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  • Episodes of The Time... Guys come out very infrequently. Going by the apparent age of the cast and by Word of God, filming can only take place during school breaks. This has actually worked out well; newer episodes usually come out as shorts instead of the less tolerable twenty-minute epics they were originally.
  • It was mentioned that a few stories in the Metamor Keep universe fell flat on their faces because of this. One author suffered a brain aneurysm, and another came down with pneumonia.
  • The Fan Film series BIONICLE: The Next Generation currently resides deep in Development Hell because of this. It started out as an ambitious 3D animation film project on the BZPower forums, shortly before the forum server crashed. The project was moved to a new site, and it was decided that instead of feature-length films, they would make a series of shorts. The modeling had to be started over because the older models suffered from problems. Then, the project leaders left one by one, along with many other disillusioned members. When the BZPower forum came back, the community branded the project a futile undertaking. Since the team struggled with the 3D CGI, they split into different animation groups. Only the 2D team managed to get a test video done, effectively proving that the 3D angle has been doomed from the start. The new project leader then tried to sort out the whole thing and start over with more realistic goals, before leaving to pursuit a more fruitful endeavor. Currently, it seems that the project's fate rests in the hands of the still-working 3D team.
    • The earlier Quest of the Toa fan-movie has met a similar fate. Production was well underway with a big buzz surrounding the would-be voice actors and the script receiving tons of rewrites due to plotting difficulties. Then, the animation files got lost, and the project, which had been aiming for a late-2006 release date, was canceled in 2007. It resurfaced a few years later with a new and improved models, but went under again in 2010. Given that it was to be made by one person who did everything from directing to modeling and animating, and the fandom had become distilled and disjointed by that time, this is understandable.
  • Production on The Game Overthinker stalled out in early 2013 due to a combination of snowstorms making it impossible to shoot the outdoor scenes that had been set up, and Bob Chipman committing himself to too many things at once (particularly an appearance at PAX East). He goes into more detail on the causes of the delay in this video.
  • Another Dead Hero had himself a rough case of this with his first episode Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, which due to not only computer troubles with his editing software going haywire, but also the finished episode becoming so corruptible, he couldn't save it, making it a Missing Episode. It took him till a couple more months before he released his first official released review, part one of Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. Though, now he's kinda ran into this again, due to losing the camera he used to film the episode and the next two.
  • DEATH BATTLE! suffered one when their animators' hard drive crashed when they were getting ready to compile the files for the Gamera profile section, also causing them to lose progress on the Zechs Merquise vs. Tommy Oliver battle. They had to push back the Zechs vs. Tommy battle and use Batman vs. Captain America instead.
  • Economy Watch: "A Very Hoarder Christmas" had a long and difficult production.
  • Epithet Erased: Per the artbook, the original contract with VRV required the first episode to be delivered in just seven weeks. This meant that animation turnarounds for the seven main characters had to be completed in just one very busy week for lead designer Rhea Burtram. The decision to set the Western arc (episodes 5-7) late in the day also caused disproportionate hassles; the artbook's discussion of the Bar Brawl map mentions that the additional filters meant that it could take 8 hours to actually render, and with the extremely tight production schedule, one rendering failure on that scale could push the project from "ahead of schedule" to "dangerously close to missing the deadline". Once the seven episodes of "Season 1" were completed, EE pivoted to being a primarily audiobook project with no further animation projects planned.
  • The 2014 Mountain Dew Game Jam involving several famous indie developers and YouTube celebrities fell apart for several reasons:
    • The first bad sign was a contract that practically told the participants they would be subject to Manipulative Editing and that the Game Jam could not be shown publicly on YouTube, which came as a disappointment to the devs as they wished to show their viewers the making of a game.
    • While the concept of a Game Jam is that of relaxed, friendly competition, the participants had to deal with Matti Leshem, an overbearing producer sent by Mountain Dew and not reined in by Polaris until it was too late. Leshem was determined to turn the game jam into a reality show and would try to put people against each other, encourage prima donna behavior, and would only allow Mountain Dew and water to be drunk on set (and the water had to be drunk out of Mountain Dew bottles). Furthermore, Leshem demanded that the participants grin and pose dramatically every time they had a drink, constantly forcing them to do retakes.
    • The prizes were incredibly lame, which wasn't helped by Leshem's insistence that the participants cheer and clap enthusiastically when they were announced, again forcing them through several retakes.
    • The YouTube celebrities were only brought in for publicity and had little experience actually making a game, which, combined with arbitrary challenges, note  made it nigh impossible to actually get work done.
    • When Zoe Quinn and JonTron had a small disagreement and stepped outside to discuss it peacefully, Leshem and his camera crew surrounded them and tried to play it off as an intense, heated argument. When the two separated, they chased JonTron down and tried to coerce him into saying negative things about Quinn, which he refused to do.
    • Leshem tried to start a "Battle of the Sexes" by badgering the teams with sexist questions such as "Do you think you're at an advantage because you have a pretty girl on your team?" and "Do you think the teams with women on them are at a disadvantage?" and actually seemed disappointed when they didn't "play along".
    • Finally Leshem was expelled from the event, but the damage was done. Over half the developers quit and the jam was shut down after one day. Angry Joe recounts his experience in his Top 10 Gaming controversies of 2014 video, noting that the production costs ranged somewhere between $250,000 to $400,000 for a Game Jam that doesn't exist.
  • My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series constantly fell under this, thanks to constantly getting pinged for copyright infringement by overzealous Content ID claims, eventually leading to a Missing Episode. Then they tried only using screenshots to get around that and it worked...for a while until the claims came again, leading to another Missing Episode. By then, Greg decided to do it himself and rebooted the series with his own artwork...and that's when the audio started getting pinged. What's worse, according to Greg, it's by a copyright troll claiming on music in the public domain. That latest claim also threatens the Rainbow Dash Presents videos since they use the same outro.
    • Speaking of RDP, the more elaborate the video got, the likelier it got delayed. One video had intended for them to team up with some cast members of Friendship is Witchcraft, but the Witchcraft crew took offense at a joke and left in a huff, exacerbating the already bitter rivalry between the two. Equestria Primates, intended to be the Grand Finale to the RDP series, ended up scrapped altogether because there was no way they could finish in time (especially since Petriep, the artist, went pro) and it wasn't funny enough to justify continuing it. All that's left is a couple pieces of concept art on Petriep's DeviantArt and a video that showed the first four or so minutes of Equestria Primates. Despite reviving RDP for a one off-The Star in Yellow-and leaving open the possibility of more episodes, Equestria Primates is unlikely to be revived for the above reasons, and also because the voice actor for Jokermort is no longer available due to breaking up with Greg.
  • 2Beats+, a music review show made by Shoegazer Productions, had an extremely troubled existence that can easily give most of the examples on this page a run for their money:
    • The show couldn't even get a smooth start. Creator Randy McNeely had just been kicked out of his band, Ocean Void, in the summer of 2013. In an attempt to try to bring his friend out of his depression, Randy's friend Alan Zuvy talked to him about collaborating on the project. Randy accepted, but there was a problem: Alan was not the most enthusiastic music listener and decided to part with the project in 2014, before shooting had even started. He would, however, appear in videos as one of the "henchmen".
    • Randy started searching for a new partner when Jordan Dansdil joined in late 2014. With both being inexperienced in the art of video-making, it was, as Randy put it, "a rocky start". They struggled with shooting and editing. Early episodes of the series show remnants of the awkward process.
    • Footage would frequently go missing, leading to reshoots. At one point, Jordan can be seen having shaved from a reshot scene. Because both of them had full-time jobs, this caused a great deal of stress. Eventually, due to constant pressure from Randy to get the show from an amateur-level "hobbyist" series to something that "could compete with some of the professionals", Jordan dismissed himself from the project after the ninth episode in April of 2015.
    • Randy started a second show for The Lost Media Wiki called The Lost Media Chronicles, which got dramatically more views and upvotes than the demanding 30-minute-long episodes of 2Beats+. This led new viewers who subscribed to the channel for Chronicles to view 2Beats+ as an annoyance. Randy would attempt to alternate between the two shows to appease viewers, but all this did was cause arguments between fans of both shows, as production times for each got longer as demand for both shows to increase in quality also went up.
    • Eventually Randy got a new creative partner, Trey Holt, and as the editing and production got cleaner, the same cannot be said about the technical issues. Randy's skits started getting more ambitious, leading to Trey having to get more creative with the editing. It didn't help that Randy started creating an "over-arching storyline" that had recurring characters.
    • Then, the Radiohead review came, intended as a season finale, and things got really dramatic. For starters, there was a character introduced that wore a mask and spoke with a Russian accent named "Tony", played by the guitarist from Ocean Void. The finale was supposed to contain the "big reveal" with an epilogue explaining his experience with the band. Unfortunately, though, when Part 3 of the Radiohead review came, the actor flaked, causing Randy to have to re-write the video at the last minute and re-shoot some footage. To make matters worse, right when production was starting to wrap up with the editing, Randy's laptop got stolen, leading to Trey being the sole video editor and even more footage having to be shot. On New Year's of 2016, Randy discovered two of his roommates (one of whom is a 2Beats+ cast member) had become drug addicts, and he had to shift his attention elsewhere. This caused both Part 3 and the epilogue of the first season to be postponed by over two weeks.
    • Even into the second season the show had its problems. While the My Chemical Romance review took off and proved to be the most popular video in the series yet, Trey was starting to have cold feet of his involvement. Eventually he quit shortly after the filming of the 3 Doors Down episode, which left the video in limbo for over a year before it was released in July 2017. Trey's editing style was allegedly much more layered and complex than Randy's was, which left Randy unable to complete it without Trey's help. The series effectively ended and Randy launched a new, more straightforward review show, Adventures in Vinyl-Land.
    • As of 2018, The Lost Media Chronicles has become this as well. Feeling depressed that his channel was not growing at the rate he wanted, he fell into creative burnout and videos started to be posted infrequently. Even though Randy was trying to get help from his girlfriend, Amanda (who was clearly not a good match for the series), videos started becoming progressively more delayed. His usual Video Game Month, which happens in May, got postponed to August. In June, for reasons yet to be made public (and probably never will be) Randy was let go from the Lost Media Wiki. The already-existing strain became even worse and, by November 2018, both Chronicles and Adventures in Vinyl-Land remain dead. It's unknown if or when he will be posting again.
  • Somecallmejohnny's let's plays have gone through a lot of problems, mainly due to time constraints and other responsibilities shared by the three members.
    • This happened a lot when Matt first became a part of the channel in 2011. Donkey Kong Country, if Matt is to be believed, took over nine tries to complete. It was telling that Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest was recorded on a world-by-world basis to avoid that kind of bad luck happening again.
    • According to the wall comments by Johnny and Matthew, the Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) let's play also suffered from this. Allegedly, there had been multiple failures either due to bad commentary (there were points where neither Matt nor Elliot said a thing during long stretches of the game) or technical mistakes (which ended up happening during successful recordings). By about the seventh and final time, the crew was exhausted to the point where Johnny agreed to play it by himself simply because Elliot was fed up with the game, and Matthew had run out of things to say about it.
    • It happened almost frequently in the early days of the channel before Johnny got better video recording programs. Johnny and Matt's LP of The Legend of Zelda took over 3 attempts to complete (and one of them was at the end of the game to boot) due to technical hiccups, causing Matt to curse out Johnny at the beginning of their last recording attempt. Johnny and Elliot's LP of Sonic the Hedgehog also took several attempts due to the recording software suddenly shutting down each time.
    • RPG weekends (Weekends dedicated to JRPGs) haven't had one successful recording session without drama yet. Final Fantasy IV went through numerous versions before settling on the PSP version, Persona and Pokemon Red were plagued with scheduling errors, and finally Tales of Symphonia was plagued with both scheduling errors and tech mishaps (it was originally going to be live, but it ended up being post commentary.)
    • Shadow of Destiny, a game that Elliot wanted to do prior to their Summer of Twos, ended up being postponed because of technical mishaps. Johnny gave Matt all of his old Happauge equipment to record Tales of Symphonia, which also meant he got the component cables to be able to record PS2 games as well. When it came time to record again, Matt kept forgetting the equipment, and the playthrough was suspended. They managed to record the game, and then Johnny accidentally deleted the footage while getting rid of the leftover videos. Then they finally managed to record the game, and it was shown on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
    • Final Fantasy VI was recorded by Johnny using both the SNES and GBA versions. Near the end of the game on the SNES version, Johnny's capture device had stopped working five minutes after he began recording and by the time he he discovered the issue, he had already overwritten his save file and lost two hours of work. Luckily, Johnny's recording of the GBA version was intact, so he used that for one of the episodes.
    • 2016 in general has been a rough one for the brothers gaming. RPG weekend has taken quite a long silence with no reasons from anybody where it is (with only a vague "FFV" mention coming up soon). Plus, Johnny's had multiple equipment fail on him as well, causing LPs and reviews to either be delayed (Doom (2016) due to failed recordings, Kingdom Hearts II because of the capture card frying during the fight with Terra, and the Star Fox: Assault review getting delayed thanks to the capture card dying in the middle of recording), or scrapped. Fans were totally understanding and supportive; but the trio were frustrated by the repeated failures.
  • LG15: Outbreak, a spinoff of the pioneering web series lonelygirl15, suffered mightily from this, with this video by the show's creator Gregory Austin McConnell going into more detail.
    • In 2009, the LG15 franchise was in trouble. A Kudzu Plot and multiple spinoffs were making the story difficult to follow, and furthermore, the Great Recession had led to financial difficulties at the show's production company EQAL, who put LG15: the resistance, then the flagship show of the franchise, on hiatus in order to save money. To keep the series as a whole going and fans interested, EQAL ran a contest called The Show Is Yours for fans to create an officially-sponsored, canonical spinoff, effectively crowdsourcing the show and using it as a springboard to launch a proprietary social publishing platform called Umbrella.
    • The first spinoff made through The Show Is Yours, LG15: The Last, wasn't a hit but wasn't a failure either, leading to a second contest in 2010 that produced LG15: Outbreak. McConnell, the creator of Outbreak, was a Fandom VIP known at the time, under the nom de plume "Mason", for his snarky fanfic vlogs commenting on the plot holes and Fridge Logic in LG15, and with the keys to the kingdom, he sought to right a ship that he felt had gone astray.
    • While McConnell had experience creating vlogs, he was out of his depth running a web series. The original plan was to create a sixteen-episode show filmed over eight weeks, but McConnell, out of what he feels in hindsight was hubris and a desire to prove himself, wound up extending that to 42 episodes, a wildly unfeasible and stressful production schedule. Technical problems with the cameras, microphones, and editing software reared their ugly head, conflicts in the actors' schedules made it hard to shoot scenes with many of them together, snowfall made location shooting extremely difficult, and a subpar internet connection made uploading the finished videos difficult.
    • Umbrella, meanwhile, was causing headaches on its own. McConnell intended to use Umbrella for puzzles and supplemental story material, but many key features either weren't ready in time or were still going through growing pains, forcing him to hastily scrap or rewrite them.
    • Finally, McConnell's plans for Outbreak's story clashed with those of EQAL. In short, McConnell tried to use his position as a Promoted Fanboy to make Outbreak into a far more important show than EQAL had ever planned for it to be, ending with story revelations that would tie back to LG15: the resistance. EQAL forced McConnell to scrap his planned ending and a number of other plot points, and as the two sides engaged in a tug-of-war over the show's creative direction, fan reaction proved to be extremely mixed.
    • Outbreak proved to be a Franchise Killer for the LG15 franchise, with LG15: the resistance's hiatus becoming indefinite. McConnell regards the experience as a humbling one that demonstrated to him just how much a Show Runner has to deal with, and his attempt to "save" the franchise as a classic case of hubris. It would be six years before anything new related to LG15 was so much as announced.
  • According to Pan Pizza, Pizza Party Podcast Episode 69 was a massive case of this with him stating that "everything single possible thing that could go wrong, went wrong". They brought in a porn star as a special guest, but there was so much lag on Skype that they ended up having to stop the podcast ten minutes into recording. When they tried connecting with him again, they ended up with loads of technical problems. After multiple failed attempts at connecting to him, the group decided to cancel the episode, with Pan instead uploading a tour of his room. Nolan (one of the members of the podcast) described the episode as "cursed".
  • Elements of Justice was originally planned to be released in 2015, but as of early 2017, has been delayed due to the creator's hard drive crashing and money problems. Also, the recordings of TheGoldCrow's voice were lost and he stated he was too busy to rerecord them, meaning Phoenix Wright must be recast.
  • The Civ Battle Royale had massive production problems during its hiatus in 2017, eventually forcing the creators to recreate the entire map file from scratch.
  • A minor one for The Music Video Show and its 81st episode. Word of God on its commentary that the episode was not supposed to be made. However, the script was written and completed to have an episode shot. However, just when the episode was completed editing, Kiara's computer crashed and the entire episode was gone. Given up, she had to go on vacation for a week and came back to edit the episode again...only for the footage she shot completely gone. Not only did she have to reshoot the episode, hours after she came back from vacation, she also edited it on the same day. It explains why her hair changes twice throughout the episode.
  • The Arkn Mythos has been through a lot of production issues, mainly stemming from the strained working relationship between its main creators.
    • A number of vlogs and blogs set in the War Chronicles and the Winter Saga were delayed due to disagreements between the creators (namely, disputes regarding various plot points in the Arknthology and how various characters fit into it). Said disputes led to a great deal of infighting, which resulted in a number of creators leaving the Mythos — and led several vlogs and blogs to be cancelled and/or deleted. In the end, DeathlyLogic and PesterJest decided to abandon any plot arcs tied to the Arknthology, cancel their remaining series, and begin work on the Spin-Off ahead of schedule.
    • Oddly, TypeONegative and FeralWasteland both reconciled with DeathlyLogic in early 2017. Their respective Arknthology series (acryfromwinter and MedBoy789 were resurrected, along with The Knight Shift: End Times, and several new episodes were produced for each series. The trio fell out again several months later, however, and their vlogs — and the Arknthology — were once again put out to pasture.
    • In early 2018, DL and T0N reconciled again and decided to create a new Arknverse plot involving Uriel and Azrael. Less than two weeks later, those plans were put on the backburner, due to DL having employment and financial issues. Have we mentioned that the Arknverse has had a troubled production?
  • Chip Cheezum experienced this while recording footage for his Duck Dynasty playthrough. Figuring that he wanted to get the game over with while at his family's place for Christmas, he recorded the second half of the game in one go. But, due to the footage lacking any sort of audio—plus him thinking that he wouldn't be needing multiple save files for a game as easy and dull as this one—Chip had to record the entire game all over again.note 
  • Meta Runner co-creator Kevin Lerdwichagul charitably described the production of Season 1 as “organized chaos”. In short, Kevin and his brother Luke went in with basically zero experience in professional animation, and what they thought would take one month to make with a group of 10 people ended up taking two years instead, with them pouring in basically all their money into making it, only managing to stay afloat thanks to a combination of sponsorships and grants from various parties, including Epic Games, Crunchyroll, and the Australian government. The entire first half of the season ended up needing to be redone after Kevin realized they didn’t gel well with the other half due to his process of writing the season as it was being produced. Luke also recalled staying up until 3 in the morning just to get stuff done on it. And all this while the two were still working on their other shows at the time. This was averted by Seasons 2 and 3, with Kevin and Luke able to get each season done in half the time as the first, thanks to the experience they gained and an expanded production crew.
  • Joueur du Grenier was intended to have a special video to celebrate its ten-year anniversary. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, delaying filming for so long it's now the eleven-year anniversary video.
  • Bennett the Sage's episode on "Voogie's Angels" for Anime Abandon hit a snag during the writing process. While writing the script for the episode, his software completely borked out and corrupted his entire script after a week and a half of writing. Rather than spending more time rewriting it to get it out on time, Bennett decided to make the episode more of an unscripted discussion rather than his usual format.
  • Though not the series itself, "Wha Happun?" by Matt McMuscles covers the troubled productions of many video games (and even movies on occasion), explaining either why some games turn out bad (Like Fallout 76 or Balan Wonderworld) or how some good games had a lot of trouble (Like Doom (2016) and Final Fantasy VII Remake).
  • Liana K's Bossfight had the bad luck to enter production right as the COVID-19 pandemic struck. While it was always going to be a challenging show (Liana playing about ten different characters), COVID restrictions meant it took twice as long as normal to film and edit even five episodes. The finale in particular featured nearly every character returning, and the extensive use of Double Vision meant twice the editing time per how many characters were in the frame. It also required lots of green screen, and the Zarkazaan character having a green dress and colour scheme meant her coverage had to be done via a separate blue screen. Overall, the series entered production in March 2020 and the final episode wasn't uploaded until August 2021!
  • The MandaloreGaming review of the obscure adventure games Ring and Ring 2 was one of the creator's most difficult videos. The first game's save system didn't work, forcing him to restart the game anytime he got a game over which was a frequent occurrence. The second game was seemingly impossible to review at first as despite years of trying he had never been able to get the game to run on a modern PC. He finally succeeded, but the changes made to his PC were so extensive it's likely the success could never be recreated. Worse, the changes actually damaged the PC to the point that the entire thing had to be replaced. With the addition of the bizarre and difficult gameplay itself, it took three years to finish the video.

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