejoined the project during its final months. Even with Darrah and Hudson's efforts, it was clear to everybody that the game would be effectively unfinished at release.
  • Anthem was released in February 2019 to rocky reviews and poor sales. Its Metacritic scores across all three platforms sit in the 50s and 60s - numbers generally considered disastrous for a big-budget title. Many people who left the studio described development on Anthem as a symbol of everything that had been going wrong at BioWare for years by that point, in particular its over-reliance on "BioWare Magic", i.e. crunch time that would pull a troubled production together in the last few months. BioWare replied to Schreier's article a mere 15 minutes after the article went live, accusing the gaming press of writing articles that 'tear down the industry'. This reply was not taken kindly by fans or the press, especially as the story was surrounded by reports of brutal crunch conditions and employee mistreatment throughout the industry. Electronic Arts would lay off 350 employees a few weeks after the release of Anthem, likely in reaction to the game's poor critical and sales performance.
  • The troubles continued post-launch, as support of Anthem was not any better with an inconsistent update schedule and a litany of bugged content that lead to a hemorrhaging player base. The 90-day roadmap was delayed indefinitely at the end of April 2019, and some PS4 owners reported that the game would crash and brick their consoles, due to some crashes permanently corrupting PS4 databases. The further updates to Anthem reduced drop rates of Legendary gear against player requests, and the much anticipated Cataclysm expansion was eventually released in August 2019, a full 3 months behind its original release date; even then the Cataclysm event failed to reinvigorate Anthem in the public conscience, and BioWare announced they would cancel their post-release plans in favor of focusing on the game's core issues. It was estimated that by May 2019, the number of concurrent players on the Xbox One alone numbered less than 2,500.
  • One year after the game's initial launch, Bioware announced that the studio was holding off seasonal updates in favor of massive rework titled "Anthem Next". However, Darrah and Hudson would retire from Bioware in the same year, leaving "Anthem Next" without any leadership and only a skeletal crew. Making matters worse is the COVID-19 Pandemic hampering development by forcing the small team to work remotely. Although the team provided a demo for EA, the publisher ultimately cancelled the overhaul in February 2021 and transferred the remaining Anthem developers to work on other Bioware IPs. The tumultuous development of Anthem and its subsequently disappointing reception also convinced EA to remove mandatory multiplayer elements planned for Dragon Age 4.
• Apocalypse contains a full list of credits for the version of the game that Activision tried to develop internally but eventually gave up on and had Neversoft rebuild from the ground up.
• ARMA III's development eventually led to a somewhat-infamous incident where two members of the dev team were arrested in Greece and held for over 4 months under charges of espionage. Greek officials asserted that they were taking pictures of Greek military facilities as research for the game's setting, while the devs retorted that they were simply on vacation and that the planning and designs for the setting were already finished by then.
• Batman: Dark Tomorrow went through hell during development. The ambitious project sought to see Batman travel an open world Gotham with usage of his legendary vehicles. Initially it was meant to be a Gamecube exclusive before pivoting into adding the Xbox and Playstation 2 (the latter quietly cancelled early on). But things went completely off the rails as explained by former Hot Gen dev Dave Vout via the web series Wha Happun? by Matt McMuscles:
  • The first bit of trouble came from producer Yuki Takafumi, who was producing his first video game after coming off numerous TV and movies. It was quite obvious that the CGI cutscenes and music were beautifully done, but nothing had been addressed concerning the gameplay side of things.
  • Vout found himself in a culture where he had to sell ideas to the board team and get every member to agree to each one just so his team could help finish the Gamecube version before jumping onto the ports. At the same time, his team investigated the code and learned that it was running on a Game Boy Advance emulator. Vout surmises that the team was originally meant to make a GBA port but was moved to making a Gamecube game and they decided to do things like this to get it running.
  • There was also a massive case of culture clash between the Japanese company Kemco and DC Comics with Scott Peterson recalling one instance of the Kemco developers suggesting that Batman would distract guards by pulling out a boombox and playing salsa music. Essentially speaking, they had no idea what Batman's character was or how his various series function.
  • Outside of a comic tie-in, Kemco had no money to push for a marketing campaign and hoped good word of mouth would save the game, which it obviously did not. In the end, Kemco would find themselves scaling back massively and making simple mobile RPG games while Hot Gen would ultimately collapse soon after.
• Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. In 1989, Derek Smart had the idea for a grand, sweeping game set on a large ship cruising a realistically large galaxy. Players could choose how they wanted to experience it, from either the strategic level commanding fleets of ships in interstellar campaigns, to just shooting it out on a planetary surface with a blaster. Three years later it was a gaming magazine's cover story as "the last game you'll ever want."
  • Smart posted regular, lengthy updates on multiple online forums. This got him in his first bit of trouble. He claimed at one point that he'd figured out how to make the opposing AIs use neural nets, a potential quantum leap in not only gaming but computing as a whole. Many developers and programmers were skeptical, and Smart's updates soon engendered one of the longest-running flame wars in Usenet history due to his penchant for writing lengthy and confrontational replies, then lengthy and confrontational rebuttals to the lengthy and confrontational responses those replies got. Some people say that the feud between Smart and his critics might as well have been the real game, since at least most people could play it.
  • Offline, his personality was having the same effect on his backers. He went through several before landing at a small, relatively new company called Take-Two Interactive. They got tired of his antics and, in 1996, called one of Smart's frequent bluffs by actually releasing the game. The buggy, unfinished result of seven years of hype, development, and online acrimony got the expected horrible reviews.
  • Smart immediately went online blaming Take-Two. He was just as incorrigible with the company's executives. During one of the fights he had with management there, he started trashing the company's office, reportedly completely destroying a Coke machine at one point (an account he denies).
  • Smart has released some later versions as freeware. The flame wars are probably still going on somewhere on the Internet. And given his interest in the development of Star Citizen, a game that he feels is a similarly troubled production, they likely won't end anytime soon.
• According to interviews and information gathered by Tom Henderson, Battlefield 2042 and its problematic reception was the result of Executive Meddling by EA and management troubles at EA DICE reaching a breaking point.
  • The troubles for 2042 began far earlier, as numerous DICE directors, producers, and engineers started leaving the company after the release of Battlefield 1, frustrated by EA pushing for Battlefield to Follow the Leader and become a Battle Royale Game like Fortnite. This exodus caused a "brain-drain" at the studio, with inexperienced developers now left to grapple with the mounting issues facing the franchise, and post-release support for Battlefield V ended prematurely due to lacklustre sales and volatile player reception,
  • DICE was now left not only with the task of developing a new Battlefield, which EA ordered to "copy what's popular", but addressing the increasingly outdated technology of the Frostbite game engine. With senior engineers who had made the engine no longer available, DICE was now struggling with Frostbite in the same way that many other projects under the umbrella of EA already had. What was predicted to be a six month task instead took eighteen months, roughly half of the development time.
  • Even with the success of Apex Legends giving EA its much-coveted Battle Royale title, concerns about its longevity made them continue their plan to make 2042 another BR title as insurance. The onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic forced DICE to implement work-from-home policies, which had a profound impact on development as communication troubles and supply shortages for high-end PC parts bottlenecked futher development on the game.
  • With Call of Duty Warzone being a runaway success for Activision and Apex Legends having stablized into a persistant money-maker for EA by the middle of 2020, EA now wanted 2042 to offer a more traditional Battlefield experience on top of its BR game mode, which became 'Hazard Zone' in the final release. This late shift in direction caused further turmoil, as developers were now scrambling to make content beyond the scope of what had been planned. And combined with issues with the engine overhaul, the game was in crisis from a technical standpoint.
  • Even with Criterion Games dropping their intended 2021 Need for Speed title to help development, DICE still begged for additional help from the team of Frostbite technical staff within EA to get the game to a playable state. Even with their efforts, the Technical Play Test on August 2021 was a disaster, as the sheer amount of issues on display cast dark clouds upon the game. Despite reassurances to the public and a slight delay, it was known internally that the game would be making a rough landing on its release date. When it released on November 19, 2021, the game was riddled with performance issues and bugs, even more than the notorious launch of Battlefield 4, while many players who toughed out the issues considered the game to be thin in content and had fundamental design problems. Even the positive critic reviews it received were muted compared to prior games in the series.
  • Pains continued even after the release, as old features like voice chat and scoreboard had been removed in the name of addressing player toxicity — which led to DICE developers being harassed away from the Battlefield sub-reddit, ironically justifying the decision to cut such features. The player count of 2042 dropped dramatically within the months following release, to the point where Battlefields 1, 4 and V were drawing more players daily, as DICE pushed further patches or updates to later dates. In December 2021, EA appointed Vince Zampella of Respawn Entertainment to oversee the future of the franchise, while DICE GM Oskar Gabrielson departed the company.
• The development of Beast's Fury — an indie 2-D fighting game with a cast of anthropomorphic animals — was rightly described by this article as a "sideshow circus". A former developer of the project has also discussed its issues at length.
  • In 2013, Australian game developer Rhyan Stevens sought to capitalize on the fame of the 2-D fighter Skullgirls with his own game. His company, Beast Fury Studios, partnered with Montreal-based flash and mobile game developer Evil Dog Productions. Despite the high bar set by Skullgirls, development began confidently.
  • Inspired by Skullgirls' successful Indiegogo campaign, Stevens created his own. Two back-to-back failed campaigns later, he returned with a third one. It raised over $20,000—mainly thanks to endorsement by YouTube personalities Maximilian Dood and Egoraptor; they were touted as guest characters if stretch goals were met. Neither was funded, but several other characters were.
  • Stevens' projections for the animation costs were so inaccurate, his team couldn't finish the first two characters. After admitting this, he created a fourth campaign with more realistic stretch goals. The campaign raised over $47,000, which funded the first two characters.
  • The campaign money was blown on visual gimmicks over gameplay, including cinematics, 3-D models and art for unfinished characters. Not helping were the Mortal Kombat-esque finishing moves; by design, they had different animations when performed on all current and future members of the roster.^note  In contrast, Skullgirls reused animations and avoided gimmicky mechanics with little impact on gameplay in order to lower costs.
  • Worse, Stevens had a skeletal team of only two part-time animators. His next Kickstarter campaign to expand the roster improved nothing, despite making twice its goal. The animators themselves were allegedly overworked, verbally abused, and barely paid by Stevens.
  • The voice actors also got the shaft. Stevens allegedly fired one character's voice actor, and his replacement, when they asked to be paid. He later came crawling back for the original voice actor, who agreed to be rehired only after being paid first. However, Stevens sampled "demo recordings" and passed them off as final audio so that he didn't have to pay.
  • Egregiously, a sequel and animated short film were planned...while the first demo languished in a two-year Development Hell. Lead designer Andrew Fein, a professional Street Fighter player, was inexperienced in game design and mostly added whatever (bad) ideas Stevens wanted to the game. Upon release in 2015, the demo was a buggy, unbalanced mess. Entire updates were dedicated to adding purely cosmetic elements.
  • Aya, the designer of the doujin fighting game MONSTER, joined the project as a consultant. However, he decided to take a chance after seeing the project's crowdfunding successes. At Fein's request, Aya fully redesigned Beast's Fury. Stevens never signed Aya's contract, and was hostile when approached about payment two and a half months later. Aya would learn that Stevens also owed money to Fein and Evil Dog lead programmer Marco Arsenault.
  • Stevens' behavior drove off several potential investors, including WayForward Technologies.^note  When interviewed, Aya declined to elaborate on what Stevens did to make WayForward bow out. Allegedly, one deal involved Stevens not being the team leader.
  • One investor wanted a complete prototype as soon as possible. However, Stevens either lied or miscommunicated to Aya that they wanted it done in two weeks. Arsenault refused to give Stevens the original engine's source code, so Stevens convinced Aya to reschedule his eye surgery and create the prototype from scratch. Many sleepless nights later, Aya sent the completed prototype to the investor, and was livid upon learning about Stevens' deception.
  • Criticism was either ignored or met with animosity by Stevens and Arsenaut. They squandered their attempts to gain the Skullgirls community's support and sparked further derision after clashing with Skullheart forum users, stalking and harassing naysayers on social media, and rejecting developer Mike "Z" Zaimont's advice and offer to provide them the Skullgirls game engine.
  • Aya bailed and discussed his poor experience in a FurAffinity interview with ex-Beast's Fury artist RockawayCarter. Stevens hassled Aya for his design — despite that he never signed Aya's contact to be legally entitled to it — and tried to stop the interview. When this failed, he made his own FurAffinity interview to refute Aya's points.
  • The campaign backers never received their rewards. To quell the complaints, Stevens allegedly convinced one of his biggest supporters, who was terminally-ill, to lie on social media about receiving her wooden arcade stick, with Stevens promising to send her his arcade stick in return. He never did and ghosted her.
  • Furry artist Adam Wan, who designed Beast Fury's GUI, was accused by the fandom of being a bully and a sexual predator. Stevens and Evil Dog quietly deleted all mention of his name. Until an Internet chat log later confirmed Wan's involvement, fans interpreted the damage control as deliberately hiding information.
  • A last-ditch Indiegogo campaign with a massive $185,000 goal emerged in May 2015. Promotion was solicited from professional fighting game player Justin Wong. As a testament to all the bridges burned, it only grossed $1,620 (which, thanks to "flexible funding", was still pocketed). Stevens left the project, and on January 2016 announced in a now-deleted FurAffinity post◊ that Beast's Fury was cancelled.
  • Beast Fury Studios shut down, and Evil Dog removed most references to the game from their official website. Stevens did another FurAffinity interview in an attempt to save face, and sought work elsewhere in the game industry, but a conga line of voice actors and animators publicly alleged him of poor leadership and stiffing their pay. Some onlookers regard the train wreck as how not to make a fighting game.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine's development for Chapter 1 started off not too bad, but became a huge problem during the making of Chapter 2. According to a Patreon post, The Meatly describes how the decision to release Chapter 2 within two months "almost killed us," and his and his co-creator's health suffered as a result of working so hard on the game. And the night before the launch date the game broke completely, refusing to run at all. The problem was rectified before Schedule Slip could occur, but it was a very close call.
• Beyond Good & Evil 2 was initially teased in May 2008, with a short trailer showcasing a new graphics engine. Director Michel Ancel would later state that the game was only in pre-production and had not yet been greenlit, though a gameplay trailer would be leaked the following year. What would follow was a constant series of missteps, false starts, and very long waits between updates as the game underwent radio silence once again.
  • A cinematic trailer at E3 2017 was met with a lot of enthusiasm, and updates from 2018 seemed to showcase a new direction for the sequel. However, this enthusiasm began fading rapidly when the public started getting less and less information about the game. The E3 2018 trailer was the most recent thing anyone had heard about the game when the world entered The New '20s, which meant it rapidly fell off the radar for the gaming world at large.
  • In 2020, following original director Michel Ancel's retirement from game development, many members of the Beyond Good and Evil 2 development team came forward to accuse Michel Ancel of mismanaging the game and holding up progress due to him dividing his attention away from the game by also directing Wild at the same time^note Which has also reportedly been cancelled., having a penchant for frequently throwing out work and changing up game and story elements on a whim, and generally being unhelpful and even verbally abusive towards his staff. Ancel's retirement caught the team off guard, and the years afterward saw several other staff leave the project as it struggled to find a solid creative direction after Ancel's departure. In July 2021, Ubisoft ensured fans that development was "progressing well", but with Ancel leaving under very bad circumstances, fans were skeptical.
  • By late 2022, Beyond Good & Evil 2 had broken the record for the longest development period for a video game in history, surpassing even the infamous Duke Nukem Forever. It ended that year with no progress announced, although a minor source confirmed the game was being playtested. In January 2023, Ubisoft assured fans that the game was still coming, but by February, several outlets revealed that the title has been undergoing various issues (unclear creative direction, staff burnout and high attrition rates, etc.) that kept it from entering full production. And then the next time the game made headlines in game journalism in July 2023, it was for the unexpected death of their then-latest creative director Emile Morel at age 40, only a few months after taking over from the previous creator director. It got to the point that shortly after the reveal of Star Wars Outlaws, a false rumor circulated that Beyond Good & Evil 2 had been scrapped and reworked into Outlaws going by its similarities to BG&E 1 (despite having different developers).
• Team Alpha, the maker of the popular Alphabirth Game Mod for The Binding of Isaac, wound up being destroyed by their work on its third edition, as outlined in this blog post from the head of the mod team. Most of the problems stemmed from the new application programming interface (or API) introduced with the official expansion Afterbirth+. While it was intended to be mod-friendly, it instead suffered from clunky programming and design that made modding work far more difficult. Fixes were slow in the pipeline, especially for modding tools, and Binding of Isaac developer Nicalis was slow in communicating. While the mod was released, the burnout suffered by the team caused them to hang it up afterwards.
• Blacksite: Area 51 suffered from a very rushed development cycle, due in part to Midway's insistence on having all of its future projects use the Unreal Engine 3, which was still experimental, and them making hail mary shots in the hopes that any of them would be successful. The situation had gotten bad to the point that Harvey Smith (who was working on his own game) had to be called in to intervene on the game's development. Needless to say, the game was released in a buggy state and to a poor critical and commercial performance. As Smith himself puts it:
  "That project was so fucked up. I wasn't particularly interested in the IP, and it took eight months to get one thing working. With a year to go, the game was disastrously off tails. It went straight from alpha to final."
• The Nightdive Studios remaster of the Blade Runner Adventure Game ran into trouble, first because the game's source code and data were lost at some point between the release of the game and developer Westwood Studios' acquisition by Electronic Arts, and then because it could not reuse any code from the ScummVM-based rerelease of the game on GOG.com as a result of ScummVM being licensed under the GPL and thus preventing anything using it or its code from being released on consoles ^why?The GPL terms' require that any API used by a GPL project must itself be licensed under the GPL, and thus require its source code to either be available to the public or be available upon request, which is not allowed by the rules imposed by console makers regarding their APIs. An attempt to negotiate a separate license for ScummVM's work on Blade Runner fell through. The result was that Nightdive were forced to repeat the work of ScummVM's developers and reverse-engineer the whole game themselves. Among the difficulties in doing so were in untangling the efforts made to compress the game to fit in the limitations of computers of the time, which include using separate character models for individual frames of animation to reduce the amount of model data needed in memory at a time, making remastering the character models more difficult than if a single model were used per character.
• The partnership between Silicon Knights and Crystal Dynamics (with Activision involved on Crystal Dynamics' side) on the development of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and a proposed, canceled sequel degenerated into a pileup of legal screwovers and Executive Meddling on ownership and content of the IP — with Crystal Dynamics winning and bridges burned. Because of this, don't expect to see a re-release of the first Blood Omen in the near future, although it is available on the PlayStation Store as a download for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. A port of the PC version would finally arrive on GOG in 2021, though.
• Body Harvest was originally slated to be a launch title for the Nintendo 64. However, during development, publisher Nintendo took issue with the game's violent themes and thus dropped out of the project altogether. The game was presumed vaporware until Gremlin Interactive and Midway Games picked it up and released it in October 1998... more than two years after it was originally slated to be released! According to Rusel DeMaria's video game history book, the real reason Body Harvest fell through was because of DMA Design's and Nintendo's different ideas (DMA's free-form/mission play similar to GTA vs. role-playing elements that Nintendo wanted), and the game ended up being not as great as could have been after Nintendo didn't decide to publish it.
• Bubsy 3D's status as one of the most infamous video games of all time was a result of its terrible production. After the release of Bubsy 2 almost killed the franchise, lead designer Michael Berlyn wanted to take the series in a new direction by taking the titular bobcat to the third dimension. The development was a challenge due to Berlyn and Eidetic's inexperience with the software required for 3D environments. After the release of Super Mario 64, Berlyn became worried. Thinking that the game would be outshined by Mario, Berlyn and Eidetic tried making the game more complex, but due to the deadline getting closer, it was already too late. When the game came out, it was indeed outdone by not only Mario, but also newcomer Crash Bandicoot released on the same console. The Bubsy franchise laid dormant for twenty years (with a Sega Saturn port scrapped), until a new team released Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back for the PS4 and PC in 2017.
• The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, as chronicled in the Polygon article "The Many Faces of The Bureau", spent seven years in Development Hell and faced long periods of uncertainty, not helped by constant criticism and bad PR:
  • During 2005-06, Take-Two Interactive bought up a number of developers and rebranded them as a singular entity called 2K Games. Take-Two bought the rights to the X-COM franchise from Atari and planned to kick things into high gear with a new installment of the franchise. Irrational Games was renamed "2K Boston" and, together with another Irrational regional studio renamed "2K Australia", began to draw up concepts for a new game. However, none of the concepts got past the drawing board with the exception of a multiplayer prototype (which was later scrapped).
  • After the success of BioShock, 2K Boston gave up interest on the proposed X-COM title and development became a joint venture between 2K Australia and 2K Marin in California. After BioShock 2 (which had been farmed out to 2K Marin) shipped in 2010, the two studios still hadn't come up with a workable pitch for the next X-COM, but they were helped by 2K Australia creative director Jonathan Pelling, who got some traction with a pitch titled "X-COM: Enemy Unknown" (after the international name for the very first game in the series) that was intended to take place in the 1950s. 2K decided to rush into production and use the Marin staff as support so the game could be finished and ready for release by 2011.
  • What followed was a communication breakdown between Marin and Australia. The Marin team was already divided into teams working on DLC for BioShock 2 and development of a new IP in addition to the X-COM project, while 2K Australia was working on the single-player campaign while Marin worked on the multiplayer component. The two studios were merged into a single unit (as Marin) and the game was officially announced (as "XCOM" without the hyphen), but this didn't ease tensions between the two studios.
  • Once it became clear that the game wouldn't meet its original ship date, the multiplayer component was scrapped yet again and the teams were forced to rush to get a prototype ready for E3 2010. The Marin team took the lead on development of the single-player campaign, but the directives from the Australia branch were confusing and vague. The teams attempted to work out their differences by swapping small groups of programmers between the studios, but many staff quit in response.
  • A hastily thrown-together vertical slice shown at E3 2010 was met with mixed reactions from the press. In the months after, several high-profile employees departed the studio and the project was rebooted. Firaxis had also begun work on what would eventually become XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was more traditional and grounded in the franchise's strategy roots.
  • The Marin team dropped development of their new IP and continued tossing out more pitches and ideas for XCOM while development continued. The game slowly morphed from a first-person shooter to a third-person tactical game, and Marin took over lead development duties. It was given another ship date — March 6, 2012, the date that Mass Effect 3 was set to launch. The Marin team continued to rework the game and had voice actors come in to record lines (only to re-record it a year later with new actors). In October 2011, the main branch of 2K (reeling from the long development cycles being taken for XCOM and Bioshock Infinite) pulled 2K Australia from the project and instituted a mandatory "crunch" development period for the Marin team. This caused morale to drop and the March 6 release date to be scrapped.
  • 2012 saw more setbacks for the team, including the departure of creative director Jordan Thomas (to work on Infinite), the official announcement of Enemy Unknown (which received far more praise) and screens from the game that leaked online. However, the Marin team pulled together under the direction of design director Zak McClendon and started including classic enemies from the earlier games after the critical success of Enemy Unknown (and after 2K had previously told the team not to use said enemies like the Sectoids). It finally hit its development deadlines and was rebranded as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified before being released in August 2013.

C-E

• Call of Duty
  • The development of Call of Duty Finest Hour proved to be problematic on multiple fronts: Even before production started, developer Spark Unlimited became embroilled in a nasty lawsuit with Electronic Arts: the company's founders had worked on the Medal of Honor series and poached many of the staff behind Medal of Honor: Frontline, causing EA to retaliate by accusing (not baselessly) the exilees of having stolen resources and helped Spark Unlimited on company time. The development itself also had its share of troubles: despite Activision insisting otherwise, the developers decided to use Renderware for the game, which caused many problems down the line as it was incompatible with Spark's custom object database, becoming increasingly slow and crash-prone as development progressed. A poor tool chain made it difficult to troubleshoot bugs. Spark Unlimited's game development philosophy was also at odd with Activision: while EA's philosophy was to focus on making the levels and focus on technological polish at the end of development, Activision expected a polished core game far earlier. As the developers missed every milestone and went greatly overbudget, Activision salvaged the game by lending a large team of internal engineers to assist development and outsource large chunks of the game and development of the Xbox and Gamecube versions. While Finest Hour ended up being a financial success, lack of faith in Spark's management and an underwhelming pitch for a sequel caused Activision to end their contract with Spark Unlimited, spawning another lawsuit as Spark felt the company was trying to weasel out of the agreed royalties.
  • During the development of Modern Warfare 3, the long-brewing conflict between publisher Activision and lead elements of studio Infinity Ward finally came to a head^note Infinity Ward wasn't happy with Activision assigning Treyarch as a B-team to develop mainline games in the series, sneaking in a Take That! at Treyarch's Call of Duty 3 in the end credits of 4. Rumors also flew around that Infinity Ward wanted to move on to an original IP after the success of 4 but was pressured to make more Modern Warfare games instead. Activision fired the Infinity Ward's studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella over royalties involving Modern Warfare 2 and allegations that West and Zampella were communicating with rival publisher Electronic Arts in a plan to jump ship. In response, a large portion of Infinity Ward's staff ended up leaving or being forced out, forcing Activision to bring in Sledgehammer Games to finish development of the title. Infamously, one of the disgruntled employees leaked the complete plot of the single player campaign almost a year before release, which was widely published by the gaming press. West, Zampella and several departed Infinity Ward staff would then form the studio Respawn Entertainment, which would later be acquired by Electronic Arts, and a lawsuit over the royalties was settled just before going to court..
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War experienced a rough development with studio turnover and bad timing. Originally the game was to be co-developed by Raven Software and Sledgehammer Games with a 3 year development period aiming for a 2020 release. However, Sledgehammer Games co-founders Michael Condrey and Glen Schofield left the company in early 2018, leading to the studio hemorrhaging employees. A 2019 Kotaku article then revealed that Treyarch studios replaced Sledgehammer owing to the studio's tensions with Raven. The game also had the unfortunate luck of coinciding with the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown orders and the launch of the Ninth Console Generation, forcing developers to port to multiple platforms with fewer resources available. On top of all that, Raven and Treyarch had to make their title share gameplay progression with the standalone Battle Royale game Warzone even though that game was built on a different engine. The rough development cycle also adversely affected the marketing with the traditional Spring reveal trailer being delayed to August. When the game was released in November 2020, the final product showed signs of corners being cut as it had numerous bugs and having only 8 launch maps compared to the standard 12+ in previous titles.
  • Just like its previous namesake, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III faced a hectic production. Originally conceived as an expansion for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II by Sledgehammer Games, due to another Call of Duty game in development being delayed, the team were forced by Activision to instead retool the game to make it a full-fledged sequel in just a year and a half in time to meet the franchise's yearly quota, which was half the time it took to make a regular Call of Duty game. Crunch time was apparent, with many employees working nights and weekends just to get the game out on time. But the game's single player campaign suffered the most; the original plot was thrown out and retooled tremendously, and the resulting story campaign was met with negative reviews by critics and fans for its short length, Open Combat Missions that recycled maps from Warzone, and overuse of cutscenes.
• Shortly after the release of the critically disappointing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 in 2014, several anonymous sources came forward to shed light on the game's troubled production. Said sources ended up being from various employees of the game's developer, MercurySteam, claiming that development on the game had been a "degree of 'hell'".
  • Most of the blame was placed on MercurySteam's leader, Enric Álvarez. Outside of his seemingly friendly demeanor in the public media, in actuality his ego had grown since the success of the first Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and he completely undermined and overlooked his programmers, designers and artists, running development based on his own personal criteria. As such, employees were often forced to include game features and mechanics into the final game that they didn't even like (such as the stealth sequences).
  • There was also a great degree of distrust between him and his employees, with the communication so poor that they were only informed about the game's features not from Álvarez himself, but rather from the press. This treatment was the final straw for José Luis Vaello, the Art Director for the first game, who ended up leaving MercurySteam to join another developer. Once work on the game had finished, MercurySteam laid off over 35 people- and more were to be expected.
  • MercurySteam's primary game engine was coded by only two people, and since Álvarez was prone to hovering over and monitoring his employees, killing ideas that he didn't like left and right, it was never updated, reducing the development down to a very sluggish pace. In response to the game's poor reception, Álvarez claimed that the reviewer's gripes had no merits and that they weren't doing their jobs properly. Additionally, he seemed to deny the complaints of his employees, as a post on his Twitter page showed.
• The Kickstarter-funded, motion-controlled sword-fighting game Clang, developed by Subutai Production and sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, received over $500,000 in donations. Then Subutai revealed that they had exhausted all of it when searching for publishers, none of which showed interest. Livid campaign backers were refunded two years later. Stephenson discussed Clang's cancellation here.
• Another Kickstarter failure: Code Hero, a game coined as being able to teach players how to make games. It nearly doubled its $100,000 goal in January 2012. Developer Primer Labs missed two release deadlines and barely updated their website. Cue complaints from campaign backers over never receiving their rewards. Designer Alex Peake quelled those threatening legal action, but it was revealed that the $100,000 had only covered game costs up to October; afterwards, most of the developers had become volunteers. Since 2012, Primer Labs' Facebook and Twitter pages are inactive.
• Colossal Kaiju Combat! was a 2015 Kickstarter funded game by Sunstone Games that was meant to be a large, ambitious fighting game where players could fight using their own, backer-created Kaiju monsters with the playstyle of the Pipeworks Godzilla fighting games. The project reached its goal and nothing came of it. Some backers were already suspicious of the game, since it showed no original gameplay footage. On November 23, 2016, the project's development was revealed to be suspended indefinitely (game development purgatory) thanks to the unexpected death of Sunstone's environment artist, Ron Clayborn, which halted production on the game. Without an environment artist, game developers can't work on a game, and thus the game was never released, much to the dismay of the backers.
• In 2019, Cooking Mama: Cookstar was revealed for the Nintendo Switch, released in March 2020 and immediately delisted from the Nintendo eShop and recalled from stores. Speculation and rumors ran rampant until Cooking Mama creators Office Create came forward with the full story. The property was licensed out to another publisher (Planet Entertainment) and developer (1st Playable Productions), but when the developers were asked to fix Cookstar's problems after a poor gameplay demonstration, Planet not only released the game anyway (breaching their contract), but also commissioned and promoted a PlayStation 4 port of Cookstar (also without Office Create's authorization). As for the game itself, the release was an Obvious Beta plagued by awful motion controls, repetitive and unchallenging gameplay and an inferior depiction of the Mama. On top of all that, the game was so badly optimized that it caused players' Nintendo Switch consoles to overheat, which spawned rumors that it had a Bitcoin miner embedded (spurred by an odd claim in an PR release that the game would leverage cryptocurrency, which turned out to be meaningless buzzwords meant to entice investors). In the end, Office Create profusely apologized for the game, removed the game from digital storefronts, and sued Planet Entertainment over the whole debacle. The courts ruled in favor of Office Create, and in November 2022, Cookstar, which by that point was completely defined by the controversy surrounding it and had cast a heavy shadow over the franchise itself, was withdrawn from circulation from physical and digital storefronts for good.
• Counter-Strike: Condition Zero was passed between multiple developers, had its development restarted several times and suffered from chronic Schedule Slip.
  • The concept of the game was born when Rogue Entertainment, who was out of work and in financial trouble after EA canned their Playstation 2 port of American McGee's Alice, was contacted by Valve CEO Gabe Newell, who pitched the idea of a single-player focused game using the gameplay of Counter-Strike. Both parties reached an agreement for the game to start production in April 2001. Rogue quickly went into crunch to have material presentable in time for E3 2001 but one month after development started, Lead Producer Jim Molinets unexpectedly left Rogue. While Rogue insisted that his departure would not impact the project, Valve felt "betrayed" and had serious doubts over Rogue's stability, pulling the plug in May 2001. This served to accelerate Rogue's collapse and left Rogue employees infuriated by the sudden cancellation. Employees wasted little time leaking details of the negotiations as well as a number of early screenshots of the game. Rogue would be acquired by United Developers later in the year.
  • After pulling the game away from Rogue, Gearbox Software reached an agreement with Valve, following their work on the Half-Life expansions, to pick up development of Condition Zero. As development entered 2002, Gearbox and Valve butted heads over the direction of the project - Gearbox had created an arcade-style campaign of mostly disconnected levels and challenges while Valve wanted a connected, story-driven campaign akin to Half-Life, forcing Gearbox to toss out a good deal of work while direction shifted. Work continued with this new direction well into 2002, but with Gearbox lacking enthusiasm for the project and the company also working on PC ports of NightFire and Halo: Combat Evolved, Gearbox pulled out of Condition Zero by July 2002.
  • The game then fell into the hands of Ritual Entertainment, who (like Rogue) had been out of work after a cancelled port from EA and needed a project. Ritual also agreed to produce an Xbox port of the original Counter-Strike. But in June 2003 Ritual ran into financial troubles after finishing Star Trek: Elite Force II and were forced to lay off members of the Condition Zero team. While Ritual completed development of Condition Zero, Valve was deeply unhappy about the quality of the game and a handful of outlets who received review copies were unkind in their reviews. Valve retracted the game's immediate release and - without informing Ritual - assigned Turtle Rock Studios to finish Condition Zero, scrapping Ritual's single-player in favor of skirmishes against bots. Ritual's Xbox port was released in November 2003 to positive reviews, but Condition Zero released in March 2004 to mediocre reviews that considered the game outdated as Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source were mere months away from their own release. Ritual's single-player portion of the game would be included as Deleted Scenes.
• Crash Twinsanity suffered through this. Deadlines not being met, scrapped concepts, the pressure of Universal needing the game out, and too many ambitious ideas led to about a third of the game's original ideas being cut. The final product, while still regarded as a good game, shows the lamented development cycle in many areas. However, the dev team have been kind enough over the years to explain and show off various parts of the game that got cut, even supplying cut voiced dialogue and storyboards, all of which can be found online.
• Given the wildly ambitious scope of the project, it probably should come as no surprise that Cuphead went through this. A run 'n' gun game that painstakingly reproduced the art, animation, and sound of 1930s cartoons by Fleischer Bros. and similar animation companies, while also packing over three dozen varied boss battles; produced by a small indie studio of very limited staff on hand. As one would expect, it took a long and hard 7 years before the game became what it is today, and the development cost was so big that the Moldenhauer brothers, the game's creators, had to mortgage their house to get through it. It worked though — the game sold over a million copies in two weeks, and received tons of acclaim and a handful of awards for its presentation.
• Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hyped video games of all time. Upon its release, however, it became notorious for being an Obvious Beta on next-gen platforms and the catastrophic Porting Disaster it received on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. This article by Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning for The New York Times, along with Jason Schreier's investigation for Bloomberg, tells a grim tale of CD Projekt RED's unchecked ambition and severe mismanagement resulting in a Broken Pedestal moment for what had previously been one of gaming’s most beloved companies.
  • CD Projekt RED, hot off the success of 2011's The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, announced an adaptation of the tabletop game Cyberpunk the following year, but production didn't really get rolling until the blockbuster success of 2015's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt propelled the Warsaw-based studio to triple-A developer and publisher thanks to their ownership of the digital games store GOG. That success and their pro-consumer policies dramatically increased the hype around Cyberpunk, as fans of the Witcher games expected it to be a larger and deeper role-playing experience than any of the Witcher games had been.
  • While a small team had been quietly working on base concepts for the game during the development of Wild Hunt, the completion of that game’s final downloadable expansion saw the Wild Hunt team joining up with the Cyberpunk team… and immediately clashing with them. The veterans behind the Witcher titles had very different ideas for what Cyberpunk should be, and disliked that Cyberpunk's gameplay was similar to Wild Hunt. The clashes led to studio head Adam Badowski taking over the project and several lead developers walking away from the company, as development was effectively rebooted.
  • CD Projekt was keen on exceeding expectations. The first gameplay reveal at E3 2018 showed a vast array of role-playing options, a massive and deep world, and advanced graphics, all of which appeared to eclipse that of Wild Hunt. While the presentation drew wide praise, the entirety of the presentation had been created specifically for E3 and had no basis in the game’s actual progress, taking vital months away from development and setting unrealistic expectations. The hype machine shifted into overdrive in 2019 at the announcement that Keanu Reeves, riding high on a Career Resurrection from the John Wick films, would be providing the likeness and voice of major supporting character Johnny Silverhand. Reeves was also present to announce the game’s release date of April 2020.
  • Back in Warsaw, however, employees at CD Projekt RED were quietly panicking over the 2020 release frame. They saw obvious signs of feature creep as the studio's management had made increasingly grandiose promises they had no way of meeting with the timeframe they were given, with one manager dismissing concerns with "We'll figure it out along the way". The release date of 2020 was at least in part from hoping to “double dip” consumers by getting the game out before next-generation consoles released, then forcing consumers to buy the game again on the latest hardware.
  • Despite having increased the size of the team to over 500 people for the game, they were still considered grossly understaffed, and the company's inexperience with handling a large team further impacted work. There were also troubles between the native Polish employees and foreign expats brought in for work, with the expats frequently feeling disrespected (for example, Polish developers would suddenly start speaking Polish amongst them during meetings with non-Polish speaking expats present, despite company policy to hold all meetings in English). Against the backdrop of these troubles, management forced a long period of brutal crunch time in order to get the game finished by its planned April 2020 release date, despite having publicly promised that no crunch would happen. This lead to numerous departures from longtime engineering staff due to overwork, as well as backlash when the crunch conditions were made public.
  • As 2019 ended, management realized that there was no possible way the game would be ready in time even as the team cut content, and in January 2020, with just three months before release, they announced that they were pushing it back to September. In June, they pushed it back to November as the COVID-19 Pandemic severely impacted communication and workrate, and in October, after the game had been announced as having "gone gold", they pushed it back again to December as the team scrambled to fix severe bugs. By this point, next-generation consoles had already hit stores, scuttling the "double dip" plans — which would likely have been torpedoed anyway by the fact that the next-gen consoles turned out to be fully back-compatible with their predecessors, most publishers made next-gen versions of their games available for free, and the few that did charge extra for next-gen upgrades were almost invariably met with heavy backlash — and splitting the team's efforts between the new consoles and the prior generation.
  • Meanwhile, QuanticLab, the Romanian QA company that CDPR contracted to play-test the game, was botching things on their end, too, at least according to documents leaked by a whistleblower to the YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers. According to the allegations, QuanticLab flat-out lied to CDPR about the size and experience of the team, claiming to have far more testers than they actually had and that senior staff would be working on testing. Furthermore, they pushed testers to meet a daily quota of bugs discovered, which had the effect of causing CDPR to be inundated with reports of minor, comparatively irrelevant issues that distracted them from working on the serious Game-Breaking Bugs.
  • Despite the hype, the reveal of crunch conditions and the constant delays served as red flags as they went directly against many PR statements made by CDPR. More red flags raised in the immediate lead-up to release, as LGBTQI+ groups took exception to the game’s treatment of trans characters, and the release build contained sequences that consistently caused seizures. It was known within the studio that, while the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions were buggy but functional, the PS4 and Xbox One versions were nearly unplayable. The game would be shipping regardless. CD Projekt RED only allowed reviewers to play the PC version in controlled conditions to mitigate the issues.
  • While many of the initial reviews were positive, console gamers, the vast majority of whom were using the PS4 and Xbox One due to supply shortages of next-gen consoles, were in for an unpleasant shock when they got a nigh-unplayable version of the game. Overnight, social media was flooded with reports and memes about the slew of bugs, performance issues, and rampant crashing. While much of the negativity was directed at the game’s technical state, the more critical console reviews also targeted the gameplay and story, which, while generally considered solid, wasn’t as ambitious as the marketing promised, as well as the obvious signs of cut content.
  • The backlash was so overwhelming that Sony ripped the game down from its digital store and began offering refunds. Microsoft and CD Projekt RED themselves also began offering refunds soon after, and employees at CD Projekt RED got into heated arguments with executives over the poor state of the game and the hypocritical attitude toward the game’s anti-corporate and anti-capitalist themes. Two months after launch, CD Projekt RED was hit by a cyberattack that claimed to have stolen Cyberpunk's source code among others, which delayed patches for the game.
• Daikatana, as chronicled in "Knee Deep in a Dream".
  • Despite the success he'd enjoyed with Doom and its progeny at id Software, John Romero was unhappy with his job because he felt his vision as a designer took a back seat to the company's technological considerations. When his idea to split the company into separate divisions devoted to design and technology was nixed by the founders, he threatened to leave and start his own company instead, and was eventually let go.
  • Carrying out his threat, he and id cofounder Tom Hall started what became Ion Storm at the end of 1996, where "Design is Law." On the strength of their names and accomplishments, the company was able to raise millions. Some of this was spent on high-cost real estate, renting office space in the top floors of a Dallas skyscraper, featuring the Ion Storm logo carved into terrazzo in the lobby because, Romero said, he had always wanted to work in flashier offices at id. But all did not go well from that auspicious start.
  • Romero's dream game, Daikatana, would be the sort of First-Person Shooter he had pioneered, but with two sidekicks and multiple levels in four different time periods across a 4,000-year period. He told the media it would be available within a year, since the plan was to build it on the Quake engine. As you might expect, such an optimistic prospect was just asking for trouble.
  • First, Ion Storm had some internal warring because the Daikatana team felt the development of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 was stealing resources and staff, which ultimately hurt that game and forced the abandonment of the other early titles Ion Storm meant to bring out.
  • Then, they tried to move from the old Quake engine to the Quake II one, a process much more complicated and time-consuming than they thought. In June of 1997, they made it official — Daikatana would not be shipping that year. That didn't stop the company from taking out ads that cheekily promised "John Romero's about to make you his bitch", alienating some gamers and ramping up expectations for others. Romero has since apologized for the campaign and tried to distance himself from it; others involved say he was much more enthusiastic at the time.
  • Romero's prowess as a designer and programmer, despite his experience at well-managed id, did not transfer to management or leadership skills. His development team quit on him en masse to start their own company because they were so fed up with the lack of direction they were getting. To maintain goodwill with potential competitors, Romero avoided hiring away any of their programmers, instead hiring amateur programmers whose homebrewed levels for id's games had been the most downloaded — a fact which, another Ion Storm executive admitted later, told them nothing about what it was like to work with this person or what their work habits were. During the development of the game, the staff changed completely three times.
  • This turnover had a chaotic impact on the game code, with fragments inserted here and there by different people who had never communicated. Demos made from this increasingly buggy mess failed to impress at industry events. Communications between all the people working on the game did not get any better: one artist submitted the infamous "1,300-pixel arrow", a texture file for a crossbow bolt that was inexplicably 1300 pixels by 960 pixels. ^note  For reference, the most common resolution for gaming — i.e. the resolution that the entire game output at — at the time was 1024 by 768 pixels, something which would largely remain the case until the late 2000s. When Romero hired his then-girlfriend, Stevie Case, to work on level design, he nearly triggered another full-staff walkout.
  • The programmers who were working had some unexpected physical problems with the skyscraper office space. Some of them were under skylights where, around midday in the Texas sun, they would get too hot to work, and even if they didn't the light was too distracting. People were covering their cubicles in blankets to get their work done.
  • Ion Storm missed Daikatana's 1997 ship date, and its 1998 ship date, and its 1999 ship date. It became a punchline within the industry, as one webcomic memorably demonstrated. Eidos, Ion Storm's parent company, finally had to step in and straighten things out. And as things were finally turning out, id released the Quake III game engine. Recalling how much fun they had had three years earlier upgrading to its predecessor, Ion Storm understandably opted not to do it again, meaning the game they had poured so much design effort into would be technologically behind from the moment it was released.
  • The game ended up delayed so much that, by the time it came out in 2000, it was seriously outclassed by competing games like Half-Life, System Shock 2, and the soon-to-be-released Deus Ex. The resulting product ended up being a complete bust and ended the fame and career of John Romero, who, before Daikatana, was a superstar developer on par with Sid Meier and Tim Schafer thanks to his work on Doom and Quake.
• The cancelled Daredevil game owes its nonexistence to this trope, as this video would explain. In a nutshell...
  • 5,000 Ft, a game studio located in Reno, Nevada, wanted to make a game of their own after assisting 3DO with their Army Men series for the PS1. After being bought by publisher Encore, Encore proceeded to buy out a few licenses to several Marvel products, such as Captain America, and of course, Daredevil.
  • 5,000 Ft thought of doing a Daredevil game for the PS2 because of their interest in the character. They presented their ideas to Encore, which consisted of a linear third person brawler that was heavily tied into the comics. The game was meant to be a series of vignettes based around famous Daredevil stories as a way to celebrate the character’s legacy. After a week of creating a workable prototype for Encore, the game was greenlit for production under the name Daredevil. Marvel themselves became heavily involved with the game’s development, at first being very easygoing with 5,000 Ft such as giving the writers full creative control over the story of the game.
  • Sony Pictures then called upon former 5,000 Ft president, Tim Page, to inform him of the then upcoming Daredevil movie. Because of this coincidence, Encore decided to port the game to PC and Xbox alongside its original PS2 port. This forced both Microsoft and Sony to watch over development of the game.
  • After meeting with Sony, 5,000 Ft was forced to increase the budget and scale of their game. The game became an open world action game that was meant to be a lot more combat focused. The game was then given a deadline: February 2003, around the time the movie came out. Microsoft, in contrast, was much more laid back in their approach to the game, allowing the developers to do whatever they wanted. Both cases of contradicting philosophies caused friction during development.
  • If that wasn’t bad enough, Marvel’s ideas for the game contrasted even more with Sony’s ideas. While Marvel wanted a game that was more faithful to the comic, Sony wanted a game that was more experimental. Marvel would constantly shoot down any ideas presented by Sony, such as a grinding mechanic inspired by the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series.
  • The game had some conflicts with the engine. 5,000 Ft wanted to use the new Renderware engine, used in games such as Grand Theft Auto III. Encore, however, didn’t want to use it, not wanting to pay engine fees. 5,000 Ft ended up having to use the base of Renderware’s technology, and build upon it, creating their own engine in the process.
  • Due to the release of the first Spiderman Game, 5,000 Ft not only wanted to copy that game, but also outdo it, giving Daredevil a swinging mechanic that allowed his billy club to grapple onto buildings, loads of people for Daredevil to interact with, and a new, cutting edge mechanic called The Shadow World, which allowed the player to see the game from Daredevil’s perspective (the precursor to detective mode).
  • At this point, the game grew into a giant, bloated mess that ended up causing problems for 5,000 Ft’s development team. Tensions started rising up, with multiple developers and staff members, including one of their most skilled engineers, leaving. Their replacements ended up being nowhere near as talented. What’s worse, drug problems ran rampant among the staff. Multiple developers started showing up to work intoxicated, with one of the engineers doing drugs during his lunch break. 5,000 Ft then attempted to make Encore give them full creative control over the final product, which resulted in the studio dividing itself due to several staff members’ growing ambitions and conflicting ideas.
  • By now, the engine had started taking its toll, struggling to handle the game’s graphical fidelity and scope, which ended up causing a weak framerate. After multiple edits and cuts of certain levels, 5,000 Ft decided to cut the game’s overworld entirely, turning the game into a linear third person brawler that had almost none of the features 5,000 Ft had promised. The new linear and tight level design caused the aforementioned grappling and Shadow World mechanics to become useless.
  • Because of the engine’s limitations and the upcoming deadline getting closer and closer, 5,000 Ft had to rely on help from many different studios such as Electronic Arts in order to get the engine working properly. By now, the game had missed its February 2003 deadline, resulting in the game getting pushed to the summer.
  • The game, now going under Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, was now almost fully complete, with a new story and overworld created. Unfortunately, during 5,000 Ft’s now six month development time, a large chunk of the staff left, resulting in control of the project being given towards their hired consultants, who ended up cancelling production of the game because of Marvel’s refusal to release it.
  • In the end, Daredevil: The Man Without Fear was shelved thanks to 5,000 Ft leaning more closely with Sony’s ideas rather than Marvel’s, who pulled the license from 5,000 Ft. An attempt to make another IP using the same engine and mechanics ended up not happening. 5,000 Ft sunk into third party obscurity until their demise in 2012.
• Dark Souls II suffered through a large bit of behind-the-scenes trouble, as detailed in an interview with director Yu Tanimura, explaining why the final game is significantly different from the first Dark Souls. The original director was kicked off the project for as-yet undisclosed reasons halfway through development, and the game was essentially restarted from scratch with a hard deadline to ship the game. The new director had to salvage what he could and re-purpose it into what became the final product, meaning that large numbers of areas (most notably a transition between Earthen Peak and Iron Keep) and the entire original plot had to be scrapped. It didn't help either that their planned graphical upgrade to the engine failed when they discovered that the PS3 and Xbox versions could only run the game in single-digit FPS, forcing them to drastically downgrade the graphics to make it playable. While still a very good game, it definitely bears the scars of its turbulent development, and is usually considered weaker than the other Souls games by many fans for that reason.
• The Day Before was originally announced in 2021 as a new, open-world Zombie Apocalypse survival MMO by Russian game studio Fntastic, quickly becoming a hotly-anticipated title (becoming the most wishlisted game on Steam almost immediately following its announcement), but ended up experiencing a multitude of behind-the-scenes troubles and scuffles with the public that resulted in a cataclysmic launch:
  • Following a steady release of various gameplay trailers throughout 2021, Fntastic set up a release date of June 2022. However, just a month shy of the date, it was announced that the game would be delayed to March 2023 in order to upgrade its engine from Unreal Engine 4 to 5, ostensibly to boost its open world technology. This sudden announcement provoked disappointment as well as suspicion as such a fundamental shift in development isn't at all normal for a project of The Day Before's scope, ambition, and schedule, and this would be the first of several incidents that left many questioning the game's integrity.
  • Fntastic received further heat in June 2022 when it was reported that the game was being developed almost entirely by unpaid workers, something that the company ended up confirming and defending in a public statement on grounds that all their employees were "volunteers", believing that it wasn't necessary to pay them as part of their "volunteer culture". Not only did this draw immense scrutiny for being worker exploitation, this raised even more suspicion as to whether or not Fntastic could even afford to develop the game, especially concerning for something as expensive and requiring maintenance as an MMO.
  • Early 2023 saw Fntastic enter a trademark dispute over the title The Day Before (from a holder in Korea with trademark rights in regions including the US, EU, and Russia), resulting in the game's Steam page being briefly taken down, along with an announcement of another delay, this time to November 2023. However, Fntastic would end up relaying in a statement to IGN that this most recent Release Date Change was planned even without this legal dispute, provoking even more fan revolt, with many accusing Fntastic of lying about progress of their development and calling the game a scam.
  • Facing increasing public controversy, Fntastic began making public pledges to be more transparent about the game's progress and to combat disinformation of the game being a scam, including a public commitment that the November 2023 release date would be set and final. However, with this came with a further revelation that they had no marketing team and that all their resources went into game development (lightly muddied by their earlier confirmation that their workers were unpaid volunteers), provoking further concerns that them acting on damage control was only stretching progress even further. Not helping matters was how the game did end up experiencing yet more last-minute delays, this time with the PC version launching on December 2023, and only in Early Access. Meanwhile, the expected console releases on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S were delayed indefinitely.
  • The Early Access launch date finally arrived, only for it to be met with a disastrous response as it was discovered that virtually nothing about the game was as advertised — instead of an open-world zombie MMO, The Day Before was effectively a half-baked extraction shooter with almost no zombies in it whatsoever, filled with AI-generated art and stock assets (the entire city environment turning out to be an Unreal store asset), as well as server instability and many, many bugs. The overwhelming backlash — from social media, to Steam reviews (the game quickly becoming one of the worst-reviewed games on the platform), to the game's own official Discord server (which quickly became locked from complaints of angry customers demanding refunds) — led to Fntastic announcing a mere four days later that both The Day Before and the company as a whole were folding due to having "failed financially," with the game becoming delisted almost immediately.
• Dead Island 2 was originally to be developed by Techland (who had worked on the previous installments), but they had a falling out with Deep Silver that led to them going independent and releasing a Spiritual Successor in the form of Dying Light, so the game was handed over to Yager Studios (who had just finished Spec Ops: The Line). A trailer was unveiled at E3 2014, with plans to release the game in 2015. However, relations between Deep Silver and Yager quickly broke down in the following year, and the game was transferred to Sumo Digital in 2016. After three more years, the game was transferred again to Dambuster Studios in 2019. Then it was finally unveiled again at Gamescom 2022 with a release date of February 3rd 2023, before getting one last delay to April of that year, and after eleven grueling years the game would finally release to mixed-to-positive reception not unlike its predecessor.
• The iconic Dead or Alive series might be dead in the water thanks to the troubled production of Dead or Alive 6:
  • Coming off of the hight of Dead or Alive 5, Yohei Shimbori, director for most of the series, started work on the next chapter of the franchise. He wanted to break away from DOA's infamous reliance on sexy female fighters and make the next chapter more in line with other competitive fighting games. As well, the new engine being worked on would be used to give the characters a more realisitic stance with added damage, additions and physics.
  • June 2018 saw the release of the first teaser trailer for the game, showing off the new aspects. Fans, however, saw something different - the costuming and tone had decidedly changed. The trailer was designed to be more serious, reframe the DOA tournament as a serious martial arts tournament and mostly dumping the heavy sexual nature. Of note was the de facto main character Kasumi, who abandoned her iconic gi top and thigh-highs for a full leather black and blue outfit.
  • Later that same summer, another trailer showcasing two male characters was released and the creators began doing the interview scene. Shimbori explained that the game's change in tone was meant to help the franchise get into the emerging e-sports scene, something fighting games aren't really known for really taking off in. That meant the game's iconic sex appeal had to be deemphasized. Shimbori tried to walk this back during the Tokyo Game Show 2018, claiming that the trailers were only what they had to work with at the moment and they wanted to show off what the new engine could do. Despite this, many fans didn't buy it and continued to lambbast the game's more puritan nature, going so far as to note a Eurogamer interview done earlier, where Shimbori blamed the DOA Xtreme entries for its more sexual nature.
  • The game arrived on March 1, 2019 to a lukewarm reception - hardcore fighter players still saw the game's mechanics as simplistic even after the supposed changes while the hardcore fans of the franchise were slighted at the fact that the game's iconic skimpy outfits were shoved aside various lists to be grinded away while the more conservative outfits were front in center.
  • Worst of all were the game's more predatory purchases. Season Passes were nothing more than just character costumes going as high as over $90 and then there was the Platinum Passes, which were used for hair color changes. That was the last straw for gamers and Koei Tecmo as the Passes were done away with and support ended in April 2020, barely over a year after the game released.
• As this video by Liam Robertson explains, the Dead Rising series, from the third game onward, endured a series of these that eventually led to the collapse of Capcom's Vancouver studio and the death of the series.
  • To start, after their successful work on Dead Rising 2, Blue Castle Games was bought out by series publisher Capcom to become Capcom Vancouver. Unfortunately, around this time their original IP Brazil, a survival game set in an alien-infested Rio de Janeiro, saw its own production fall apart after two years of work due to Creative Differences within the staff over fundamental gameplay elements, particularly the pacing. With production on Brazil going nowhere, Capcom shut it down in 2012 and put the studio to work on Dead Rising 3.
  • Dead Rising 3 was already suffering a troubled production when Capcom Vancouver was brought in, beset as it was by technical issues. The PlayStation 3 version, owing to that console's infamously exotic and complex hardware, suffered the bulk of the problems, especially given the game's lofty Wide-Open Sandbox ambitions compared to its predecessors. As a result, when Microsoft showed up with an offer to make the game an Xbox One exclusive, Capcom jumped at the chance to cancel the troubled PS3 version and focus their resources, especially with the added Microsoft money, more powerful hardware to work with, and another year to work on the game before the Xbox One launched. Unfortunately, this forced Capcom Vancouver to cancel another original IP, an open-world sci-fi action RPG called New Frontier that many people who worked on it described as a "proto-Destiny".
  • Dead Rising 4's mixed reception owes much to its troubled history, as recapped by Matt McMuscles.
    • Capcom Vancouver, disillusioned with the increasingly Denser and Wackier tone of the series and desperate to try something new, began work on a Darker and Edgier reboot inspired by The Last of Us codenamed "Climber", with Microsoft, eager to compete with Sony's Killer App and now increasingly involved with the series, supporting the shift. They had not received permission from Capcom Japan for such a departure, as Capcom Japan trusted Vancouver enough to be able to produce a game without their constant oversight, but Vancouver expected Capcom Japan to be pleased when they presented their new direction. Instead, Capcom Japan's executives were reportedly furious at the changes, which they felt took away everything that made Dead Rising unique and made it into a cookie-cutter zombie horror game, and they fired the responsible devs (including several of the lead developers on Dead Rising 3) and demanded the rest throw out their work to make a more traditional Dead Rising game.
    • With six months of work rendered useless, minimal budget, hemorrhaging of key developers, a general sense of aimlessness without them, fast-approaching deadlines from Microsoft, and studio morale running low, the game's development cascaded into a disastrous crunch where many series mainstays (most infamously the time limit, Multiple Endings, and psychopath battles) were cut, the exosuit and evo zombies were added at Microsoft's insistence despite most of the developers hating them, and attempts to polish the gameplay, story, and technical aspects were constantly fought against because of internal conflicts or there simply being no time. About 40% of the Vancouver studio, including many series veterans, left during 2014, and many people who worked on the game said that they knew it was going to be bad. The game released in 2016 to mediocre reviews and disastrous sales that, in the long term, tanked both Capcom Vancouver and the series.
  • Before it dissolved, however, Capcom Vancouver was gearing up for Dead Rising 5, which proved to be The Last Straw for Capcom.
    • Seeking to get as far away from the horror-show experience of working on the fourth game as possible, the team for this title was composed entirely of fresh blood and led by a former Crystal Dynamics executive, and it was to run on Unreal Engine 4 instead of Capcom's proprietary Forge engine. Unreal 4 was not particularly well-optimized for either large open worlds or the series' trademark hordes of hundreds of zombies on screen at once, which led to a focus on smaller semi-open environments like the first two games as well as battle with smaller numbers of tougher zombies. Its plot would have been an interquel set between the second and third games, with Chuck and Katey Greene from the second game as co-protagonists in a Mexican city searching for Zombrex medicine to suppress Katey's infection, with the plot inspired by films like Sicario.
    • Even before the failure of Dead Rising 4, however, the project was entering troubled waters in 2016 with a shift in design director, with the new one, who had previously worked on the Assassin's Creed series, implementing a parkour-inspired building climbing mechanic, changing up the combo weapon system, and trying to go back to the open-world design of the prior two games — all decisions that divided the team. (On the parkour, some developers questioned why they were implementing a system that's all about avoiding zombies in a series dedicated to giving players creative ways to kill them.) Creative disputes led to firings of more key developers, just like on Dead Rising 4, and the game underwent another creative shift to a semi-linear Souls-like RPG, a move that, just like the Climber build of Dead Rising 4, was rejected by Capcom Japan in 2018 despite Sony showing interest, leading again to layoffs and a shift to a more traditional series style.
    • Six months after that, Capcom, fed up with spending time and money with little to show for it and feeling that the Vancouver studio had learned nothing from the problems that occurred making Dead Rising 4, cut its losses and shut down the Vancouver studio, canceling Dead Rising 5 with it. Many former employees describe it as a Mercy Kill given how dysfunctional the studio was.
• Descent to Undermountain was Interplay Entertainment's attempt to make a cheaply produced mega hit by quickly developing a game that utilized their Dungeons & Dragons license and their newly developed fully 3D engine that was used in their extremely successful title, Descent. However, Interplay's judgment was blinded by greed and they wanted to rush the game out quickly without taking into account what it would actually take to ship a game in their planned six month timeframe. This made the development cycle much more difficult than it should have been.
  • Instead of assigning a development studio to work on the game like usual, Interplay decided to set up an independent contracting program that would utilize Interplay's own employees as well as outside talent. This arrangement proved to be chaotic and the team never even had an assigned project manager.
  • The engine used for Descent proved to be ill suited for an RPG that involved melee combat. The giant collision meshes in particular proved very difficult to work with as they had to be downscaled significantly to better fit the gameplay requirements.
  • By December 1997, the game that was supposed to take six months of four developers' time had been three years in the making and gone six times over the budget. Despite being woefully unfinished, Interplay believed that they could still profit from the game if they released it before 1998 due to the immense hype surrounding it. As a result, the unfinished four player multiplayer was left out of the game and the game itself would release in an Obvious Beta state.
  • The game's release was followed by an immense Hype Backlash, Chris Avellone who worked on the project still regrets his involvement in it, and its failure also played a role in driving Interplay's finances to the point that it was in bankruptcy court in 1998. The game would be mostly forgotten by the turn of the millennium and is nowadays mostly remembered from an Easter Egg in Fallout 2, where Interplay themselves admit that the game was crap.
• Deus Ex was Ion Storm's big success story but it wasn't less troubled for it, with lead director Warren Spector giving a detailed post-mortem in the November 2000 issue of Game Developer Magazine about the challenges and mistakes of its production.
  • Warren Spector struggled for years to get the concept (initially titled Troubleshooter) off the ground, with Origin Systems rejecting it and Looking Glass Studios unable to find funding. Spector nearly took a contract with Electronic Arts in 1997 when John Romero, having recently helped to establish Ion Storm, offered Spector the chance to make his game at Ion Storm without any limitations. Spector gladly accepted, quickly starting pre-production in Austin, Texas with a small team of former Looking Glass staff.
  • Spector's team was soon bolstered by former Origin Systems employees, including Ultima IX lead designer Robert White, as part of a walk-out due to EA's Executive Meddling at Origin, but problems soon arose as White's team had a very different design ethos. This led Spector to split developers into two camps with White leading a "traditional roleplaying group" against an "immersive simulation group" led by Harvey Smith, hoping that a Friendly Rivalry would bring the best out of both. Instead, the two groups clashed over everything, with just the idea of a set name for the player character nearly inciting a "holy war". Spector ultimately merged the two groups into a single team with Harvey Smith as the lone design lead, and later regarded the two groups decision as a costly blunder.
  • There were also troubles regarding art assets and engine choice. Early in development, assets were outsourced to Ion Storm's Dallas offices who seemed disinterested in the game, leading Spector to beg for a dedicated art team which he eventually got. As for the engine, the team licensed the Unreal engine and had to spend over half a year learning it, cautiously programming role-playing features like skill systems and dialogue trees for an engine built around shooting.
  • Meanwhile, the Dallas branch of Ion Storm was under fire. Their real-time strategy game Dominions: Storm Over Gift 3 had released to negative reviews and was utterly crushed by StarCraft in sales^note most estimates for the sales of Storm Over Gift 3 are around twenty thousand copies, though a GameSpy retrospective put it at less than ten thousand copies, Tom Hall's Anachronox and John Romero's Daikatana were punching bags in the gaming press for their protracted developments and confrontational marketing, also casting doubts on Deus Ex, and private emails were leaked to the public. The bad press hurt morale and made it nigh-impossible for Ion Storm to hire more developers. Ultimately, the Austin team adapted a "we'll show them" mentality to continue work on the game.
  • As private prototype tests were held in 1999, the feedback was dire. Game systems were criticized for lacking tension while the realistic level design wasn't creating compelling gameplay. Realizing a "less is more" approach was needed, the team began toning down their ambitions and refocused their efforts, cutting their design document in half and trimming many locations from the story to allow the team to focus their efforts on what worked.
  • And even as the game finally began to take shape, Eidos Interactive (who had made a publishing deal with Ion Storm) grew increasingly concerned with the turbulence within Ion Storm's walls. Spector claimed that Eidos repeatedly pressured him to make the game a conventional shooter, while Romero claimed years later that he had to step in late in development to stop Eidos from canceling the game entirely.
• Deus Ex: Invisible War suffered from a myriad of development problems whose end product ultimately led it sinking Warren Spector's reputation and the immersive sim genre. The engine the game was built on, a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 2 dubbed the "Flesh Engine" was capable of great visuals, but it was a technical nightmare to work with. Disaster happened when the lead engine coder left partway through the project and left no documentation behind, leaving the rest of the team scrambling to fix critical engine issues. Further complicating the development was Eidos forcing Ion Storm Austin to also develop it for the Xbox in tandem with the PC, and the Xbox proved less powerful than the developers anticipated. This, combined with the aforementioned engine issues, forced the developers to significantly cut down levels and take extreme measures to try and save on memory usage, such as shutting down the entire game and restarting it on every loading screen. These problems also affected the development of Thief: Deadly Shadows, which was developed concurrently with Invisible War and used the same engine. When the game finally was released, it performed ultimately poorly compared to the previous installment both critically and commercially and led to Eidos cancelling future installments and retooling the only in-development installment as its own game to distance itself from the franchise whose reputation was now marred by Insivible War's failure.
• Devil May Cry 2 became an outstanding example of a Sophomore Slump due to a chaotic and rushed development. Details are still scarce about what happened before Hideaki Itsuno came on board as director; he only joined halfway through the project, and the original director is unknown to this day. According to the Devil May Cry: 3-1-4-2 Graphic Arts book, Itsuno arrived to see that little progress had been done on the game, with many basic gameplay elements undecided and no plot outline written. With the game only six months away from release and Capcom unwilling to push the deadline back, Itsuno and the team scrambled to put together a game that was at least functional. The end result was commercially successful, but took a beating in the reviews for its undercooked gameplay and bland level design. Capcom themselves see it as an Old Shame; Viewtiful Joe pokes fun at it and Devil May Cry 5's "History of DMC" video only offers a brief glance at the game. Itsuno would bounce back with Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, which addressed many of the second game's flaws and was released to critical acclaim, though it failed to outsell 2 due to consumer wariness.
• DmC: Devil May Cry was an attempt to reboot the Devil May Cry series to give it greater worldwide appeal, but it suffered heavily from controversy and development troubles.
  • The idea of rebooting the series came from Capcom's disappointment by the sale numbers of Devil May Cry 4 and a push by Keiji Inafune to "westernize" game development at the company. Wanting to hand the series to a developer in the west, Capcom approached Ninja Theory, who were fresh off of their success with Heavenly Sword and the Acclaimed Flop Enslaved: Odyssey to the West to take up the series. Ninja Theory gladly accepted the offer, but their initial concepts were rejected by Capcom as being too close to the original games. Encouraged by Capcom, they pursued a radically different aesthetic inspired by street culture and works like Fight Club and Dexter.
  • When the game was first debuted at the 2010 Tokyo Game Show, it impressed critics with its visual flair but left fans of the original games confused and angry at the radical changes from the original series, the most glaring was the changes made to the series' iconic protagonist, Dante. NT director Tameem Antoniades infamously lashed out at the complaints in interviews and NT art director Alessandro Taini compared Dante's DMC4 design to Brokeback Mountain and Batman & Robin in a GDC presentation, which drew accusations of homophobia. As a result, Ninja Theory formed a mutually antagonistic relationship with DMC fans, even though many of the choices that got them heat had been at Capcom's behest. Communication and culture issues between Ninja Theory and Capcom meant that DMC4 director Hideaki Itsuno was brought in to advise Ninja Theory on gameplay and visual designs, leading the game to take more elements from the original series than initially intended.
  • Upon release, the game suffered a textbook example of Critical Dissonance. Professional reviewers gave nigh-universally positive reviews, while fans of the original series were deeply displeased with the simplified gameplay mechanics, Darker and Edgier tone and perceived jabs toward the older games. The high review scores did not translate to commercial success however, and the game only managed half the sales of DMC4. In the end, Capcom would Un Reboot the series with Devil May Cry 5, ignoring DmC plot points and outright saying that DmC was Exiled from Continuity in interviews. Ninja Theory also thankfully managed to escape the game's shadow, returning to developing original properties and managing to self-publish the critically-acclaimed hit Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice in 2017.
• Both Destiny and its sequel went through much turmoil owing to conflicts between the development team and senior leadership at both Bungie and Activision.
  • Destiny: There was a lot of difficulty and conflict over exactly what kind of game they were trying to make, the core idea was a hybrid between the mechanics of a First-Person Shooter with the infrastructure of an Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. They did not always agree on the best way to do that.
    • When Joseph Staten revealed the story plans for the base game release to the higher ups they declared it too complex and linear, desiring a more open world approach, leading to most of the material to be dropped and Staten eventually left. Some of that material has filtered into later DLC and the lore, but this was the core reason the first year of the game was so underwhelming with its story as the focus was on refining the gameplay mechanics and Worldbuilding to a sharp point.
    • Marty O'Donnell took on an ambitious composing project to create unique musical environments called "Music of the Spheres," complete with getting Paul McCartney involved, but Activision rejected his ideas for a soundtrack release, and the gameplay reveal was made using other licensed music. This conflict eventually lead to O'Donnell being fired, he successfully sued them for wrongful termination and lost income for profit-sharing and stock options. By the time the game was launched Bungie ended up losing two of the most prominent members of the Halo crew.
  • Destiny 2. According to Jason Schreier, the game underwent a complete reboot in production about sixteen months from release when Luke Smith took over as Game Director. Apparently, many of the current woes that the fandom is expressing (Mainly the Eververse) can be traced back to this decision. For anyone who thinks that this sounds familiar, that's because the exact same thing happened to the first game.
    • People who have paid visits to the actual headquarters of Bungie have discovered that there is a strong internal disagreement with many of the negatively-received aspects of the game. No one knows the full extent of this, but given the wording of these accounts, at best, it's A House Divided, at worst, you could count the amount of people who genuinely like said aspects on one hand, namely the directors.
    • During the Season of the Drifter near the end of Year 2, Activision and Bungie officially parted ways on game development, after having a difficult relationship from the start of the franchise. Rumors imply that Bungie threw a party to celebrate. Year 3 and the release of Shadowkeep was Bungie making the game closer to what they wanted it to be, but the overhaul on PC was massive as they had to switch from the Battle.Net client to Steam.
  • A 2021 report by IGN revealed that Bungie suffered from a chaotic and sexist work culture that negatively impacted the development on Destiny with the narrative team suffering the worst. According to one writer, a woman of color known in the article as Cookie Hiponia, women were denied promotion unless they "got good" at the game, their reports of sexist abuse were aside by HR as just jokes and many writers suffered from stress-related health problems caused by working 80-100 hours per week with Hiponia herself developing a gastrointestinal disorder required surgery. On top of the hostile workplace, the writers were scapegoated by members of the Destiny fanbase, who weren't aware of the development problems and blamed the team for storytelling pitfalls that they had little control over. Only after threats of developers quitting en masse did Bungie finally fire the problematic leads and overhauled the studio structure.
• The development of Doom went generally smoothly, but its infamous 3DO port was something else. It was produced by a company called Art Data Interactive, who's CEO Randy Scott paid for the license by asking for donations from his Church. He beleived that all one had to do to port a game to another platform was to recompile its code, and that new weapons could be added just by importing new art assets. This led to programmer Rebecca "Burger Becky" Heineman, who had joined under the impression she just needed to polish a complete game for release as Scott repeatedly claimed the game was 90% done, having to develop the entire thing, on her own, in ten weeks, which forced her to live in her office to finish it on time.
  • All Scott did during this time was butting heads with Heineman, demanding more additions to the game and still convinced programming wasn't nessacery. The only thing that Scott actively contributed to the final product was the soundtrack since the 3DO has a dedicated sound driver that was incompatible with the 3DO's sound font (he was able to record every track in the game with his garage band).
  • It appears that Art Data attempted to create Full Motion Video cutscenes for the port, if this still photo from Heineman and others dug up by fans are any indication. The result was So Bad, It's Good, which is likely why it wasn't added to the final game.
  • Heineman lost about a week of development time dealing with flaws in the console's development tools and quirks of its operating system; for most games this would have been only a minor inconvenience, but with such a short development timescale, it was all the more damaging. And even if she'd had more time to optimize the code, the console's CPU was too weak for it to even match the resolution or frame-rate of the Atari Jaguar or Sega 32X ports, hence why it runs in such a small gameplay window.
  • In the end, Scott was actively mad at Becky for not putting all of the content he wanted into the game, still under the belief that programming was not necessary. Randy Scott vanished from the industry after Art Data Interactive immediately went under after Scott pressed way more copies than would feasibly ever sell.
  • Nine years later, Heineman released the source code alongside her story of its production and a wish that she had time to polish her work before release. In addition, she's more than happy to recall the story to those interested in her livestreams and convention appearances.
• 2016's Doom (2016) had a hard time getting finished.
  • As covered in the DOOM Resurrected documentary, the game started life as Doom 4. id Software originally built the game as a much more scripted, cinematic experience in the style of Call of Duty, but development suffered a number of restarts and employees leaving, with poor management and direction being blamed for the lack of progress. When screenshots and concept art leaked out in 2008, fans were deeply upset at its derivative Follow the Leader nature and feared it would become an even bigger Oddball in the Series than Doom³, which came out years prior. Id realized the direction of the project was a poor fit for Doom, and rebooted the project with Zenimax's blessing.
  • Even then, it was a rough road; its Quakecon 2014 debut was behind closed doors with no footage allowed, and its E3 2015 showing was met cautiously by the fanbase. Id was forced to outsource the multiplayer as they scrambled to finalize and polish the single-player elements. Bethesda chose to heavily promote the multiplayer in its marketing, which left fans restless about the state of the single-player and only got worse when the multiplayer open beta was slammed for its lack of features and Halo-style weapon loadout system. Bethesda withheld review copies in response, which accordingly sunk expectations to rock-bottom.
  • However, when the game finally released, it was greeted warmly by both fans and critics with the single-player in particular being praised as a quality Genre Throwback, though its multiplayer was and still remains a divisive element.
• Dragon Age II was a victim of an especially rushed development cycle, as the success of Dragon Age: Origins resulted in EA demanding that BioWare were to make a full sequel to within 18 months of the Origins's launch. In comparison, the pre-production on Origins had been 18 months alone, while the development cycle had been clocking in at about 5 years. Under these circumstances, BioWare scrambled to quickly put a team and did a rushed bit of pre-production, where it was decided to take the planned minor Spin-Off game Dragon Age: Exodus and turn it into an uplifted side story by retooling it into being a sequel. According to some sources, the game then ended up spending as little as 8-9 months in active development before it was pushed out the gate to meet EA's deadline.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition suffered from a messy and hectic development.
  • Initially planned to be an expansion to Dragon Age II, the colder-than-expected reception to that game led to BioWare scrapping those plans and turning Inquisition into a full sequel. This had ripple effects through development, as the team had difficulty committing to decisions on gameplay mechanics and story. This led to the game significantly shifting from its PAX 2013 demo, and a number of story and gameplay elements would be cut from the game.
  • Technical issues plagued the game during development. EA mandated the use of DICE's Frostbite Game Engine that had been developed for the Battlefield series. Frostbite has become notorious for its Crippling Overspecialization toward First-Person Shooter games, offering no concessions toward other genres, and would come to plague the development of other games under EA's umbrella. Combined with the team failing to make design decisions early in development, the final months were defined by a harsh period of crunch time.
  • While the game was ultimately a success - enough that several outlets gave it their Game of the Year awards - some at the company would later state that the game's success convinced BioWare's management that indecision and crunch periods were an acceptable reality of modern game development, leading to the troubles faced by Anthem.
• Dragon Quest XI was one of the first games announced for the Nintendo Switch. Its development went smoothly and it released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo 3DS without trouble, but the game's Switch version was delayed by two years because XI was initially developed on a version of Unreal Engine 4 that the Switch did not support, and Square Enix had to spend a fair chunk of time updating the engine to a newer version. To compensate for the delay, the Switch version became an Updated Re-release with new story chapters and several new features, which was eventually re-released on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
• The saga of Duke Nukem Forever is one of gaming's most infamous examples of a production Gone Horribly Wrong, becoming a byword for Vaporware through its 14-year development.
  • The long Development Hell for 3D Realms began in 1997 after Duke Nukem 3D proved to be a smash hit. Forever was originally intended to be a 2D platformer, but was scrapped and rebuilt to be a First-Person Shooter sequel to 3D. The game was first announced in 1997 and made a point to use the latest in technology, with 3D Realms licensing id Software's iDTech 2 engine at an exorbitant cost - roughly $500,000^note to put this in perspective, the licensing costs for powerful game engines late in the next decade, like Unreal Engine 3, didn't cost that much. While the game's showing at E3 1998 impressed many, 3D Realms co-founder George Broussard was concerned that the game would be overshadowed by the likes of Unreal and Half-Life. The team made a unanimous decision to switch to the Unreal engine, a decision that required scrapping the work they had done up to that point.
  • The game would miss release dates for the next few years, and public appearances of the game ceased amid publisher troubles before the game landed with Take-Two. Forever would reemerge at E3 2001, becoming the talk of the show with its advanced graphics and interactivity. The team was elated at the response, but the game would once again fade from the public eye; the release date now being "When it's done.", which became the subject of mockery and Memetic Mutation.
  • Many who worked on the game blame the delays on Broussard, whose perfectionism and desire to upstage the competition led to the game constantly shifting as new technologies and gameplay innovations inevitably arrived, with no end goal in sight. The company's outdated mentality toward game development was also an issue, as it used small teams and a management structure that was inefficient and understaffed for the demands of a big-budget title.
  • As the game was funded entirely by 3D Realms, the game was effectively immune to Executive Meddling by publishers, which led to tensions between Take-Two and 3D Realms over the lack of progress. In response to Take-Two CEO Jeffrey Lapin claiming that the game would cost the company $5.5 million of its earnings in 2003, Broussard publicly stated that "Take-Two needs to STFU" (yes, he really did say this in an online forum that year). Broussard would make several other statements against Take-Two, his Protection from Editors rendering him immune to retaliation.
  • With development dragging on through the mid-2000s, the team became restless with the constant delays and being paid via deferred income; many began walking out. By late 2006, Broussard began to take the idea of finishing the game seriously and the company would bring in new hires in 2007, most notably Brian Hook as project lead, who was the first to push back against Broussard's demands. At one point, Ben Croshaw was approached by Hook to write the game's script, but Broussard shot down Croshaw's irony-drenched draft as disrespectful. Media began to be released once again, starting with a small trailer in late 2007 and in-game footage appearing on The Jace Hall Show in 2008.
  • But funds finally began to dry up. 3D Realms, having spent over $20 million of its own money on Forever, approached Take-Two for an additional $6 million to complete the game. Both parties have conflicting accounts about the exact counter-offer made, but Broussard rejected the offer and 3D Realms ceased development in May of 2009, laying off the development staff. Take-Two filed a lawsuit against 3D Realms for failing to complete the game, which would be settled out of court in 2010. While internal development at 3D Realms had ceased, work continued by ex-employees under Triptych Games.
  • With the PC version of the game nearly complete, 3D Realms contacted Gearbox Software to assist development and create console ports. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford - a former 3D Realms employee who had worked on Duke 3D - convinced 2K Games that Gearbox and Triptych could finally complete the game. The near-final version of Forever made a surprise showing at the Penny Arcade Expo of 2010 with a playable public demo. It was the first time the game had been shown to the public since E3 2001. The reveal of a playable demo reignited interest in the game, setting the internet abuzz with the news while hours-long lines formed for the demo.
  • A new release date was finally set: May 3, 2011. Fittingly, this date would be pushed back one last time to June 2011. Unfortunately, the game's release finally saw the hype bubble pop after being deflated and revived constantly. Reviews were mixed-to-negative, with critics unimpressed with its gameplay and attacking the game's 90s attitudes as crass and unacceptable. Fans were somewhat more positive, though many were displeased with the game borrowing elements from Halo and Half-Life instead of being a true Genre Throwback.
  • While the development nightmare was finally over, the aftershocks continued to echo for years. Gearbox and 3D Realms would tangle in legal disputes over the ownership of the Duke Nukem property, with 3D Realms eventually conceding to Gearbox. The game appears to have been a Franchise Killer for Duke; his only appearances since Forever have been Gearbox's Updated Re-release of Bulletstorm and the World Tour re-release of Duke 3D. 3D Realms managed to remain in business but have fallen irreparably far from their glory days, having backed away from development to publish retro indie titles such as Ion Fury.
• In a partnership with Nintendo, Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness started development on the Nintendo 64 — and neared completion before Silicon Knights were asked to throw away everything and rebuild the game from scratch on the GameCube for launch.^note A situation that isn't unique to just Silicon Knights; see also Star Fox Adventures by Rare, coincidentally another developer that would end up suffering from having their ties to Nintendo cut... Additionally, in its GameCube incarnation, there were some internal concerns on the Middle Eastern areas due to 9/11, causing a delay. Altogether though, the development of the GameCube version (as well as that of The Twin Snakes) were far less catastrophic due to the constant supervision of none other than Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata (no word if Silicon Knights' workplace conditions under Nintendo were as difficult as those of Retro Studios' concurrently).
• The infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600, which was so rushed that it ended up being made just in six weeks. It was made by a single person, Howard Scott Warshaw, and programming for 2600 was notoriously idiosyncratic, so it's actually a minor miracle that the game is playable at all. The game was enormously hyped by the Atari's marketing department, who were so confident that the game would be successful that they manufactured over 4 million cartridges. Instead, it catastrophically failed to live up to expectations, with many people calling it one of the worst games ever made. The game's failure played a huge role in triggering The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. It led to Atari secretly burying tons of unsold cartridges in a secure New Mexico landfill, which were later excavated in 2014.

F-H

• As explained in this article from Eurogamer, development on the Fable games was a long series of Troubled Productions that slowly destroyed Lionhead Studios.
  • After the success of Black & White, Lionhead made a decision that Peter Molyneux felt in hindsight to be a bad idea: it brought on two smaller developers, Big Blue Box and Intrepid, as satellite studios, leading to Lionhead turning into a quite large and bloated company. Big Blue Box began work on what would become Fable, which attracted the attention of Microsoft, which was looking for a Killer App for their new Xbox console and liked what they saw. They immediately stepped in to publish and fund Fable, and all seemed to be going well.
  • Unfortunately, Lionhead's plan to raise money by having the company float on the stock market backfired spectacularly after 9/11 and the resulting crash in the stock market. Leaking money, the company absorbed Big Blue Box and Intrepid, canceling the latter's caveman survival game B.C. and its own internal "Project Dimitri" (which the Black & White dev team had been working on before being shifted to Fable) in order to meet its commitment to Microsoft. All the while, Fable grew more ambitious than initially planned, the result of Molyneux's penchant for constantly thinking of new features to add (some of which his developers resisted), turning into by far the biggest game that anybody involved on it had ever worked on.
  • When it was ultimately released, Fable had all the hallmarks of a Lionhead game: a lovely Wide-Open Sandbox that was absolutely packed with features, characters, monsters, and ways for the player to experiment, but not much of a cohesive story tying it all together, a critical element for a console Role-Playing Game. The long, drawn-out production also meant that, while the game looked good by the standards of an Xbox launch title, at the time of its 2004 release other games had long since passed it by. Many Lionhead veterans maintain that it was Microsoft's support that had saved Fable and ensured it was any good at all, and that Lionhead was in way over its head making such an ambitious RPG.
  • After Fable, Lionhead grew large and bloated, with over three hundred employees at one point in 2005 working on such games as a Fable expansion, Fable II, The Movies, Black & White 2, and more. Molyneux later admitted that the company's resources and his attention were drawn too thin, especially when The Movies and Black & White 2 underperformed in sales and left Lionhead in financial trouble.
  • In 2006, Microsoft purchased Lionhead, hoping to secure Fable as a flagship RPG franchise for the Xbox 360. The deal was based on an earnout, and to secure the rest of the money, Lionhead not only had to make Fable II, but they also had to release Fable III by the end of 2010. Microsoft's involvement marked a change in the culture at Lionhead; the "boys' club" culture that had dominated the company in its early years would no longer fly, and while many grumbled at the increasingly uptight, HR-focused nature of the new Lionhead, most employees agreed that Microsoft's management was for the better. The company redirected its resources towards Fable II, and even though development required heavy crunch towards the end to get the game finished on time, as well as butting heads with Microsoft over some of the content and marketing, the game came out in 2008 to much fanfare.
  • Now, Lionhead had just eighteen months to make Fable III... time that was clearly not enough, especially not with the design changes Molyneux had planned, some of which (like the "Road to Rule" feature) he only announced late in the development cycle. Fable III launched in 2010, and while it received positive reviews, critics noted its technical problems and undercooked story and compared it unfavorably to the previous game. Problems continued to hit Lionhead with their experiences working with Microsoft's Kinect motion control system. One game they were working on, Milo & Kate, fell apart due to both the reduced technical specs of the Kinect and fear that the game would be used by pedophiles as a 'grooming simulator', while Fable: The Journey received mixed reviews, with many critics again citing the technological limitations of the Kinect. After the departure of several veteran developers, Molyneux left Lionhead and formed an independent studio, allegedly because of his disillusionment with being unable to make games at Lionhead that weren't sequels to Fable (a game that, having originated at Big Blue Box outside of his purview, he wasn't so personally connected to in the first place).
  • The final straw for Lionhead was Fable Legends, the most troubled production of them all. The remaining Lionhead developers wished to work on a proper Fable IV, but Microsoft, launching the Xbox One at the time, was keen on the idea of 'games as a service', and wanted to make a multiplayer Fable and rejected Lionhead's single-player game. The developers were incensed by Microsoft's Executive Veto, but had little room to push back given Microsoft's ownership of the studio. And so they got to work making Fable Legends, which was stymied by constant Executive Meddling designed to shoehorn the game into Microsoft's constantly evolving brand strategy, as well as by Lionhead's inexperience at making multiplayer games and designing for competitive balance. Up to $75 million was spent on Fable Legends according to some sources. As development continued to drag on with little to show for it, few developers were surprised when, in 2016, Microsoft cut its losses and closed down Lionhead, canceling Fable Legends in the process.
• Faith and a .45, a cooperative Third-Person Shooter set in The Great Depression, fell victim to this. Though it was mainly external factors and Executive Meddling that killed both the game and its developer, Deadline Games.
  • According to a post-mortem by lead developer Søren Lundgaard, the project originally started as a Bonnie and Clyde video game, directly based on the historical Outlaw Couple. While publishers were receptive to the idea, they also demanded the game not use innocents or police officers as enemies, which flew in the face of the concept and forced the developers to spend years reworking the premise.
  • Eventually, the project became Faith and a .45, which now featured Expyies of Bonnie and Clyde running from John Mammon, an oil baron who had bought out part of the United States. Deadline proceeded to pitch the game to a number of publishers, but the game was repeatedly rejected with the reason being "Old West games don't sell". Demoralized and confused by this response, the developers realized that publishers had no idea what to do with a game set during The Great Depression, and as few games had covered the setting before, it was treated as a western game in the eyes of publishers, which were seen as poor sellers. There were also doubts about the game's focus on a romantically-involved couple not going over with shooter audiences, as Rated M for Manly shooters such as Gears of War and Army of Two were the hot sellers of the genre.
  • In an attempt to get publishers to take on the game, Deadline revealed it to the public with a number of screenshots and trailers, most of which can be seen in this Unseen64 article. While the initial publicity and positive reception was a major boost for the developers, publishers remained unconvinced and uninterested in the game. In a last-ditch attempt to sell the concept, Deadline repitched the game in an After the End setting akin to Fallout. This was also brushed off by publishers, who by now had made clear that they wanted nothing to do with the game regardless of its setting.
  • Unable to secure funding for Faith and a .45 or any other in-development games, which included a sequel to Total Overdose, Deadline filed for bankruptcy in 2009 following the financial failure of Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, and closed down shortly after.
• While Fez emerged as an "underdog darling of the indie game scene" and went on to attain critical acclaim, it was highly-publicized for the five-year Development Hell Phil Fish and his company, Polytron, had faced. The documentary Indie Game: The Movie highlights just a few of their struggles.
  • During Fez's prototyping phase, Fish opened Polytron as a startup company through means of a Canadian government loan. However, they began to run out of money, and the loan wasn't renewed for the game's production phase. Polytron also lost funding from the organization supporting them^note (which preceded the Indie Fund) when their producer, Jason DeGroot, left the company. Fish — contemplating cancelling Fez outright at this point — was forced to borrow money from friends and family for three months in order to keep Polytron open. To his luck, Québécois developer and publisher Trapdoor offered their support in exchange for a portion of Fez's earnings—a turn of events which Fish himself believed to have saved the game.
  • Fish was embroiled in a legal dispute with DeGroot, who was yet to sign his side of a final separation deal; because of this, DeGroot had the ability to potentially block Polytron from presenting anything at 2011 PAX East. The situation left Fish suffering anxiety attacks as Polytron was getting ready for the Penny Arcade Expo. Fortunately, his new partner, Ken Schachter, met with and came to an agreement with DeGroot, settling the problem once and for all.
  • At the Expo itself, last minute changes to the build caused Fez to hang up or crash, to which Fish would have to restart the game. This turned out to be a minor issue, however, as player reception remained positive. His confidence regained, Fish went back to work on the game. Fez was submitted for certification in February 2012 after a few delays, before getting released exclusively to Xbox Live Arcade on April 13, 2012.
  • Months later, Polytron and Microsoft clashed when the former released a patch which, while fixing some technical issues, had introduced a new one that corrupted the saved games for one percent of users. Polytron withdrew the patch, only to reinstate it later after finding Microsoft's fee for subsequent patch releases unfeasible; the latter eventually announced that they would no longer be charging for patches, and Fish went on to criticize Microsoft for mishandling Fez's release, citing poor advertising and little promotion or publicity.
  • Fez 2 was announced in June 2013. However, after an argument with game journalist Marcus Beer, Fish angrily cancelled the game and left the industry. This bit of news surprised the rest of Polytron, and ever since then are loath to discuss upcoming projects (besides ports). On account of what happened, Fish himself became a persona non grata among portions of the gaming community. Fingers were still crossed that Fez 2 would see the light of day, but those hopes were quashed when Fish sold the rights to Fez and Polytron after his personal information was hacked^note (over his support of the controversial Depression Quest).
• Final Fantasy:
  • Midway through development of Final Fantasy II, the development staff moved to Sacramento, California to finish the game, since the work visa of lead programmer Nasir Gebelli (who is Iranian-American) had expired.
  • Final Fantasy XIII was envisioned as the starting point for a "ten year project" of games sharing a common mythos (a la the Ivalice Alliance) called the Fabula Nova Crystallis: Final Fantasy. Unfortunately the project was plagued with issues mostly stemming from XIII being the first Final Fantasy game produced for the seventh generation. The vast majority of time and effort was spent on the creation of the Crystal Tools engine, which was envisioned as the engine Square Enix would use on all of their future seventh generation games. Meanwhile, the development team could not agree on a creative vision for the game: the E3 2006 trailer felt more like a concept movie, and the extravagant Summon Magic was purely the art team's idea. The resulting game was commercially successful and scored well with critics but was also controversial for having a linear storytelling style similar to earlier titles like Final Fantasy X during a time when open world games were becoming popular.
  • Final Fantasy XV was announced in 2006 as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, a PlayStation 3 exclusive. The game spent four years in pre-production due to the protracted development of the Crystal Tools engine, which gave director Tetsuya Nomura time to work on three Kingdom Hearts games (358/2 Days, coded and Birth by Sleep) and a remake of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Unfortunately, Crystal Tools was unable to handle the open environments of Versus XIII, which caused Square Enix to order another purpose-built engine: the Luminous Engine. Frustrated, Nomura's team moved to internally-built code with only the graphics supported by Luminous.
    
    When Versus XIII was about to enter full production, Square Enix got an early look at the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which threatened to render Versus XIII obsolete before release. Even after blowing so many resources on two purpose-built engines, SQEX president Yoichi Wada Mis-blamed Nomura for the development trouble; he ordered Versus XIII retooled into the next mainline Final Fantasy and assigned the developers of Final Fantasy Type-0 to replace Nomura's team. Type-0 director Hajime Tabata was made co-director with the long-term goal of making Nomura leave the project — which succeeded.
    
    Unfortunately, development proved even more chaotic under Tabata. The battle system changed countless times; the script was heavily rewritten even months before release; and the dev team took so much fan feedback that the game's release was delayed by two months. While the game was still critically and commercially successful, development of XV proved so exhausting that Hajime Tabata quit Square Enix in 2018, and the second of two DLC waves was cancelled and relegated to a book.
  • Final Fantasy XIV had a very troubled production from the beginning, a production so troubled, they literally pulled a Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies ending to revive it. This video series describes what happened, but Cliff Notes:
    • Coming off of the success of Final Fantasy XI, Square Enix got to work on creating a sequel to it for PC and Playstation 3. In a case of Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup, various teams were created to craft the various worlds and systems for the game. What no one realized (except maybe the localization the QA teams) was that all of these systems were individually amazing, but were a total mess when combined. Background pieces had as many graphics and polygons as a character, the UI was confusing, crafting was slow and tedious, movement was a hassle, and the game ran extremely slowly on all but the most powerful hardware at the time. As the game came together, the developers started to realize that maybe they were doing something wrong, but many of them were too stubborn to adjust and kept going. When the game was finally released, despite people noting things in the beta that were wrong, the game was savaged by players and critics alike because of its design flaws.
    • As this was going on, Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida, who had worked on the Dragon Quest series but had no experience in Final Fantasy, had been approached by FF XIV team members to help and petitioned to let him join the team. Yoshida felt, at the time, that Square Enix was caught up in a pattern of arrogance that needed to be shot down. However, as Yoshida and his new team prepared to work on the game, he realized the game in its current state could not be fixed. He approached the bigwigs at Square Enix with two plans. Plan A: keep patching the game and try to make it the best it could, knowing it would never be the best and the Online branding would be tarnished. Plan B: patch the game and make an entirely new one behind the scenes to replace the old one. Plan B was implimented in order to salvage the game.
    • During development of this new game, the 2011 Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami struck, and Yoshida made the decision to power down the servers to help alleviate the pressure caused by the damage. When they returned power, Yoshida recieved letters of thanks for keeping the game going as people were able to connect through the game. However, it prompted him to replace the primal Leviathan with Good King Moggle Mog XII, but it was decided to keep the game running during this time. In the following months, patches were released that added auto-attack, removed the fatigue system, brought in Chocobo mounts, introduced famous faces like Hildebrand Manderville... and a strange red star in the sky. On October 11, 2011, A Realm Reborn was announced with benefits made for new players who stuck with the game during the time this was all happening. In the last months of 2012, final patches were made to set up the final basic systems for 2.0 and set the stage for the end.
    • On November 11st, 2012, after a week of insane monster spawns outside city hubs, the game finally reached its end, playing the "End of an Era" trailer before the servers were shut off. Nine months later, A Realm Reborn was launched, rescuing a game that heavily floundered upon released, and becoming one of the most iconic games in MMO history. The fact that Yoshida and his team were able to turn a massive failure into such a success is considered one of the biggest Author's Saving Throw attempts in video game history, but it had a very rough road getting there.
• Firefall, a team-based hybrid of an MMORPG and a First-Person Shooter, was announced in 2010 as a potential e-Sports contender with a heavy focus on PvP. However, as explained in this GameFront article, over the course of its development things went downhill fast. As of this writing, the game is still in development, but studio Red 5 has laid off a sizable chunk of its workforce, putting its future in doubt.
  • Frequent changes in direction from Red 5 studio founder Mark Kern, the studio's horizontal structure making it hard to coordinate efforts, and Kern's hot temper, absenteeism, and attempts to dictate the production all led to wasted work and what former employees described as a once-pleasant, tight-knit work environment slowly turning toxic. The original focus on PvP also faded as Kern lost interest in e-Sports, culminating in the game's beta dropping PvP altogether in 2014, despite all the work that had been put into the PvP side of the game.
  • There was also Stage 5 TV, a YouTube channel designed to promote Firefall. Kern and Red 5 spent lavishly on Stage 5, with highly produced short films and reality-style shows shot with very expensive (over $40,000 each) 4k-resolution video cameras, along with a studio, a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van, and other equipment.^note For comparison, most professional, high-end YouTube videos are shot with cameras that cost in the low four figures, with budgets typically ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. Kern would greenlight short films left and right, throwing money at projects that often turned out to be either very low quality or having little to do with games at all, and not the sort of thing that Red 5 wanted to showcase. Stage 5 quickly became a money sink that diverted resources away from Firefall, before being scaled back drastically in 2013.
  • Red 5 finally decided to pull the plug entirely on July 2017. At this point, most of the playerbase agreed that it was only a matter of time.
• Atari's Firefox arcade game was plagued with problems from start to finish. The success of Dragon's Lair prompted management to demand the game be ready in a few months, so it could appear at the October 1983 AMOA show in New Orleans. Experienced designers and engineers balked at the schedule; the role of project engineer fell on a new hire who had claimed to be a programmer, hardware engineer, and systems developer, yet who had never designed an arcade game before. The game used three boards designed by different groups, and a laserdisc player that had never been tested in an arcade environment. The incomplete game was rushed to the AMOA show in Nolan Bushnell's private jet, but despite the assurances of the project engineer, remained a dormant shell for the entire show. The project engineer quit afterward; Jed Margolin was cajoled into the project, working 12-hour shifts for three weeks straight to resolve numerous engineering issues, including a new raster monitor that tended to explode when it did not receive a sync signal. The final insult came after the game was released; its high price and declining demand for laserdisc games resulted in Firefox being a flop right out of the gate.
• Fuga: Melodies of Steel was CyberConnect2's first venture into indie game development and publishing, and as they stated over different articles on Famitsu, so many things went wrong that it's a miracle the game didn't crash and burn on release. This included an extremely understaffed team that had no programmers at the start (everyone else was working on the licensed anime-endorsed games), the project going over-budget and passed projected development time due to certain features being added last minute, the team confusing wholesale and retail price causing the game's pricing to be out of sync across multiple regions and systems, and, somehow, the development team forgot to contact Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo for their respective consoles' development kits. At the end of Fuga's development cycle.
• While Fortnite's Battle Royale mode had a smooth and quick development process thanks to piggybacking on existing assets and code, the same could not be said for the core Save the World mode. It took at least six years to make and was the first game to use Unreal Engine 4, which wasn't finished at the time and slowed production down as a result. Epic Games was also looking into using the games as a service model and reached out to various MMORPG game designers and Chinese conglomerate Tencent, who had experience with the model, for help. This led to many senior employees at Epic Games, including lead designer Cliff Bleszinski, leaving the company. Darren Sugg, one of the MMORPG game designers hired by Epic Games, then had to pick up the slack Bleszinski left behind when he left.
• Gex, as discussed by programmer Gregg Tavares here. The development team was inexperienced, overworked to the point of doing 12 to 16 hours a day, understaffed and rushed to finish the game for Christmas. A lot of content was cut due to time and manpower constraints, and lead designer Justin Knorr was fired after hiding an insulting message in the game that included Crystal Dynamics co-founder Madeline Canepa's actual phone number.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game, while not as fraught with development difficulties as the films, had to deal with a set of problems of its own, including struggles to handle the game's internal development engine, problems securing actors for roles and cost overruns resulting in Vivendi Studios slashing the project's budget anywhere from 25-40%. To note, the producers had to work around Bill Murray's infamous silence related to which projects he was confirmed to be working on by lobbying his brother, Brian-Doyle Murray, who they cast in the game as the Mayor of New York (replacing David Marguiles) and eventually asked him to tell Bill about the project. Additionally, just as the game was finishing production, it was left in developmental limbo as a result of the Activision/Vivendi merger, but was bought by Atari several months later. Despite that, the game was a critical success, and sold one million units by July 2009.
• Golden Axe was planned to have a 3D remake in the style of Castle of Illusion, but according to a developer on the Golden Axe revival project it was a nightmare to make. Crunch hours, the suits not knowing what to do with the thing, and health issues plagued the project and Sega ultimately pulled the plug on it. The cancellation of the Golden Axe remake played a hand in SEGA Studios Australia closing their doors. However, it wasn't a total waste as Sega cleaned up a prototype and released it for free on Steam as Golden Axed. That said, its release is a sore spot for those who DID work on the prototype, and the developers weren't contacted by Sega (allegedly) about it being released on Steam.
• Goldeneye Rogue Agent: According to screenwriter Danny Bilson in a video and interview with Lucas Raycevick, the game was "our dream that became kind of a nightmare" thanks to this trope.
  • The concept started when Bilson and writing partner Paul DeMeo, having written prior James Bond games under the flag of Electronic Arts, pitched a Bond game where the player would be a rogue MI6 agent playing both sides in a "gang war" between Bond villains Dr. No and Auric Goldfinger. Despite certain restrictions coming down from EON and MGM regarding the pitch, it quickly entered pre-production at EA Los Angeles.
  • Just as quickly, troubles descended down on the project. EA mandated that it needed a quick turnaround, as EA was intent on keeping its Bond games to a yearly release cycle and had 007: From Russia with Love lined up for 2005. EA LA manager John Batter named the game Goldeneye: Rogue Agent for marketing reasons, despite the game having no relation to the film or the game of the same name^note The game would ultimately include a paper-thin justification by having the protagonist lose an eye and have it be replaced a golden prosthetic and thus be given the nickname "GoldenEye".. Bilson took particular exception to this, noting that the name would bring unfair comparisons.
  • EA Los Angeles attempted to overhaul its technology during development. The game engine they used had come under fire for its dated graphics in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, pressuring the studio to take action. With EA demanding that Rogue Agent be released within nine months, EA LA found themselves gutting the concept in order to make it work within the confines of their in-progress engine upgrade and the strict deadline imposed by EA. Bilson was dismayed as communication between the creatives and the development team grew "out of sync", and virtually all the storylines and ambitious setpieces he had drawn up was cut in the mad dash to present a shippable product.
  • The game also had knock-on effects with Timesplitters Future Perfect, developed by former Rare veterans at Free Radical, as EA slashed the marketing budget for Future Perfect in favour of Rogue Agent. Future Perfect became an Acclaimed Flop while Rogue Agent was panned for its repetitive gameplay. Bilson, having already grown disillusioned with how EA was handling the business side of games he had worked on, decided that Rogue Agent was the last straw and walked away from the company. Bilson would be hired as a creative executive at THQ during its final years before returning to screenwriting with Da 5 Bloods in 2020.
• Greed Monger was a Kickstarter game by Electronic Crow Games that was meant to be a Free-to-Play MMO RPG with a focus on crafting, economics, and politics that allowed the player to do whatever they wanted. While the project made almost four times its original funding goal, it ended up suffering due to terrible behind the scenes problems and never actually released. Where to begin?
  • The game was thought of by Web designer/Mortgage consulter/Club promoter/Voice actor/DJ competitor/Jujitsu competitor/Head of his own marketing SEO company Jason Appleton, who wanted to get into game design. After many months of zero progress, backers became suspicious and impatient. Looking at the development pictures, backers wondered where their money was going to, especially since Appleton stated in a video that he already had the budget for not only the video game, but also a server farm.
  • Enter James Proctor, the game's sole programmer. Proctor was a Unity developer best known on the Unity forums as a guy who creates loads of games every five minutes that he never ends up finishing. Appleton hired Proctor because of his love for programing, thinking that Greed Monger will get finished quickly and safely when in fact, the opposite happened.
  • What backers ended up seeing was a game that had no original assets or models at all. All the money that the backers spent ended up being used by Proctor to buy Unity store-bought assets, essentially turning the game into an overly expensive asset flip. Three years later, photos were shown to backers in order to calm them down and show that the game was progressing. Instead, it caused a lot of animosity thanks to the game looking just plain awful. It was then revealed on the Unity forums that Proctor quit the project because he hated working with Appleton, since not only was Proctor not getting paid until the final product was released, but if he were to ever quit development, Appleton would sue him. Worse, Proctor was almost about to lose his life thanks to all the stress both Appleton and the project were putting on him. Proctor didn't have a contract to prove any of this. Instead, he had his and Appleton's Skype conversation.
  • "But wait!" you say, "How could Proctor pay for things like taxes, rent, and electricity if he was working on the game for years without pay?" Well, it was later revealed that Proctor suffered from depression, and that he couldn't leave his house without having a panic attack if he were to see a large crowd. Because of this, Proctor was getting disability checks from the government. Yup, the game was actually being funded by tax payers, while the backers' money was spent on already made assets from the Unity Store.
  • The project ended with Greed Monger never getting released, Proctor quitting the project, and Appleton leaving the project with the remaining Kickstarter money, having gone silent, though Proctor randomly shows off the build for the game from time to time, and most likely will never be able to finish it.
• The arcade Shoot 'Em Up G-Stream G2020 has a unique development history. The game was the brainchild of former Konami employee Toshiaki Fujino, who had struggled with self-doubt and unemployment and was about to leave the game industry entirely until he saw an employment ad from an obscure and rather shady Korean company named Oriental Soft, which specifically asked for someone interested in developing an arcade shoot'em up. As Fujino badly wanted to make such a game, he immediately took the job but the problems would not end there: Oriental Soft would not pay him or composer Hiroshi Tanabe (a.k.a. Naoto) for most of development, and the game ran on hardware that was flimsy and woefully outdated for 2001; in particular, the board only had 3MB of audio memory available for music, only enough for about 30 seconds of background soundtrack. The story would have an happy ending though, as after completing the game, Fujino and Naoto left Oriental Soft and founded their own company Triangle Service, which would continue making arcade shoot'em ups, and eventually get the right to rerelease G-Stream G2020 alongside their other games, which they did under the new title of Delta Zeal.
• Valve Software's landmark Half-Life series is known as a benchmark for revolutionizing gaming with each new major installment, so it's no surprise that actually producing them is a very uphill battle:
  • As covered by The Final Hours of Half-Life, Half-Life was so ambitious that most publishers rejected the game, and Valve was forced to cancel other projects to focus their efforts. Initially given a release date of November 1997, Valve repeatedly delayed the game after playtesters were finding it unfun and incohesive, with the setpiece design coming from the team placing every possible idea in a demo level out of desperation. 1998 was a year of brutal crunch development as the game was effectively rebuilt from the ground up, with developers pulling all-nighters on the regular and relying on internal committies named "cabals" to manage design aspects. Roughly two months before the release, the source code control system of Valve "exploded", resulting in a catastrophic loss of data and forcing the team to recover game code from various employee computers to complete development.
  • Half-Life 2 spent five years in development, and had a number of setbacks and challenges that impeded work. Aside from spending close to a year on a single gameplay trailer (which had to be reworked over and over because Gabe Newell and Jay Stelly were unimpressed by it), the project was originally given a release date of September 30, 2003, despite the dev team knowing that there was no way they would be able to make the deadline because near-final maps and minor storylines had been thrown out. The problems were then compounded by a delay announced on the week before the game was to be released, and making matters worse, an incomplete build of the game along with the source code for the game engine was stolen from Valve and released online a week afterward. This triggered a massive backlash over Valve lying to the fans over the release date and the stolen build showing that the E3 demos were heavily scripted. It took another year before the game was released, though it was met with resounding critical praise and commercial success. The original storyline and scrapped gameplay elements can be seen here.
  • Half-Life: Alyx was built on an even more troubled path, this time not because of strict deadlines, but there being effectively no deadlines, and Valve losing much of its steam (so to speak) since the start of the 2010s. According to the documentary The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve began focusing on the successor to their in-house Source engine — simply called "Source 2" — following Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but the unexpected complications that extended its development resulted in many planned projects being stillborn, including the legendarily ill-fated Half-Life 3. Combined with the studio's organizational style visibly turning on itself^ExplanationValve famously works on a quasi-anarchic model where developers assign themselves to whatever self-directed projects they and their teams are most interested in, which worked for starting new ideas, but relied entirely on collaborative momentum for projects to actually be completed, virtually no projects were getting finished. It wasn't until they began their pursuit in VR technology and smaller concept projects like The Lab around 2016 (which reintroduced their need for strict deadlines to coincide with the release of the Valve Index) did they finally buckle down in pursuing a new landmark project simply hinging around "Half-Life, but VR". From there on, the usual Valve process of reiteration and refinement began taking hold again for the next several years, and Half-Life: Alyx was finally released in 2020, 13 years after the previous Half-Life, and to critical acclaim and commercial success.
• Halo
  • The final iteration of Halo: Combat Evolved that we know today was developed in just nine months, a consequence of Microsoft acquiring the title as an early Xbox exclusive. This resulted in a very contentious developer-publisher relationship, as Bungie struggled to work with Microsoft as a publisher, and was often suspicious of their intentions for the game. From the perspective of Microsoft's Franchise Division, they had an immense interest in ensuring the game would be a Killer App for the Xbox, and saw Bungie's reluctance to cooperate as immature. The biggest episode in this conflict surrounds the tie-in novel, Halo: The Fall of Reach. Microsoft commissioned author Eric Nylund to write it with the intention that it would be the starting point for a multi-media expanded universe, and gave him just seven weeks to write the book. Four weeks in, Bungie attempted to have the work cancelled because they envisioned Halo as a standalone work and did not wish to give its universe or characters a definitive backstory. The Franchise Division's Eric Trautmann managed to negotiate the book's continued existence, in exchange for assisting Bungie in completing the game's script, which was heavily behind schedule. As a result, Trautmann and his writers had to write a bulk of the game's dialogue with only a basic outline of what was happening in each level. For example, the infamous "This cave is not a natural formation" quote was the result of a writer only having outdated concept art to use as reference. Ultimately, Halo: Combat Evolved would win commercial and critical acclaim, become the Killer App for the fledgling Xbox, and spawned a massive franchise and expanded universe that continues to grow to this day. The Bungie-Microsoft relationship would get less dysfunctional, but the conflicting visions for the franchise would remain an issue for the remainder of Bungie's stewardship.
  • Halo 2. As detailed here, Bungie did not want to just retread on Halo: Combat Evolved and would indulge in Sequel Escalation. They built a new engine that pushed the Xbox to the limits, created an impressive trailer, and then discovered the console couldn't actually handle the tech, meaning they had to restart from scratch after 18 months of work. The planned sprawling levels had to be scaled down considerably, the storyline was cut down (leading to a rushed ending that served as a shameless Sequel Hook) and trying to reach the November 2004 deadline meant the developers had to discard almost everything planned along the way. It became a Killer App, particularly for groundbreaking online console multiplayer, but everyone agreed the single player campaign required more polish, and Bungie felt the game was not as good as they planned (thus much more effort was put into Halo 3).
  • Halo Infinite, according to this report. Originally intended for Xbox One and Windows, the game switched to becoming a 2020 launch title for the Xbox One's successor, the Xbox Series X|S. Besides having to create multiple compatible ports, studio 343 Industries faced many challenges including working from home during a pandemic, adjusting to a new open world design and transitioning to a new game engine. Yet the biggest problem was the high developer turnover with senior leads leaving and contractors, who made up most of the development team, resigning after 18 months of work per company policy. Development did turn a corner when Joseph Staten, the original cinematic director at Bungie, came onboard and used his experience to address the flawed studio decisions and poor developer morale. It also helps that Microsoft delayed the game's release by a year to avoid releasing an unpolished game that would further tarnish the franchise (and to also coincide with the 20th anniversary of the first game). Ultimately Infinite was released to positive reception in 2021 and became one of the biggest launch success for the Xbox Series X|S though there were still sign of troublesome development as staple series elements like campaign co-op and Forge mode were absent at launch.
    • Post-launch support for Infinite was similarly troublesome. In the lead up to the game's release, 343 and Xbox touted that the game would have years of support including expansions to the campaign and multiplayer. As with pre-launch development, the live-service was continuously hampered by the tech and manpower issues, resulting in delayed content releases and the scrapping of promised features like split-screen co-op and additional story missions. However, the biggest setback to the live-service happened in 2023 when Microsoft would layoff dozens of 343 staff members and Staten himself would leave Microsoft, leaving a skeleton crew in its place. Despite 343's continuous work and some successes like the release of Forge mode and a strong competitive scene, Infinite never quite recovered from the drop-off in players and hardly has a presence in mainstream gaming discourse.
• Highlander - The Last of the MacLeods, according to a comment on Spoony's review of the game, had a terrible production.
  • Lore Design, the makers of the game, were just a bunch of inexperienced 24-year-old Highlander fans wanting to make a game. Problems had already arisen when the folks at Lore Design were forced to make a game based on Highlander: The Animated Series, which they all despised. No one except the boss of Lore Design knew where the budget for the game was coming from.
  • Coding for the Atari Jaguar CD was a nightmare, since because the Jaguar CD wouldn't allow Lore Design to use an already built engine like the one used for Quake, they had to code everything by scratch.
  • The composer for the game, Paul C, had a miserable time making the music. He could only come up with 2-second loops that didn't go anywhere. The team would have been able to allow longer music tracks by writing a small wavetable synthesis engine, but that would have taken up more space in the RAM and CPU, which would have led to a decrease in the graphics.
  • The game development caused the developers to drink heavily, which might have influenced some of the more weirder parts of the game.
  • When the game was released, it sold poorly thanks to the Atari Jaguar CD's atrocious hardware not allowing its games to be played at all (including this one). As a result, Lore Design closed its doors shortly after the game shipped.
• Homefront was subject to a lengthy, excruciating production for developer Kaos Studios, according to the fittingly-titled Polygon article "Death March".
  • Before exchanging hands with Electronic Arts and ultimately THQ to become Kaos Studios, Trauma Studios was known for Battlefield 1942's Desert Combat mod. After developing their first game, Frontlines: Fuel of War, in 2008, lead developer Frank DeLise left Kaos, taking its respected work culture with him and throwing the company into crisis.
  • As part of a new greenlighting policy, THQ critiqued prototypes before authorizing game development. Impressed with Homefront's pitch demo, they ordered Kaos to prepare a demo for E3 2009. What followed was 18 months of resource-eating labor on a five-minute-long demo.
  • Because the game's vision statement was open-ended, every designer proposed hundreds of ideas, resulting in plenty of design inconsistencies.
  • Employees were frustrated with DeLise's replacement, Dave Schulman, who made them accommodate THQ's endless design requests. He tried fostering a relationship with THQ to limit Executive Meddling, like Kaos enjoyed under DeLise. Thanks to a corporate reshuffling, however, THQ's new leadership instead fought with Schulman over his company management and responses to publisher directives.
  • Not helping was a damning audit of Homefront, which revealed that Kaos' vision was impossible, and that they had little to show despite being a multimillion-dollar production. Schulman departed Kaos and was replaced by creative director Dave Votypka.
  • Danny Bilson, THQ's vice president of core games, took the reins when Votypka couldn't multitask. Some ex-employees describe Bilson as arrogant, but most agree that he was inconsistent: his ideas suddenly pitched Homefront as a Call of Duty rival—a goal Kaos and THQ agreed was lofty, yet pursued anyway.
  • By late 2009 and early 2010, the game was still unfinished. Several of EA's veteran shooter developers joined, along with David Broadhurst as Kaos' new production lead. Initiating a seven-month crunch cycle on the team, Broadhurst allegedly rode several employees hard and publicly rebuked them in front of coworkers. His leadership, while criticized, is still often credited as the reason for Homefront's completion.
  • Bilson's sardonic Twitter comment about Kaos' crunch cycle angered developers, who then aired grievances against THQ and Kaos. Votypka was forced to play damage control.
  • The final year of development was a nightmare, if the frosty reception to Votypka's speech at Kaos' 2010 holiday party was any sign. Morale was low, and a good chunk of personnel quit - either due to physical and mental exhaustion, or accepting jobs offered to them by other game studios out of pity for what they had gone through at Kaos.
  • Homefront ultimately received a mixed critical reception and undershot Kaos's expectations. After a large stock drop in March 2011, THQ confirmed three months later that Kaos was shutting down.
• And production on the sequel, Homefront: The Revolution, had to deal with the fallout from the last game on top of its own new problems, to the point where the end credits opened with a message from game director Halit Zala concerning it. It took until 2016 for the game to finally come out, upon which it received mixed reviews. To quote the linked Kotaku article:
  "Even this first-hand explanation sells the chaos short. First, the developers of the original Homefront closed. Then the series was moved to THQ Montreal, then Crytek UK. Then publisher THQ closed, and Deep Silver picked up the tab. Then Crytek UK ran into financial issues, which led to many involved in the game’s development — including Hasit Zala himself — to walk out. *deep breath* Then Deep Silver’s parent company Koch Media stepped in, bought the property, set up a new studio and delayed the game from 2015 to 2016. Zala returned to head up development once more. So when he says 'the path has not always been a smooth one', he’s not kidding!"
• Hiveswap, the video game set in the Homestuck universe has had an extensive an quite rocky development along the way with it still despite being announced and started development almost 12 years ago still is on the horizon.
  • Despite breaking its kickstarter fund by a wide margin, with 2.4 Million dollars being raised for the project which was slated for a summer 2014 release, multiple delays followed. The main developers, The Odd Gentlemen, were subsequently dropped due to budgeting issues and unclear guidance from writers. This forced Hiveswap to be developed by the publishing company then on forward, What Pumkin in their new New York offices worked on Hiveswap until its eventual shutdown in favor for a different team that could work remotely in 2015. This new team, decided to ditch the one before 3D visuals of Hiveswap and code leading to years of work and money being lost. Hiveswap was finally released in 2017, but before release was decided the game would be split into episodic games instead of one giant game, due to an easier workload and to follow the structure of the original webcomic. Around this time "Homestuck: Beyond Canon" started its own run which depended on its own Patreon page to keep the lights on, which What Pumpkin started siphoning money out of to continue Hiveswap Act: 2 development, which finally released in 2020. Despite all this, Hiveswap Act: 3 has had nothing spoken about it besides some concept art and confirmed its being developed, with the final act 4 and Hiveswap's sequel series "Haunt Switch" also being confirmed to be coming all the way back to the original kickstarter.
• H1Z1 was a zombie-themed MMO by Daybreak Game Company that originally released on Steam Early Access in January 2015, but its ongoing development ended up transforming into an extremely complicated mess for a variety of reasons, from conflicting vision for the game's direction, to technical setbacks, to frequent exchanges of hand. As a condensed summary:
  • The game titled H1Z1 — while facing major server problems early on — was ultimately a modest Early Access success, though in February 2016, it was announced that the game would become split into two separate titles with their own development teams for ongoing support: H1Z1: Just Survive (focusing on the MMO and survival elements) and H1Z1: King of the Kill (a Battle Royale Game). This naturally induced a huge fission of the existing playerbase, with attention by players and developers ultimately favoring King of the Kill. By August 2018, the survival game — which had been retitled to simply Just Survive in 2017 — was shut down due to low player numbers.
  • During the initial announcement of the split, it was also announced that there would be console ports alongside the games' official release, slated for September 20, 2016. However, by the time that month rolled around, it was announced that the console ports were put on pause in order to focus on the PC version, and then just a week before the release date, news came that the game was still deemed "incomplete" and would remain in Early Access development until further notice.
  • H1Z1: King of the Kill attained a spike in positive attention around 2017 following the rise of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds and later Fortnite^note (In an odd twist of fate, Daybreak initially brought on Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene — back when he was simply known for producing a popular battle royale mod in DayZ — as a consultant for King of the Kill, but following this period, he was later picked up by (what was then named) Bluehole Games to produce Player Unknowns Battlegrounds), but soon found itself unable to keep up with the competition of them and other battle royale titles. By the time of its eventual release from Early Access in February 2018 (as well as a PlayStation 4 release in August 2018), Daybreak had been struggling with deciding on and implementing features to give itself an edge from other titles, from suddenly announcing then adding in an "Auto Royale" game mode based on Vehicular Combat, to the game initially launching with a $20 price tag, only to be reverted to a free-to-play a mere week later. The game's title was also in flux, with Daybreak periodically ditching the King of the Kill subtitle and just referring to the game once again as H1Z1.
  • During this development period, Daybreak was undergoing chaos from various acquisitions and restructuring: after being independent since 2015, the studio received an investment from holding company NantWorks in 2018, causing Daybreak to undergo several rounds of layoffs between 2018-2019, with it being announced in March 2019 that Daybreak would be split into three separate divisions. In this shuffle, H1Z1: King of the Kill was rebranded yet again to Z1 Battle Royale, with its new developer division being NantG Mobile, who — in a bizarre turn of events — reverted the game's form to a patch from 2017, undoing two years worth of work to the combat, movement, graphics, and other game mechanics in the title.
  • In April 2019 — a mere one month after taking the wheel — NantG Mobile returned the game back to Daybreak, citing confusion from both development parties as having severely impeded the title's progress. This presented issues for Daybreak in trying to revert NantG's reversal of their progress, and ultimately, they were forced to source their PS4 port of their game (which had become greatly asynchronous from the PC version that that point) and sought to integrate console-specific content for the PC version. Reportedly, NantG had provided a season's worth of old content, but this never saw the light of day.
  • The game's final update came in the form of a bug fix in February 2020. In December of the same year, it was announced that Daybreak was being bought out by Swedish holding company Enad Global 7, and in April 2021, then-CEO Robin Flodin announced that they were going through the game's codebase and were interested in adding new life back into the game. This ended up being the last news of the game's development, with Flodin being replaced by Ji Ham (formerly Daybreak's CEO) in August 2021. No updates to the game have been made since, with North American servers becoming defunct on June 2023 without announcement (though European servers still remain).

I-K

• Indie Game Battle was a hella ambitious project; a Super Smash Bros. clone starring characters from indie games. Unfortunately, as several former devs have testified, the lead developer Felix Kjolner failed to learn anything from the disastrous story of fellow fighting game Beast's Fury and tore the project down with his own unstable ego.
  • When the game first previewed, it was roundly mocked for its cheap appearance and underwhelming roster, with generic-looking nobodies far outnumbering the few recognizable characters such as The Kid from I Wanna Be the Guy and Salad Fingers (who wasn't even technically a videogame character, being a Newgrounds web series). Many people learned of the game's existence from Caustic Critic Jim Sterling's video, which certainly didn't help its image.
  • The devs struggled in obtaining the licenses for the "heavy hitters" in the indie industry: Edmund McMillen said no to using Isaac, Yacht Club said they'd rather have Shovel Knight in Smash ^note  which he was, albeit as an Assist Trophy there rather than fully playable as he would be here, which really shows what they thought of the game that they considered this a better outcome, Toby Fox wouldn't even give the courtesy of a reply, and nobody was willing to cough up the license fee to obtain Lilac.
  • Still, the game began to show some promise, improving in graphical quality as well as managing to secure a surprising number of fighters such as Zee Tee from Eversion, Captain Viridian from VVVVVV, The Batter from OFF, a goat from Goat Simulator, and Dust from Dust: An Elysian Tail. However, it became clear that Kjolner was apparently so desperate to pad out the roster that he was not only including characters from "indies-to-be" that weren't yet released (some of which were later straight-up cancelled), but also characters from games that hadn't even started production. Him actually beginning work on these games only made things worse, as he increasingly neglected Indie Game Battle in favor of his own work.
  • People working with Kjolner were treated poorly: Kjolner reacted terribly to criticism and would often spite developers he had butted heads with by stalling work on their characters, deliberately making their characters play worse, and "forgetting" to credit them for their contributions. He would also send his yes-men to spam fake positive reviews as well as harass and mass downvote◊ anyone who made negative ones.
  • Gaming website Opium Pulses agreed to feature Indie Game Battle on their store page in exchange for their mascot Opius becoming a character, a deal in which Kjolner never upheld his end of the bargain, essentially conning the site into giving him free advertising.
  • As the criticism wore him down Kjolner's ego went out of control. He started kicking out several longtime developers (such as BountyXSnipe, StarTurbo, and Ryan Silberman, who had all been working with him for years) and banning them from his Discord channel, often making up fake reasons for said bans and removing any characters or stages they had contributed to the game in the process. If anyone stuck up for said developers, they would also be banned, as would anyone who happened to be friends with people who had been previously banned.
    • Silberman's treatment deserves special mention. Kjolner and his yes-men ripped on Missileman (Silberman's game) constantly, nagging Silberman to change the game to their desires and regularly threatening to remove Missileman as a character if demands weren't met. After booting Silberman from the project, Kjolner later lied to Silberman that the fans had voted for Missileman to be removed when no such thing had happened. For the rest of the game's history and to this very day, Kjolner and his yes-men treat Silberman as a Boogeyman-figure out to sabotage the (nonexistent) game.
  • When the game was finally cancelled in 2017 it had barely changed from its Early-Access debut in 2015, with no extra modes added and several characters unfinished, unbalanced, unimplemented, or removed. Kjolner showed he had learned absolutely nothing by blaming the game's state on "the haters" while posting articles slandering his former coworkers and holding a last-minute sale to squeeze what little money he could before the game fell into obscurity.
• This trope can affect gaming hardware as well as software. The best known example goes back to the early days of home video gaming: the Keyboard Component to Mattel's Intellivision.
  • Starting in 1980, the back of the Intellivision box had given a third of its space to a large promotion for the Keyboard Component. The console itself was really the Master Component of what was to be fully functional home computer with a secondary processor, 64K of RAM, a built-in cassette drive and a connection for a thermal-printer cable (all of which would have sounded impressive at that time). Just buy it, play the games, and wait. This could have easily justified buying an Intellivision over the cheaper Atari 2600, especially for parents not wanting the expense of buying both a video-game console and a home computer.
  • However, behind the scenes the engineers responsible weren't as confident as the marketing department^note Which of course rarely happens. Their prototypes were neither reliable nor reasonably cost-efficient to make. The ship date of the KC kept getting pushed back, to the point that Jay Leno got his biggest laugh at the company's 1981 Christmas party when he said that the three biggest lies were "the check is in the mail, I'll still respect you in the morning, and the Keyboard will be out in the spring".
  • By that time, the executives had grown concerned enough that they secretly established another group of programmers within the company to come up with a more scaled-down version of the KC, perhaps limited to the function of teaching kids BASIC programming. It was codenamed the LUCKI, or Low User-Cost Keyboard Interface, and its creators kept their work a secret out of (justifiable) fear that the main KC group would use their influence in the company to kill the LUCKI project if they learned of its existence.
  • Mattel's executives weren't the only ones having concerns, and acting on them. Customers who'd waited almost two years for the KC began to complain to the Federal Trade Commission, accusing Mattel of defrauding them. After enough of these complaints, and further stalling from Mattel, the FTC said that if they didn't make their latest promised ship date with the KC they would be fined $10,000 a day until they did.
  • It was still nowhere near ready. To appease the FTC, the company put about 4,000 of the latest prototype on shelves in selected test markets. Some sold, but the overall results were not encouraging.
  • After almost three years, the Keyboard Component was officially cancelled late in 1982 — the ultimate death knell being brought about largely in part by the release of the Commodore 64, whose specifications rendered the Keyboard Component utterly obsolete, and at a much lower price to boot. The FTC dropped the mounting fines when Mattel agreed to offer a full refund to anyone who had purchased one of the limited production runs. Those who wanted to keep them had to sign a full waiver promising not to seek any support or later refund from Mattel (in-house, the KC saw some limited later use when modified versions proved to be ideal development boards). A few are still out there somewhere.
  • As a consolation prize, the company brought out LUCKI, now formally named the Entertainment Computer System. While you could write and save programs to its (much-simpler) cassette drive (at a time when floppy disks were displacing tapes as the preferred storage medium), making it technically a computer, it only offered an additional 2K of RAM, putting it far behind any real PC on the market at that time. It was further the ECS's bad luck to hit the market in the spring, as The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 was becoming an undeniable reality. Mattel went from aggressively hiring programmers to laying them off in one two-week period that spring; it further decided to switch its Intellivision focus from hardware to software, leaving the ECS with little marketing push behind it. The KC-ECS debacle played no small part in Mattel's decision to discontinue Intellivision a year later.
• Jagged Alliance 3 had a development that spanned two decades and the collapse of multiple developers.
  • After Sir-Tech ceased development operations in 2003, the series ended up in the hands of Strategy First and Russian developer MiST Land South (later GFI Russia). Jagged Alliance 3D became mired as the two parties clashed over the game's direction, with GFI allegedly pushing for the removal of the strategic layer and turn-based combat system. In 2006, Strategy First pulled the series from them as 3D was still not ready for release after two full years in development. GFI Russia would salvage the work done on 3D and release it as Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge. It would be one of the last games GFI Russia would release.
  • Strategy First then handed the game to Russian companies Akella and F3games with a tentative release date of late 2008, but it was pushed back to 2010. While Project Manager Andrew Kazakov blamed Strategy First demanding graphical improvements for the delay, the 2008 financial crisis was particularly brutal to the Russian economy and likely had consequences on the game. Development fell silent in 2009 as Strategy First was also rocked by financial issues, and German site games-on-net reported that Akella had ceased development amid ongoing layoffs and unpaid work disputes.
  • Early in 2010, German outfit bitComposer picked the series up from Strategy First with plans to develop the third game, but news on the project fell silent shortly after. It is likely that the lukewarm receptions of Jagged Alliance: Back in Action and Jagged Alliance Online scared bitComposer off from continuing development on the third game.
  • In 2015, THQ Nordic announced that it had acquired the series but made no immediate plans. In 2021, they finally announced that the game was back in development with Bulgarian studio Haemimont Games, with a trailer showing pre-alpha gameplay footage. Unlike the prior attempts, this one wasn't stopped by troubles and it was finally released in July 2023.
• Development of the Nintendo Entertainment System port of Jim Power: The Lost Dimension was set back when licensed developer Piko Interactive tried to contact the original creator for approval, only to be met with two years of silence. Upon learning that the creator had died around the time they initially tried to contact him, Piko themselves worked to fully acquire the Jim Power IP before the game's development went back on track.
• Jurassic Park: Trespasser: As explained in an online feature and this video about this infamously botched 1998 FPS, Trespasser had a host of design and logistical problems that caused its design team to hastily scale it back from their initial goals.
  • Intended as an ambitious and immersive first-person game with groundbreaking AI and realistic physics, mismanagement plagued the game's design team from the start. The team was inexperienced and had little in the way of design documentation for the project. Issues with the engine and toolset constantly dragged down the speed of development, and the team found there were serious issues with the game's AI and physics system.
  • The plan to have friendly and hostile dinosaurs that dynamically reacted to the player was largely abandoned because the creatures' AI couldn't internally decide what mood to pick. The melee weapons didn't work due to issues with the physics system, so they had all their mass removed making them useless. Textures were largely scaled back because of compatibility issues between the software-based rendering and the early 3D video cards of the time. A botched licensing deal meant they couldn't use John Williams' iconic music in the game, so they had to create their own. The continuously delayed release and broken technical state caused the game to be dead on arrival when released, but it would inspire elements of later games such as Half-Life 2 and Peter Jackson's King Kong
• Katawa Shoujo is a freeware visual novel created by amateurs. It spent many years in Development Hell, lost many writers, and went through several phases until it was finally released.
• Kid Icarus (1986): Designer and artist Toru Osawa spent most of the game's development working on it alone, while the rest of Nintendo R&D1's development staff was focused on Metroid. After the Metroid team completed that game and returned from vacation, Kid Icarus entered three straight months of crunch and constant all-nighters in order to meet the December deadline, with Osawa even foregoing his honeymoon in the process. The game was completed a mere three days before release, with there being no time to even add a credits roll for the original Japanese FDS version.
• The King of Fighters: While most of the franchise as a whole's developments were mostly smooth sailing, some weren't, to put it lightly:
  • The King of Fighters 2001 was heavily impacted by SNK going bankrupt midway through development, forcing a skeleton crew to partner up with the South Korean company Eolith who then made many, most of them poorly received, changes to the plot and character arcs. The result stumbled out as one of the more negatively received mainline installments.
  • The King of Fighters XII suffered from the one-two punch of SNK Playmore deciding to completely overhaul the graphics, which ate into a lot of the game's time and budget (it was estimated that it took 16-17 months just to complete one sprite sheet) and setting a strict deadline for 2009, the 15th anniversary of the series. Once that deadline came around, they was forced to release what they had — which got near-universally lambasted for being obviously unfinished.
• King's Quest: Mask of Eternity: Right out of the starting gate, the game was to become a Action-Adventure RPG, similar to Sierra's own Quest for Glory series, which was suggested by Sierra employee Mark Seibert to fill in the large empty maps of the game in-between puzzles.
  • This ran into stiff opposition from sister company Davidson & Associates, creators of the Math Blaster series. Founders Bob and Jan Davidson, both devout Christians, were appalled at how the game was straying from the King's Quest series' Thou Shalt Not Kill roots. This only compounded their pre-existing disgust with Sierra over the Leisure Suit Larry games and Phantasmagoria, the latter of which had been designed by Roberta Williams, co-chair of Sierra and the writer and designer of Mask of Eternity. The Davidsons coerced CUC Software, the company that owned both Sierra and Davidson & Associates at the time, into giving them permission to make their own Christian-friendly version of Mask of Eternity, which would remove any and all violence and combat, ironically making it more like a standard King's Quest game.
  • Upon hearing this news, Williams felt like she was losing control over her game. She became adamant about her needing to work on it, and almost threatened to quit the game altogether. This changed when Davidson & Associates went out of business, meaning their version of the game was canceled. With their deadline steadily approaching, Roberta bounced back full force and helped salvage what was left of their game, but it wasn't good enough as it ended up being the last game she would ever work on, and would be one of the last adventure games made by Sierra.
• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a particularly extreme example. The game as it was showed great promise, and in fact ended up selling over a million copies, but due to either extreme overconfidence or extreme shortsightedness, developer 38 Studios borrowed money left and right from the state of Rhode Island, ultimately racking up a 75 million dollar debt. They were apparently confident that they would be able to pay back all the loans with the game's sales, as well as the sales of an then-planned MMO, but it then turned out that the game would have had to sell 3 million copies just to break even. Long story short, 38's financial situation imploded, they went bankrupt, and all their assets, including the Amalur IP, were seized by the State of Rhode Island.
  • The head of that company was famous Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who traded heavily on his celebrity in convincing Rhode Island to suspend their own funding rules to loan his company more money. Not that RI necessarily needed convincing; the state at the time had one of the five highest unemployment rate in America; the promise of a major high-tech firm bolstering their economy must have been very easy to get excited about. RI's long rivalry with Massachusetts may also have played a role: here was one of Boston's star sons offering to bring his business to Providence.
  • The New York Times did a long story about this. RI governor Lincoln Chafee had not endeared himself to Schilling when, as a candidate while the state was doing the deal, he dared to repeat insinuations that Schilling had put red paint on his sock himself rather than actually bleeding during the most famous game of his career. While he tried to make up after he was elected, Schilling still resents that.
  • Schilling was probably out of his depth with his ambitious plans for the game. A complex multilevel PVE game is challenging to develop even for an established game maker with a success of exactly that type. He hired R.A. Salvatore to create a 10,000-year backstory for the game, for which Salvatore has yet to get paid any of the $2 million he's owed. One of 38's original executives said he had tried to convince Schilling to develop and release the game in stages, rather than "trying to build a skyscraper on the side and then stand it up."
  • Schilling paid very generous salaries... by his estimate, the average pay at 38 was $86,000. The company went so far as to pick up the mortgage payments on its employees' unsold Boston-area homes if they moved closer to Providence. And since the state had made the investment to create jobs, 38 ultimately hired 400 people — a lot for a new game developer with only one title out.
  • In the end, everybody got hurt. Over three hundred people were let go from the jobs Rhode Island wanted so badly. Schilling claims to have lost his fortune from his baseball career, and had to auction the bloody sock. Schilling would take a position at ESPN as sports analyst until he was fired in 2016 for unacceptable conduct. Chafee announced he would not run for another term. The state launched a criminal investigation into Schilling and 38 Games on suspicion of fraud, though the investigation found no criminal acts. The parties involved ultimately came to out-of-court settlements.

L-M

• Lair went through a variety of issues during development, including but not limited to the following: the ill-advised decision to scrap all of Factor 5's previous development tools for the making of the game (which was called the single biggest mistake on the project by Factor 5's Julien Eggebrecht), Factor 5 greatly underestimating the work needed to optimize the game for the Playstation 3 hardware, the game's lead designer (and Factor 5 president) going through a rough patch in his life and growing increasingly irritable and emotional at the rest of the team, conflict over the game's direction (with Julien Eggebretch wanting a very fast-paced game more in the style of the developer's previous work on Rogue Squadron and others wanting a slower-paced experience that would better showcase the PS3 hardware), a buggy and crash-prone level editor, feature creep... and most infamously, Sony's decision to impose a motion control-only scheme to promote the Sixaxis when the Warhawk team refused to do likewise in their own game, and the company's poor attempt at damage control when the controls predictably became the most contentious aspect of the game.
• Two developers claim this happened to the infamous Last Action Hero licensed game. After the planning stage, word from a lawyer came that Arnold Schwarzenegger did not want to be "associated with violence" due to his then-recent involvement in family friendly comedies, and that the game could not feature him using firearms, completely ruining the original concept. This led to the game being hastily retooled as the deadline was fixed with no chance for extension. Communication with the legal department was exceptionally slow, leading to the developers being clueless on even basic questions such as whether or not Arnold's character could even punch anything, and the development of the PC version ground to an halt after the graphic artist refused to do work because of an unrelated payment issue with the publisher.
• The Last of Us Part II was the highly anticipated follow-up to one of the most acclaimed titles of all time, but became one of the most controversial titles of 2020 in part due to the management issues of Naughty Dog and a massive Content Leak spoiling the game's major plot twists months in advance.
  • The marketing of the game was the first to attract attention, as marketing focused heavily on brutally realistic human-on-human violence and on Ellie's romantic relationship with a woman; The former was called out by some critics as snuff film-like (not helped when director Neil Druckmann admitted that the team watched "uncomfortable" videos to ensure the violence was as realistic as possible), while the latter attracted a score of homophobic commentators who accused the studio of "pushing an agenda". Repeated delays also hit the game; Initially set for February 21, 2020, it slipped to May 29, 2020 before being delayed indefinitely that year due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic.
  • In March 2020, Jason Schreier did a report on the intense crunch conditions that had become commonplace at the studio, pointing out that the rate of turnover was high enough that of the twenty non-gameplay leads of Uncharted 4, 70% had left. Script changes were causing problems late into development; playtesters were finding characters unlikable while Naughty Dog's tradition of not using managers meant that developers were working on art assets for weeks at a time, only to find a change in the script had made their work irrelevant. Both factors were resulting in the long development time and constant delays that had marked production.
  • Shortly after the report went public, former Naughty Dog employee Jonathan Cooper claimed that Naughty Dog's reputation is so bad in Los Angeles that the studio found it "nigh-impossible" to hire game animators, forcing them to hire workers from the film industry. At least one employee was so overworked during the creation of the September 2019 demo that they had to be hospitalized - an occurrence that was not uncommon at the studio during crunch. By Cooper's estimation, development took over a year later than it should have due to the high turnover. Poorly redacted court documents submitted as part of Sony's court battles with Microsoft over their buyout of Activision-Blizzard in 2023 revealed that the troubles swelled the game's budget to over $200 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever made.
  • Things got worse in April of 2020 when a massive Content Leak occurred through a data breach attack on Naughty Dog's servers. The leak was posted onto a Youtube channel that contained cutscene and gameplay footage from a near-final development build of the game, spoiling several major plot points (including and especially the brutal and horrific death of Joel, the protagonist of the first game). These plot points were met with derision by a large portion of the fanbase and were quickly subjected to Memetic Mutation across the internet, while various alt-right figures attempted to stir further outrage with transphobic and misogynistic fabrications. Within a day of the leak, Sony and Naughty Dog suddenly announced that the game would release on June 19, 2020, likely in an attempt to mitigate the impact of spoilers..
  • In an attempt to stem the tide of spoilers flowing out from the leak, Sony and Naughty Dog used a third-party company (MUSO) to send waves of DMCA's targeting not just reuploads of the leaked content, but also anything so much as discussing or referencing the leak. This caused numerous YouTube channels to rack up copyright strikes for merely stating that the leak had occurred with no discussion of the content at all, and Sony's own Tweet advertising the game was hit with a DMCA. This heavy-handed attempt at damage control only served to drive more of the unaware to look into the leaks, and further fueled resentment against both Sony and Naughty Dog.
  • When the game finally released in June 2020, critics greeted it with open arms. Many gave perfect scores and some went as far as comparing it to highly regarded classic works of cinema such as Citizen Kane and Schindler's List, but others such as Polygon and Kotaku were more reserved in their praise, leveling criticism at the story's pacing and characters. Fan reception was mixed to say the least, with some agreeing with the praise and others outraged, and the work's Metacritic page was subjected to a bombardment of negative user reviews (many of which were from members of the alt-right angry over the game prominently featuring multiple LGBT characters and people of color). Hype Backlash and the reports of harsh crunch may have also contributed to the outrage, while the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and widespread social unrest caused some to dismiss it for its excessively bleak tone in an already depressing and tragic year. Nevertheless, it quickly become one of the best-selling games of 2020 and swept The Game Awards in 2020, winning seven awards including Game of the Year.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky was a knockout hit in Japan and a porting nightmare in the United States. Over three million characters of Japanese text, deathmarch hours, subcontracting difficulties, incompatible formats, and Falcom threatening to pull out resulted in a suicide attempt and a great deal of lost weight among those working on it. Fortunately, the story seems to have had a happy ending so far. Falcom would ultimately become fed up with how long XSeed's translations for the series took and stripped the localization rights of both the series and Ys from them in favor of NISA, who promised quicker translations of the same quality.
• Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. Despite the lofty promises that initially won Falcom over, it turned out that NISA actually had very little experience with non-Sony game platforms, leading to the much-anticipated PC version being delayed at the very last minute for almost half a year, and when it finally released, it was still chock-full of bugs and glitches both mundane and game breaking. Most egregiously, the localization, which NISA had insisted would be on par quality wise with XSeed's beloved localizations of past Ys games and the Legend of Heroes games, turned out to be anything but; hundreds of typos, wooden, directionless voice acting, conversations and scenes making absolutely no sense due to horrendous grammar and syntax, and completely off-base translations of even the simplest of terms and titles (most infamously, a major dungeon was literally translated as "Big Hole"). The backlash against the localization was so severe that NISA was forced to completely retranslate and rewrite the script from the ground up.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword owes its late arrival in the Wii's lifespan and smaller world compared to then-recent Zelda games (especially The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess) to a troubled development cycle on account of difficulties with the Wii MotionPlus accessory. Pre-development began in 2006 soon after Twilight Princess, but during this phase Shigeru Miyamoto noted that some on the team didn't want to make a new Zelda game due to a lack of interesting ideas and an unwillingness from anyone to direct the game. This came to an end when Hidemaro Fujibayashi^note A longtime director of many of the handheld Zelda games starting with the Oracle duology proposed his idea to use the in-development MotionPlus accessory to realize fully motion-controlled swordfighting, which would earn him the director's seat on his first home console Zelda. However, the team found the accessory to be very "unruly", finding it hard to work with and the mood of the team becoming "very nasty" at one point. Eiji Aonuma eventually decided to give up and abandon the MotionPlus, but the release of Wii Sports Resort (the first game to use the accessory) and pressure from others within Nintendo forced the team to return to it. This left the team with only a year and a half to actually develop the game, and there were debates about the game's direction during development as well. At the time of its release near the end of 2011, the game had taken the longest of any The Legend of Zelda game up to that point to go from planning to release. The released game would be a critical success, but would sell the lowest of the 3D Zelda games (albeit still multiple millions), and would be extremely controversial in the fanbase for its linear structure, heavy backtracking, and handholding companion and hint system.
• The Sega Saturn game for Magic Knight Rayearth was initially listed as one of the first games for the system. It didn't show up in the U.S. until three years after the Japanese release and six months after support for the system came to an end, effectively being the last North American Saturn game. What caused this game from Working Designs to fall this far down? Numerous problems, including:
  • The usual need to translate and dub the voice bits from Japanese to English.
  • The computer holding the data for the game crashing, forcing them to rebuild pieces of it.
  • A fight between WD and Sega over what to name the main heroines (Sega had realized Rayearth was a good enough series to franchise to the States. However, as it was common at the time, they wanted to give them English names. Both Sega and WD had different names for the girls before they both threw their arms into the air and left them Hikaru, Umi and Fuu.)
  • And after it was all done, then-current Sega head honcho Bernie Stolar's draconian policy against third party developers kicked in, leaving them high and dry until the Saturn was dead in the water.
• Marvel aka Marvel: Chaos, the cancelled Marvel Universe fighting game from Electronic Arts, was plagued with problems from Day 1:
  • The creative team initially wanted to use an analog control style, similar to the company's successful Fight Night and Def Jam series. Unfortunately, while an analog control scheme worked well for games about boxing or street fighting, it quickly proved insufficient for a game featuring a wide range of superpowered attacks.
  • EA was interested in a more realistic visual style, with Spider-Man sporting a very scrawny physique to highlight his youthfulness, Wolverine appearing even more bestial and disheveled than usual, Doctor Doom wearing a tank-like suit of Powered Armor, and The Incredible Hulk having a bulkier, almost overweight appearance. Marvel strongly objected to these creative liberties, forcing EA to go with more traditional designs instead.
  • One of the major selling points for the game was that unlike past fighting games such as the Marvel vs. Capcom series or X-Men: Next Dimension, Marvel would take place in a sprawling, open world environment that could be interacted with. Characters could cause damage to the surrounding city, and use objects like cars and street signs as weapons. While groundbreaking in theory, the idea proved horrendously challenging to implement, with the main problem being that huge arenas made it difficult for the characters to get close enough to each other to actually fight.
  Michael Mendheim: When you are in a big play environment, and say you have the Thing over here and Beast over there, and they're two blocks away — they're just kind of running towards each other on a street. It wasn't very compelling.
  • Another idea was that the environments would feature interactive crowds of civilians who could participate in the fight. For instance, if one player rescued some civilians, the civilians might repay the favor by attacking the player's opponent. Similarly, causing damage to the surrounding area could provoke attacks from the police or military. It quickly proved difficult to actually include as many bystanders as the developers wanted, and the creative team soon realized that the AI required for such a feature would be incredibly complex. Some members of the team also found the idea distracting, especially given how fighting games are known for being fast-paced and tense. The concept was ultimately scrapped.
  • Because of the success of Fight Night 3, the employees at EA Chicago were feeling very confident and adventurous, which meant that very few people involved with Marvel were willing to make decisions to limit the scope of the game, despite it rapidly becoming obvious that many of the original ideas were completely unfeasible in practice.
  • The game lacked any sort of story mode to explain why any of these characters were fighting each other, and plans to include a plot based on World War Hulk or a Skrull invasion proved fruitless. While the fighting system was improving, the staff admitted that they hadn't yet come up with any sort of motivation to move the players from one battle to the next.
  • Adding to the existing problems was that EA Chicago had then-recently moved into a brand new studio in an expensive downtown neighborhood, which greatly increased overhead costs. This, combined with a massive staff increase and the failure of Def Jam: Icon, greatly hurt EA Chicago's profitability in the eyes of its parent company. Around this same time, EA also began cutting back on the number of licensed games it produced, beginning with them dropping the Def Jam franchise. A combination of these factors led to EA closing its Chicago branch and cancelling Marvel, ending the company's partnership with Marvel Entertainment.
• According to this video, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite went through all sorts of tribulations:
  • Capcom slashed the game's intended budget in half, which caused a major downgrade in model quality, cutscene animation and gameplay features, and the other half went into Street Fighter V DLC.
  • To cut costs, the developers had to reuse the Capcom characters' models from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and older games they were in, which meant that the MvC3 models had to be reshaded to fit in with Infinite's art style and engine. This quickly led to criticism from fans and reviewers, as many of the cartoonish and exaggerated older models didn't mesh well with the more realistic, movie-inspired visual design of Infinite.
  • Marvel gave some Executive Meddling of their own, refusing the use of X-Men and Fantastic Four characters because their film rights were controlled by 20th Century Fox at the time. The absence of fan favorites like Wolverine, Magneto, Storm and Doctor Doom did not go unnoticed, and got major fan backlash and bad publicity.
  • All of this caused Capcom employees to become extremely disappointed in the product, while the higher-ups wouldn't have any concerns with the game until fans started reacting really negatively to the graphics and models on social media (in particular Chun-Li's model, which ended up being reworked on before the game shipped, to better reception). The higher-ups also forced Black Panther and Monster Hunter to become paid DLC characters, despite having already been completed and meant for the final game (with both characters showing up fully voiced in the story mode).
  • As a result of the game selling below expectations, planned DLC support was pulled after only one season. According to rumors, the premature cancellation meant that new characters who were already being worked on by the staff, such as Ms. Marvel, Gill, Star-Lord and Asura, ended up being scrapped. Data mining subsequent revealed that a total of 61 characters were planned, with only 36 ever actually making it into the game.
• Believe it or not, a freaking baseball game fell victim to this trope! Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr., a spiritual successor to Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run on the Super NES, was supposed to be released in late-1996. However, the game was delayed left and right before finally being released in May of 1998. By which time its graphics and gameplay were ultimately surpassed by Acclaim's All Star Baseball 99.
• While it didn't apparently face the time crunch and staff conflicts other entries on this page did, the development of the Neo Geo launch title Magician Lord was hectic, as detailed in a video by the French Youtube show Retro Games Test. As the game developed alongside the Neo Geo hardware itself, features were constantly in flux and the developers wound up having to scale down their ambitious plans for dozens of transformations and advanced graphical effects due to the pressure to release the game alongside the system's launch and hardware features like zoom and rotation being cut to save costs. Another issue was when the game was location-tested and ADK found out that the game was far too easy, and thus unprofitable as an arcade game, as the large maze-like levels and generous health allotment meant players were able to survive for much longer than the average arcade game. As this was a few weeks before release, the developers responded by cutting the player's lifebar by half and haphazardly removing large chunks of the levels (the last-minute nature of the change is exemplified by the fact, that using a double jump exploits, players can go out of bound in the first level and find unused graphics for the original "large" version of the level and stand on invisible platforms that had their graphics removed but not the collision detection). This change ended up working perhaps a little too well, as the final release is a shining example of Nintendo Hard and an ADK employee was only able to one-credit it more than a year after release. In the end, Magician Lord flopped in the arcades but saw better sales on the home console and became something of a Cult Classic among early adopters of the Neo Geo.
• The lead-up to the development of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was not the smoothest. Ubisoft wanted to revitalize the Rabbids franchise after a strings of poorly-received games and tasked Ubisoft Milan's newly-promoted creative director Davide Soliani to create a pitch for a new Rabbids game that could potentially be shown to Nintendo. However, as Ubisoft Milan was already busy with assisting the development of Ghost Recon Wildlands, Soliani was only given a tiny team of designers and they had to hire a junior programmer with no experience in video games to code the prototype - which turned out to be timely when management told him they would show a prototype to Shigeru Miyamoto in three weeks and a half. After Miyamoto responded positively to it, the team's resources were increased slightly for the purpose of making a second prototype over the next three months, but some employees had to split their work between it and Ghost Recon and Davide Soliani was so overworked that he went to the hospital as he was fearing having an heart attack (after being told there was nothing wrong with him but that he had to chill for the sake of his health, Soliani would promptly go back to work). Fortunately, it seems development on the actual game was far smoother, sans a period of diminished morale caused not by actual production woes but poor response on the internet to leaked documents about the title.
• Martian Gothic Unification, a Survival Horror game developed by Creative Reality, suffered from this according to an interview with director Stephen Marley. In short, the ambitious scope of the project proved too much for the seven-person team and their tight deadlines. Numerous scenes and gameplay elements, including puzzle hints and the final boss fight, were cut for time. Executive Meddling demanded that the PC and Playstation versions be identical in content, which prevented the PC version from receiving additional content. The casting agency also went against the wishes of the developers and cast a white voice actor for a black character, despite having reassured the team they would not do so. The game received mixed reviews and underperformed in sales, and Marley expressed regret over how the final product turned out.
• As detailed in this article, most of the problems that made Mass Effect: Andromeda fall short of its high expectations can be traced back to its turbulent development history, most of which can in turn be attributed to the mandated use of the Frostbite engine. While a very powerful engine and the mandate was intended to simplify development across Electronic Arts' various studios, it simply wasn't designed for building RPGs and thus lacked many features considered crucial for this genre. Figuring out how to build a Mass Effect game on Frostbite tied up so many resources that for a long time it wasn't even clear how ME:A's gameplay would look. The team realized that their ideas, like a free-roaming procedural system, were too ambitious to handle, throwing out years of effort. A lot of components (motion capture, facial animations, etc.) were outsourced to dozens of studios all over the world, many of which couldn't work efficiently because they also didn't know which direction the game was going. Throughout the course of development, multiple members of the team disliked the game's main plot of the Council's races travelling to a foreign galaxy to carve out a new home as many felt it glorified imperial colonialism (this is somewhat acknowledged in the game), but their concerns were either curtly shut down or ignored entirely. Of the five years the game was in development, only the final 18 months were spent on actually building the game. It was a small miracle ME:A was released in largely working condition at all.
• Mega Man Universe was announced as a side-scrolling Mega Man spin-off with a level editor. It was cancelled after a murderer's row of production troubles, mostly chalked up to poor management by Keiji Inafune.
  • The game was announced at the New York Comic-Con in July 2010 without a concept in stone. Internally, it juggled between a Mega Man 2 remake and a level creation platform (like Super Mario Maker after it), until Keiji Inafune settled on the latter. Inafune ultimately envisioned Universe as an ambitious DLC-driven live service game with new officially-released levels and tons of Official Fan-Submitted Content, to the point he no longer saw a need for "traditional" Mega Man games.
  • Unfortunately, a playable demo at New York Comic-Con failed to impress. Whoever played it was let down by the subpar graphics and controls, and most fans were left livid by the sudden Art Shift towards a style influenced by Cartoon Network shows. However, Inafune's mind was made up, and the new art style stayed while the dev team focused on graphical fidelity.
  • As Universe's scope grew to include a two-player co-op mode, Inafune had the game outsourced to a third-party studio. Unfortunately, to save costs, he chose a studio that had no experience with home consoles or online networking; as a result, the online co-op didn't work at all.
  • In October 2010, Inafune announced he was leaving Capcom. Universe's development became completely disorganized, without a real director to call the shots (but with help from producer Akiko Ito). With a Spring 2011 release window set in stone, the studio dropped the co-op mode, but was still unprepared to handle Universe's ambitious scope.
  • Capcom tried to salvage what remained of the game by reassigning development to Capcom's in-house studios and changing platforms to iPhone and iPad, scrapping the level editor, and leaning even more heavily into its origins as a Mega Man 2 remake. Even that didn't work, and Universe was officially cancelled in March 31, 2011.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty suffered a rushed development in order to try getting the game out in time for the Chinese Year of the Snake. But the biggest problem was the September 11th attacks happening just three days before the game's intended release date. The fact that the game's climax involved Lower Manhattan in New York City getting devastated and appearances of the World Trade Center (which ironically went untouched in the original script) caused the game to be delayed by a few months. The climax had to be hastily edited to avoid controversy, contributing to the infamous Gainax Ending.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was intended to be series creator Hideo Kojima's masterpiece, but it also marked the end of an era, as it was his final project for Konami due to a contentious production.
  • Despite the game's auspicious reveal (with the main game being announced only by its subtitle and helmed by a "Moby Dick Studios", a fake name for Kojima Productions), the project faced controversy immediately when it came to light that long-time Solid Snake/Big Boss voice actor David Hayter was unceremoniously fired in favor of actor Kiefer Sutherland (who also provided facial capture for the Big Boss character). While it was suggested that Kojima did so in order to avoid paying a higher salary for Hayter, the latter contends that he was never approached about the issue and still harbors resentment.
  • In March 2015, it came to light that Konami restructured their corporate offices, with Kojima apparently out of the company as a permanent employee and his production studio intended to be disbanded at the end of Phantom Pain's production. This was followed by Kojima's name and company being removed from all marketing materials, including the final cover art for the game and future releases of Ground Zeroes and The Legacy Collection. Over the next few months, several people (including voice actress/singer Donna Burke, composer Rika Muranaka and Akio Ōtsuka, Snake's Japanese voice actor) publicly spoke out against Konami for their poor treatment of Kojima. This also resulted in the cancellation of Silent Hills.
  • In April 2015, an online movement began to express questions about the likeness of a doctor featured in one of the trailers to real-life neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who was believed to be part of a viral marketing campaign for the game. In response, Canavero denied any involvement with the project and decided to sue Konami for an unauthorized use of his likeness.
  • Several months later, the Japanese newspaper Nikkei put out a damning exposé on the circumstances behind the game's development. It was reported that Kojima became a pariah because The Phantom Pain was delayed, leading to its production budget exceeding $80 million USD by April 2015. It was also revealed that Konami's executives had refocused their efforts towards mobile games; pachinko machines; and health spas, and had an iron grip over Kojima Productions — now renamed "Production Development No. 8". Employees were reportedly monitored on social media and on emails, publicly shamed if their lunch breaks went on too long, and demoted to menial tasks for perceived mistakes.
  • When the game finally came out, it was immediately bombarded with universal acclaim... with the exception of a notoriously Disappointing Last Level, with several promised features not coming to fruition, the game's Twist Ending revealed suddenly and out of context, and the game's True Final Boss deleted and reduced to unfinished cutscene footage as a special edition Blu-Ray extra. A third chapter of the game appears to have been cut when it became apparent that the game was not going to break even for Konami. It's rumored that the game has become a Creator Killer for Konami's AAA game production, though the company has publicly denied this.
• Metal Slug:
  • Metal Slug 5 was originally being developed by Noise Factory (who handled 4) and was almost done, until SNK took over late in development and revamped the entire thing. Unfortunately, they were also forced to rush the game out prematurely in order to begin development of 6 for the upcoming Atomiswave arcade board, and as a result, a lot of stuff got cut out such as a large turtle-like mech and the native zapped by lightning at the beginning acting as the final boss on a levitating, laser-blasting pillar. All the stuff that was left out can be found here. For what it's worth, some of them do eventually get their time to shine in the mobile games Metal Slug Defense and Attack.
  • A GBA port of the first Metal Slug was also being made, but was criticized during development demos for poor implementation and was eventually cancelled due to memory limitations alongside planned ports of 2 and 3^note That, and the fact that Metal Slug Anthology was also being released probably didn't help matters..
• Metroid:
  • The development of Metroid Prime (as detailed in this article by Polygon) was an absolute mess. Even foregoing Retro Studios's troubled beginnings that prompted a frustrated Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto to throw out everything they were working on and lay off multiple employees, Prime 1's development was a stressful time. At a certain point, the Japanese crew was spending most of their year in America overseeing the game, while Retro staffers would spend that same year pulling all-nighters, working 80-100 hours a week and nourishing themselves on atomic fireball candy (going through a total of 72 gallons worth). In the words of one artist: "I think it took us almost six months to do the first level that Nintendo approved, then we had less than a year to do the rest of the game." While the end result remains one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful entries in the franchise, the aforementioned work conditions and the aftermath of studio heads hogging the bulk of royalty payments to themselves still led to some staff jumping ship, forcing Nintendo to step in once again to replace company head Steve Barcia with Michael Kelbaugh. And this is even without mentioning how the founder of Retro Studios, Jeff Spangenberg, was doing absolutely nothing in terms of development or even general management, instead preferring to spend his time partying and running a porn website on computers that Nintendo paid for. Needless to say, when Nintendo found out about Spangenberg's escapades, they bought out his share of the company and force him to resign.
  • Metroid Dread was considered Vaporware for almost sixteen years. While never officially announced until 2021, the game's existence was leaked to the press shortly after it started development in 2005 for the Nintendo DS. However, it would be cancelled quickly after due to series producer Yoshio Sakamoto being displeased with the technical power of the hardware. Development would begin anew in 2008 (presumably for the handheld's more powerful DSi revision), but was once again cancelled for the same reason. It wasn't until Sakamoto worked with MercurySteam to develop Metroid: Samus Returns that Dread was revived, with the positive reception of Samus Returns and his own satisfaction with their work inspiring him to revisit the concept once again. Unfortunately, once the game restarted development in 2018, it suffered a number of production woes. This article details the production problems, with an English translation here. In short, many of the employees at MercurySteam were undervalued by higher-ups and treated as expendable drones that were fired for the slimmest of infractions. This led to more than 50 staff members not receiving proper credit for the finished game, due to MercurySteam's policies only crediting those who worked for at least 25% of development time. Mismanagement of the project also resulted in tons of content needing to be scrapped to meet deadlines, though said decision was also thankfully the result of both Nintendo and MercurySteam adamantly refusing to force staff to crunch to make up for lost time (which employees viewed as a godsend for their physical and mental health). Despite the poor working environment, just like Prime, Metroid Dread quickly became one of the most successful games in the franchise.
• Mighty No. 9 was originally meant as a spiritual successor to the Classic Mega Man franchise by series co-creator and main producer Keiji Inafune. However, a combination of big promises, a slashed budget, and a desire for it to immediately become a franchise as large as Mega Man led to a slow and troubled development. None of this was helped by one of these big promises being to bring the game to all ten major gaming platforms of the time. After multiple delays, most versions were released in mid-2016; on top of the game being critically lambasted, the launch was plagued with multiple counts of backers receiving broken keys or receiving DLC keys instead of the game, and the Wii U version was buggy enough to cause the console to crash. Inafune accepted responsibility for the disappointing final product, citing the promise of developing so many versions at once as a death knell. With that in mind, the developers were also unable to complete all these versions; the Vita and 3DS versions would never see completion, being quietly (but unofficially) cancelled.
• The Nintendo 64 adaptation of the 1996 Mission: Impossible film. The game was originally slated to be released in late-1996. However, constant Executive Meddling (resulting in the game switching development teams midway through development) and problems fitting such an at-the-time ambitious game onto a small cartridge resulted in the game not seeing release until mid-1998 in North America. The final game actually wasn't half bad. However, its long development history definitely showed with its dated graphics, buggy programming, and somewhat underdeveloped gameplay. The impending release of the competing Metal Gear Solid that same year certainly didn't help matters.
• Trevor Roberts, creator of the Analog Horror web story Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, was brutally honest about why a planned Survival Horror video game adaptation ultimately fell apart. In short, he underestimated just how much work goes into making a video game and wasn't sure he could maintain his standard of quality, especially since working on a game meant collaborating with an entire studio on his creative vision, a studio whose ambitions went far beyond what he originally had planned. Fearing that the game would have been "a rushed and inferior gaming experience at best, and an unmitigated disaster at worst," he pulled the plug just a week after announcing it and focused on adapting his story into a tabletop game instead.

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