Troubled Production / Video Games

"I loved that game, but am probably most dissatisfied with the final result. Certainly tried my best, but that thing nearly killed me."

— Ted Woolsey on cramming a 32-bit CD onto a 16-bit cartridge

Video game production often proves to be a game in and of itself: sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.

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Final Fantasy

The Final Fantasy franchise is pretty bad about this, especially in later titles as shown below.

• 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.
• In 2006, Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which was planned to be a PS3 exclusive game. The game's development didn't really go anywhere for years to come, and the title was still in pre-production phase by 2011. News of its progress was sparse as Versus XIII consistently abstained from the game exhibitions, and rumours of its cancellation began to spread. In 2013, the production team announced that the game would be released for PS4 and Xbox One (rather than the intended PS3), and had been retitled to Final Fantasy XV. A year later, it was announced that Tetsuya Nomura had stepped down as the game's director and was replaced by Hajime Tabata, who has since announced a number of large changes to the game's established story, characters and gameplay. The game was then set to be released on September 30, 2016, but was later delayed again to November 29, 2016 in order to avoid a Day One patch... only to release a Day One patch in order to enhance gameplay mechanics and add new moves. However, despite its production troubles, XV nonetheless, ended up being critically and commercially successful.
• Final Fantasy XIV had a very troubled production from the beginning. The game was riddled with bugs, bad game design, and lack of content led players to heavily criticize the game for feeling unfinished. The producer of the game felt that all problems could just be patched later and wasn't quite open to interviews. On top of this, the developers did nothing but apologize every time a problem happened and it happened so frequently that the English localizer on the team got fed up and told the Japanese dev team that they had to do more than just apologize since they were coming off as insincere. The game bombed so bad that Square Enix fired most of the dev team and replaced them with new people. The new dev team did their best to fix the game, but there were so many issues that they decided to scrap the game entirely and remake it. The remade game, A Realm Reborn, ended up being a massive success, becoming one of the most popular MMORPGs on the market.

LucasArts / Star Wars

LucasArts, according to various sources and feature stories written over their lifespan, exemplified Executive Meddling, with a laundry list of scrapped, mismanaged and unfinished games under their watch. The actions of the studio culminated in Disney gutting it after their acquisition of the Star Wars license in 2013, and it solely exists these days as a licensor for other products, having moved completely out of in-house production.

• Fracture suffered from various Executive Meddling from LucasArts, such as a lack of creative control, being forced to change the game from a first-person shooter to a third-person one (which caused a lot of technical problems), and George Lucas coming in to force some more changes such as a request to change the main protagonist's name from Mason Briggs to Jet Brody (despite marketing already naming him the former). As a result of the game selling poorly, LucasArts cut all of its ties with Day 1 Studios, leaving Day 1 seeking a new publisher to stay afloat.
• LucasArts' fall from grace and eventual dissolution has been covered in multiple feature stories, and showed a company that was equal parts mismanaged and directionless. According to various sources, promising projects like Star Wars 1313 and the multiplayer shooter Star Wars: First Assault were prone to delays and shifts mid-development because of severe mismanagement that some developers felt bordered on sabotage. A hiring freeze in late 2012 killed LucasArts' momentum, and planned marketing initiatives for the in-house projects were shunted to the sidelines. A month later, the studio was shut down due to Disney's acquisition of LucasFilm, and the in-development projects were all canceled.
  • Many sources blamed the studio's former president, Micheline Chau, for causing strife and distrust between the various staffers by forcing them to rehearse what they would say to Lucas and not give any unscripted feedback of their own. If George Lucas ever chimed in on a project, his word was considered divine mandate; developers were not allowed to argue against or even question his decisions, which was problematic as staffers alleged that Lucas would give them bizarre or confusing design requests. His alleged meddling included cancelling a Chewbacca-focused action game because Lucas didn't consider Chewbacca as a protagonist, contributing to the cancellation of a Darth Maul game by telling the team to make it a "buddy cop story" with Darth Talon (a character that wouldn't exist in-universe for at least 100 years later), and wanting the protagonist of The Force Unleashed to be named Darth Icky... which the developers got around by naming him Starkiller, a name used in development for the original Star Wars film for the character that became Luke Skywalker, and therefore technically a name suggested by Lucas.
  • Coupling with What Could Have Been, LucasArts' dissolution caused many promising projects to be scrapped in mid-development. These scrapped games included (in addition to 1313 and First Assault) a complex open-world game designed by Far Cry 2 developer Clint Hocking, a proposed third installment of Knights of the Old Republic by Obsidian Entertainment, a third installment of The Force Unleashed, an Updated Re-release of the Rogue Squadron series and more. They were also several completed projects, including a mobile game where you could control the Death Star and another mobile game called Outpost where the player could create their own Empire, that were completed but scrapped for no discernible reason.
• Free Radical's Star Wars: Battlefront III was subject to a large amount of development troubles and studio in-fighting with LucasArts before it was scrapped. Despite it never being formally announced, the details of its turbulent production are infamous:
  • The developer started production on an internal prototype for the next installment in the Battlefront series. According to interviews with co-founder Steve Ellis, the concept was so good that LucasArts was pushing them to release it as soon as possible, and they promised gameplay elements like a seamless transition from the player flying a ship in space to landing on a planet and exiting, cutting-edge tech upgrades and more. Likewise, LucasArts reportedly promised the developer that they could also develop a Battlefront 4 if the third installment was successful.
  • In early 2008, LucasArts went through a round of layoffs and the relationship between the publisher and developer soured. According to Ellis, the new executives were sour on the concept and wanted to trim as many projects as they could. Consequently, the game began missing content milestones, and previous cash injections that were given by LucasArts dried up. Other accounts claim that the company was deliberately lying about their progress on the game to continue receiving support payments from LucasArts. All of this was compounded by the failure of the PlayStation 3 game Haze, which sold poorly and garnered harsh critical reviews.
  • The game missed an April 2009 launch date. Soon after, Free Radical was hit with a round of layoffs and the game was supposedly canceled for financial reasons, In interviews afterward, Ellis claimed that the project was "99% finished" and only needed bug fixing before it could be released, but his account was disputed by an anonymous ex-Lucasarts employee, who said that it was canned because Free Radical was missing target deadlines, lying about their progress and that the game tested poorly internally. Ellis stated that the game was mutually scrapped after it became clear that LucasArts couldn't afford to continue development.
  • Gameplay of the reportedly near-final version leaked in 2012, and showed that the project was playable, but also suffered from random crashes and numerous bugs. The Free Radical team later published a video ridiculing LucasArts executives for failing to fund the project through to completion.
  • To add insult to injury, Battlefront III wasn't the only Free Radical project that fell through. The team created a working prototype for Timesplitters 4, but were turned down by multiple publishers who complained that they didn't know how to market it. This was the final straw before the company disintegrated in 2009.
  • The Battlefront project reportedly passed through several more developers before it was eventually given to DICE Software, who released a reboot in late 2015.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is legendary for its turbulent development history and botched release. The game notably featured an incomplete and haphazard ending, caused by LucasArts rushing Obsidian to get the game out the door for a Christmas release. Major elements like the HK-50 Droid Factory, M4-78 droid planet, much more content with the player's squadmates (and a coherent ending) were either left unfinished or scrapped entirely, and Obsidian's attempt to resolve the issues via a major content patch after the fact was rejected by the publisher. KOTOR 2's release is also rumored as being partially responsible for the company nearly going bankrupt in 2004 and being forced to restructure and focus more on in-house development.
  • Eventually, fans created The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, which managed to fix most of the gameplay issues and restore cut content, making the game considerably better.
• Before its cancellation, the Star Wars game codenamed Ragtag suffered from tumultuous development according to Kotaku. Much of the defunct game's quagmire could be attributed to the actions of publisher Electronic Arts and Star Wars rights-holder LucasFilm.
  • Before working on the game, developer studio Visceral Games was in bad shape after Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel were commercial and critical disappointments in 2013. These flops left the studio demoralized and short of manpower, leading to much bad blood between the studio and its owner Electronic Arts. When the studio was given the Star Wars license and writer Amy Hennig of the Uncharted series joined the team, there was hope that the studio could recover and deliver a solid game.
  • Unfortunately, the studio was constantly hamstrung by Executive Meddling and culture clashes from EA and Disney. EA wanted the game to score a 90% on Metacritic and feature an innovative gameplay mechanic like the Gravity Gun. LucasFilm wanted to inspect and approve of every game design decision while also placing restrictions on the game's tone and lore. These demands have led to situations in which approving character costumes, which normally lasts about a week at most, could last for months.
  • Furthermore, the Visceral Games was short on talented staff. The high costs of running the studio in San Francisco meant that EA couldn't hire new full-time permanent employees. Exacerbating issues is that several of Visceral's employees were pulled away to work on DLC for Battlefield Hardline. Motive Studios, one of EA's existing subsidiaries, tried helping out only to be pulled away to work on Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), leaving Visceral Games again short on manpower.
  • The corporate-mandated usage of the Frostbite engine also gave headaches to the team. While the engine was great for shooters, it lacked many of the assets and tools necessary for third-person action games and RPGs. As a result, the team had to spend most of their time and money developing the necessary tool from the ground up.
  • Given the constant red tape, lack of employees, and poor morale, it was clear by 2017 that Ragtag couldn't meet the demands of being a best-selling licensed Star Wars game with quality comparable to Knights of the Old Republic. The game was cancelled in 2017 and Visceral Games was shut down. Given how tumultuous the development phase became, it was seen as a mercy kill with many employees actually happy that they were let go.

Sonic the Hedgehog

The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has a startling frequency of hectic productions, most of which haven't ended well in the long run.

• Sonic the Hedgehog 2's history can be chronicled by the many alphas and betas made along the way, including a very early build given to Nick Arcade. Rumor had it that 2 would've had a Time Travel mechanic, but it took up too much ROM space. Many Zones were planned and scrapped, including the infamous Genocide City and the legendary Hidden Palace^note The former was repurposed into Metropolis Act 3, and its planned aesthetics recycled for The Machine in Sonic Spinball; Hidden Palace was completed and restored in Sonic 2's mobile remaster.. Sonic Team director Yuji Naka, dissatisfied with Sega of Japan's policies, flew with his team to the USA to make the game at Sega Technical Institute. Unfortunately, development there was marred by conflicting work ethics and language barriers between the Japanese Sonic Team and the American STI staff. Fortunately for everyone involved, the game went on to gain rave reviews and sell millions, although it did set a precedent of things to come...
  • An HD Fan Remake of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was cancelled in 2012 when the lead programmer, LOst, had Creative Differences with the rest of the team and provided a build of the game with DRM protection. Since he had not released the source code for the game's engine, the game could not be updated. Production restarted in 2014 when a fan of the project developed a replacement engine.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were split into two games because of a licensing deal with McDonald's that pushed Happy Meal toys before the game was out, expecting a Christmas 1993 release. When that didn't happen, Sega released the first six stages of the game — as Sonic 3 —in February 1994 to keep their end of the deal. The rest of the game was released half a year later — as Sonic & Knuckles — in a special cartridge that could be hooked up to Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 for new play experiences. (The first game, however, isn't compatible because most of its graphics were built around Sonic's color palette and Knuckles's sprites interfering too much; Sonic 2 didn't have that problem thanks to Super Sonic.)
  • Michael Jackson and some of his collaborators composed some music for it, but Jackson, unhappy with the Mega Drive's sound capabilities, asked to go uncredited, and Sega was all too happy to oblige after his 1993 sexual abuse allegations. Licensing issues may also be in play, as Jackson's touring keyboardist Brad Buxer had a previously unreleased track by his band The Jetzons used for IceCap Zone.
• Sonic X-treme stands as one of most notorious examples of troubled video game development—unlike most of the other examples here, the game never finished development. Many things went wrong with the development of what was supposed to be Sonic's Video Game 3D Leap on the Sega Saturn.
  • What would eventually become Sonic X-treme for the Sega Saturn was actually the byproduct of a slew of several failed pitches for a Sonic game developed by Sega Technical Institute, which underwent many ideas for stories, game design, and even platforms (with the game previously planned for the Sega Genesis, and then its add-on the Sega 32X). Things did not get better when development for X-treme started, as the game's development staff was split between two teams, with lead designer Chris Senn leading development for the main/platforming levels, and lead programmer Ofer Alon leading development for the boss levels. Even with Mike Wallis monitoring both teams, the teams basically built two different games; which naturally led to led to some high tensions between both groups. (Not helped by smaller factions formed within the main teams to work on different aspects of the game ^note in theory they were meant to ease the development process, but in practice made it more cumbersome as well as Ofer's reclusion from the rest of his team). Then production delays kicked-in, thanks to a busted development process; the game was originally programmed on a Mac computer, quickly ported to PC and then to the Saturn. Thus the game had atrocious framerate issues on the Saturn, playing at a consistently sluggish 3 to 4 FPS.
  • SEGA of America stepped in by hiring contract developer Point of View to smooth out development, but it didn't work out. They were first hired to assist in porting the game's engine to the Saturn, but ended up taking over development duties from Alon and failed at it — POV's programming demo was just a basic image of Sonic on a checkerboard background, and they still couldn't port Sonic X-treme's engine to the Saturn. POV's inexperience ultimately led to the breaking point in March 1996, when some Sega of Japan representatives-including then-President Hayao Nakayama-visited STI to check on the game's progress. While Alon and Senn formed a new group out of the main engine's original team to continue their own work following POV taking over production duties, and by the time of Nakayama and co's visit had succeeded in porting their engine to the Saturn before the visit; POV—without the original devs' knowledge—had already demo'd an older version of Alon's engine to the Japanese executives and utterly failed to win Nakayama's favor. Then Coffin's boss engine was shown in action, and Nakayama ordered the entire game redesigned around it to be completed for the holiday season. Despite Senn's best efforts to get the Japanese execs to stay longer to see Alon's newly polished engine, they just wouldn't budge.
  • From then on, development was mostly restricted to Coffin's team to finish the game for the holidays; all other work on the main engine was effectively discarded. In desperation, Coffin's team asked for and was granted use of the engine used in NiGHTS into Dreams... to speed things up. Then Sonic Team director Yuji Naka found out that it was being used without his permission and threatened to quit Sega if it stayed that way, sending STI back to square one and prompting Alon to leave Sega. ^note It's been theorized that Coffin's level designs were merely inspired by NiGHTS, and Naka got the message the wrong way. Then Coffin and Senn did most of the work on their own, working 20 hours a day and sleeping in the offices until Coffin got pneumonia and Senn became so ill he was told he'd have six months to live if he kept going. With the game far from finished and two months left until the deadline, Wallis had no choice but to pull the plug on production, and a later attempt by Senn and Alon to get their work released on PC was rejected.
  • Sonic X-treme's cancellation has been pointed out as a reason for the Sega Saturn's commercial failure; the hole left in its wake meant that the Sonic series wouldn't have a proper 3D platformer on the Saturn and the console wouldn't have a guaranteed Killer App. X-treme has been blamed for Sega Technical Institute's closure the year after, and Sonic wouldn't get an actual 3D entry until Sonic Team revamped the series for the Dreamcast.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) also ended up as a victim of this — although the game, unlike X-treme, was released, the final product was likewise far from finished. After Yuji Naka — one of the founding members of the Sonic franchise — resigned from Sega and consequently left ongoing development of the game, massive pressure was then put on the game's director Shun Nakamura and the rest of the development team to have the game (which was supposed to help re-launch the franchise on what was a new generation of consoles) finished in time for that year's Christmas season as well as be released before year's end to qualify as the 15th anniversary title. And then if that wasn't enough, the development team was split so that a new team could work on a new Sonic game for the Wii console, the result of Sega discovering that a Wii version of the game (which was in development along with the PS3 and 360 versions) was unfeasible due to the Wii's technical limitations. The fact that they had to develop two remaining console versions of the game at the same time during the short development process did not help matters. The final product was ravaged by reviewers and fans alike as one of the worst video games ever, and — contrary to popular belief — sold poorly, resulting in a black mark the series has still struggled to move on from even to this day.
• After the game came out to scathing critical reception and even worse sales, people were left absolutely flabbergasted as to what exactly happened behind-the-scenes with the Sonic Boom video game tie-in Rise of Lyric. Efforts from Sonic researchers managed to get in touch with an anonymous former member of the game's developer Big Red Button, who revealed the whole sordid story behind the game.
  • The game started life as Project Apollo in 2011 (later given the working titles Sonic Origins and Sonic Synergy). Heavily taking after Jak and Daxter (which members of the studio had previously worked on), the project initially started out as a standalone action-adventure game with heavy focuses on exploration, multiplayer co-op, and story (boasting an origin story about Sonic and Eggman with time-travel and ancient beings), with notably different character designs. As the studio spent two years developing a vertical slice demo for Sega, mandates by the publisher and chief studio Sonic Team kicked in, causing heavy changes to the original concept (among other things, speed was increased, exploration was downplayed, character designs were retooled to be closer to the main series, the origins backstory was axed entirely, and various game mechanics were scrapped).
  • The game was originally developed for a digital release for Steam, with Xbox Live and PlayStation Store releases planned if sales were good (development kits for the PlayStation and Xbox platforms can be spied out in certain developer footage and screenshots for the game). This was undone by Sega pitching the game's vertical slice to publisher Nintendo, and ultimately folding the project into an exclusive partnership deal between the two parties; resulting in the game compromised into the game being Sega's third and final exclusive Sonic game for Nintendo's Wii U platform. This proved to be a major problem since the game ran on the CryEngine 3 game engine, which was not officially supported on the Wii U. ^note To say nothing of the fact that CryEngine 3 was an engine normally designed for first-person shooters; not for action-adventure games with co-op as it is... When the team starting porting the game to the Wii U in mid-2013, the results forced fundamental changes to the game—four-player co-op was restricted to two-player co-op, many game mechanics had to be reworked or removed, and levels were streamlined into a linear progression. A notorious quote from one of the game's developers was that the team "was fighting against the engine the entire time".
  • During this time, a separate group of people pitched to Sega the idea of an animated Sonic TV series, which would eventually develop into the Sonic Boom sub-franchise. Despite BRB's game spending most of its development as an unrelated project, Sega later gave control over the game to the production team for the show a handful of months before the game's release, resulting in more changes being made to the game (particularly its story and Knuckles' personality, as well as requesting for characters, levels, and cutscenes to be added to the game) to bring it closer to the animated show. This chiefly explains why the final game and the animated show have only a handful of tenuous connections to each other.
  • The bottom of the game's production eventually fell out when a large chunk of the team was found to have left in July 2014, either voluntarily or being let go; with the game reportedly going gold that same month. This revelation, alongside the previous Nintendo-exclusive Sonic games in the partnership selling poorly, has led to the common consensus that Sega rushed the game's development so they could release the game and quickly conclude the contract (as well as shove the game out in time for the Christmas season).
  • In the long run, the final game that was released as Rise of Lyric had a whole murderer's row of glitches and design oversights, as well as unpolished graphics that left a lot to be desired — a stark contrast to early footage released for the game, which showcased impressive visuals. In a telling move, Sega enforced a review embargo to prevent official reviewers from telling the public about the mess the game was in, not that it did any good once the game was launched. The resulting fallout from the game's failure was BRB nearly going out of business (having only worked on AR/VR games since Rise of Lyric) and the game being partly responsible for Sega undergoing layoffs and restructuring the following year, followed by the publisher's CEO later apologizing for betraying consumers' trust in recent years.

# to M

• 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 is now pursuing 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.
• 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 is what happens when you get four inexperienced programmers together in a recording studio, have them work on 52 games at once in less time than it takes to make one, constantly change ideas throughout development, and expect to kickstart a franchise with little promotion. It's lucky to have even been finished, and almost no bug testing took place.
• 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, 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, and Sega was becoming impatient with 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.
  • 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 without ever attacking, was caused by a one letter typo on the word "tether," without which they could 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 frequently shifted. They overtly sought to differentiate their game from the similar Destiny and refused to learn from what it did right and wrong, especially as various changes made Beyond resemble Destiny that much more. 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 50's and 60's - 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 hasn't been 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, and PS4 owners reported that the game would crash and even brick their consoles that would permanently corrupt 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.
• 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 pretty much finished by then.
• 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.
• 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. Investor and publisher interest never materialized (except one, which was supposedly turned down), forcing him to keep relying on crowdfunding. 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.
  • Egregiously, a sequel and animated short film were planned...while the first demo languished in a two-year Development Hell. Upon release in 2015, it was a buggy, unbalanced mess. Entire updates were dedicated to adding purely cosmetic elements.
  • Criticism was either ignored or met with animosity by Stevens and Marco Arsenaut, Evil Dog's lead programmer. 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.
  • 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Game 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 out-shined 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 out-shined 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. Also, Firaxis had 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.
• 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 reviewers'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 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 ressources 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 philosphy 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, Activsion 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  
  Published by Planet Entertainment on a license from Office Create, the game's development (by 1st Playable Productions) did not go smoothly, with gameplay demos falling far below Office Create's desired standards. When asked to go back and fix Cookstar's problems, Planet released the game anyway, thus breaching their contract and causing Office Create to order all copies of the game recalled. To add insult to injury, Planet had also commissioned and promoted a PlayStation 4 port of Cookstar without Office Create's authorization.
  
  Those that did get a hold of the game were met with 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 Switches to overheat, which spawned rumors that it had a Bitcoin miner embedded. In the end, Office Create profusely apologized for the game, sued Planet Entertainment over it and Cookstar became Overshadowed by Controversy.
• 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 company, 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.
• 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 entire 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 totally 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, that's about the size of your monitor, twice as large as the game's actual resolution, and a hell of a lot larger than the space a crossbow bolt actually takes up. 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 pretty much ended the fame and career of John Romero, who, before Daikatana, was a superstar developer on a 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 (basically 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.
  • This was fortunately averted with the Lost Crowns DLC trilogy and the Scholar of the First Sin Updated Re-release; the team had time to polish and develop them properly, and it really shows in their noticeably higher quality overall.
• 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 succesful 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 sudio to work on the game like usual, Interplay decided to set up an independent contracting program that would utilize Interplay's own as well as outside talent. This arrangement proved to be chaotic and the team never even had an assigned project manager.
  • Descent engine 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 relase 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.
• Devil May Cry 2 became an outstanding example of a Sophomore Slump due to a chaotic and rushed development. Details are 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, which addressed many of 2'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 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. Reviews 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, while Ninja Theory would return to developing original properties with the self-published hit Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice in 2017.
• 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 that reportedly believed 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 Heineman, who had joined under the impression she just needed to polish a complete game for release, 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. This alongside the difficulties she ran into with the 3DO explains why the result was such a Porting Disaster. 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.
  • Also, it appears that Art Data attempted to create Full Motion Video cutscenes for this 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.
• 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, fans were deeply upset at its derivative Follow the Leader nature. 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 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: 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.
• 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 exorbinate cost - roughly $500,000. The release date was set for 1998, the first of many the game would miss. 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, who's perfectionism and desire to upstage the competition led to the game constantly shifting as new technologies and gameplay innovations 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". 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-2000's, 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 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 - convinced 2K Games that Gearbox and Triptych could finally complete the game. The near-final version of Forever made a surprise showing at Penny Arcade Expo 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, sending 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 saw the hype bubble pop. Reviews were mixed-to-negative, with critics unimpressed with its gameplay and attacking the game's 90's 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 ET The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600, which was so rushed that it ended up being made just in six weeks. Considering that it was made basically by a single person, Howard Scott Warsaw, and that programming for 2600 was notoriously idiosyncratic, it's actually a minor miracle that the game is playable at all. The game was enormously hyped by the Atari's marketing department — they actually made more carts than there were Ataris, expecting the game to be so popular it'd create a console sale boom. 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.
• 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 of potentially block Polytron from presenting 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 loathe 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).
• 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.
• 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 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 plauged 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.
• 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 literally whatever they wanted. While the project made almost four times its original goal, it ended up suffering due to terrible behind the scenes problems. 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 programer. 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. All the money that the backers spent ended up being used by Proctor to buy Unity store-bought assets. 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 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.
  • 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, most likely never able to finish it.
• Valve Software's landmark Half-Life series is known as a benchmark for revolutionizing gaming with each new major instalment, so it's no surprise that actually producing them is a very uphill battle:
  • 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^Explanation Valve 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 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.
• 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).
• 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. Also, 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 accomodate 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 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 reigns 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.
  • 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!"
• 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 fellow fighting game Beast's Fury and tore down 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). Many people learned of the game's existence from Caustic Critic Jim Sterling's video, which certainly didn't help its image.
  • 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 games 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 totally 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, often making up BS reasons for said banning 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 fron the project, Kjolner later lied to Silberman that the fans had voted for Missileman to be removed when no such thing had happened.
  • 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 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 entire KC-ECS debacle played no small part in Mattel's decision to discontinue Intellivision a year later.
• Jurassic Park: Trespasser: As explained in an online feature or this video about this infamous botched 1996 FPS, Trespasser had a host of design and logistical problems that caused its design team to severely scale it back from their initial goals. An ambitious plan to have friendly and hostile dinosaurs that reacted to you through a groundbreaking AI system was largely abandoned because the creatures couldn't decide what mood to pick (the AI was set to maximum hostility as a quick fix). The melee weapons didn't work (so they had all their mass removed, making almost all of them useless), textures were largely scaled back because of compatibility issues and there were serious issues with the game's physics system. A botched licensing deal (they couldn't use John Williams' iconic music in the game, so they had to create their own), mismanagement between the game's design team, and a continuously delayed release caused the game to be dead on arrival, and it was quickly forgotten.
• 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 play style 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 (basically 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, so it's very likely the game will never be released, much to the dismay of the backers.
• 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.
• 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 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 the then-in planning MMO, but it then turned out that the game would have had to sell 3 million 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.
  • Note also that 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. In addition to the above points, there's the fact that 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 the 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 entire 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.
• Lair went through a variety of issues during development, including but not limited to 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 game and the company's poor attempt at damage control when the controls predictably became the most contentious aspect of the game.
• L.A. Noire competely destroyed Team Bondi due to the lead designer having serious rage issues and treating it like his masterpiece. In order to get the game back on budget, they hired and chewed up nearly every budding game programmer and artist in Sydney (some of whom completely abandoned the industry due to their treatment) and were so hostile toward their publisher, Rockstar Games, that Rockstar publicly swore off ever working with them again. Team Bondi shut down shortly after the game was released. Said lead designer and other ex-Team Bondi staff reportedly went to work on a Spiritual Successor titled The Whore Of The Orient, but it was officially put on hold in 2016.
• 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 punch, 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 sexual 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 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 indefinately 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, a former animator for the company 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 occurence that was not uncommon at the studio during crunch.
  • Things got worse in April of 2020 when a massive Content Leak occurred. 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 the death of one of the original player characters at the hands of a new character named Abby, whom the player would take control of for the second act of the game- which turns out to be somewhat true, as players instead get to control Abby at several points, including just prior to the death in question, which happens very early into the 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 the aformentioned figures attempted to stir further outrage by claiming that Abby was a trans character due to her muscular physique, which turned out to be false. 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. The source of the leak was assumed to be a disgruntled Naughty Dog developer, but Sony stated that the source of the leak was not affiliated with Sony or Naughty Dog, and Jason Schreier believed the leak came through a data breach attack on Naughty Dog's servers.
  • 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, and even 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 fuelled resentment against both Sony and Naughty Dog.
  • When the game finally released in June 2020, critics greeted it with open arms with many giving perfect scores and some comparing it to cinema works such as Citizen Kane and Schindler's List in its unflinching and uncompromising subject matter. But others such as Polygon and Kotaku were more reserved in their praise, leveling criticism at the story's pacing and unsympathetic characters. Fan reception was considerably colder, with the work being subjected to a Metacritic bombardment. Hype Backlash may have contributed to the outrage, as well as a general consumer distaste for media with dark themes due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and widespread social unrest. Despite these conditions, it quickly become one of the best-selling games of 2020.
• 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.
  • This in turn, ironically, would lead to another Troubled Production for 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, entire 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 entire script from the ground up.
• 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 even 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 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.
• 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' 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 ressources 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, Soliani would promptly go back to work). Fortunately, it seems development on the actual game was far smoother.
• 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, 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 minority members of the team tried to voice their concerns about how the game's main plot of the heroes travelling to a foreign galaxy to carve out a new home could be seen as a glorification of colonializm and imperialism, 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's a small miracle ME:A was released in largely working condition at all.
• While the Metal Gear franchise has been acclaimed and cherished by many, they weren't all exactly a walk in the park.
  • 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 New York getting destroyed 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, and its cutscenes and climax to be hastily edited to avoid controversy.
  • 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 Ohtsuka, 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, a damning report from Japan's Nikkei news service came to light that exposed the circumstances behind the game's development. It was reported that Kojima became a pariah because Phantom Pain was delayed, leading to its production budget exceeding $80 million U.S. dollars by April 2015. It was also revealed that Konami executives (having restructured their efforts more towards mobile games and its ancillary divisions like pachinko machines and health spas) was overseeing Kojima Productions, now renamed "Number 8 Production Development", with an iron fist. Employees were reportedly monitored on social media and on emails, and publicly shamed if their lunch breaks went for too long. Additionally, it was suggested that making mistakes at Konami led some employees to be transferred to menial office tasks in other divisions until they quit the company.
    • 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. An entire 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 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 were 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:
  • Metroid: Other M had many issues pop up during development due to the game director, Yoshio Sakamoto, trying to assume total control over the game's development. Whatever issues the dev team had an issue with, Sakamoto either ignored it or told them to work with it. Sakamoto also demanded that the controls be mapped to the Wii Remote only, even though the dev team pointed out that it was more difficult to control Samus on the D-pad and would be way easier to use the Nunchuck's analog stick. Sakamoto also told Samus' voice actress, Jessica Martin, to deliver her lines in a repressed way to emulate someone with a troubled past, which made Samus sound extremely flat and monotone most of the time. The overall result was the game receiving massive backlash from critics and fans alike for making Samus look weak as a person, bad writing, and awkward controls. What makes it even more painful that Super Metroid was also handled by Sakamoto and that game is considered to be the best game in the Metroid franchise, making many people wonder what happened between that and Other M.
  • Metroid Prime. Not counting that producer Shigeru Miyamoto asked to throw out basically everything during early stages, at a certain point, the Japanese crew was spending most of their year in America overseeing the game and Retro Studios' staff was pulling all-nighters, working 80-100 hours a week neglecting family and nourishing on atomic fireball candy (a total of 72 gallons of them among the staff), given that, in the words of an 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 was acclaimed and commercially successful, the awful work conditions and eventual redistribution of royalty payments led to some developers jumping ship and Retro's president being fired.
• 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 to look and feel flashy and expensive led to a slow and troubled development, not only they had to develop a game with all those difficulties but also release it on five consoles themselves with little external help. After multiple delays ended up released in mid-2016... at which point not only were there multiple counts of backer keys either not working or receiving DLC keys instead of the game, but the Wii U version caused the console to hard crash, and the release of the game on the Xbox 360, Mac and Linux were delayed even further. Upon release it was also critically savaged and creator Keiji Inafune accepted responsibility for the disappointing final project.
• 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 (even for 1998) graphics, buggy programming, and somewhat underdeveloped gameplay. The impending release of the competing Metal Gear Solid that same year certainly didn't help matters.

N to Z

• Neverwinter Nights 2's premium module Mysteries of Westgate didn't take long to develop. However, Atari wanted the DLC shipped with a DRM scheme. This delayed the release of the game. Adding to this, Obsidian patches constantly broke down the Adventure Pack, pushing the game's release even further, much to gamers' frustration.
• According to several Starbreeze and Overkill developers, Overkill's The Walking Dead had massive troubles behind the scenes.
  • Development had begun on the Valhalla game engine Starbreeze had purchased in 2015, departing from the aging Diesel game engine previously used in PAYDAY: The Heist and Payday 2. Unfortunately, Valhalla was in a very early stage of development and in no shape to be used, lacking even a function to open files. Those who worked with Valhalla had nothing good to say about the engine, calling it "a piece of shit", "unworkable" and "an insane waste of money". Developers begged management to move the game to the proven Unreal game engine, which was finally granted after two years of development on Valhalla. The game was pushed back to 2018, but that only left the team a single year to build the game, many of whom had no prior experience working with Unreal.
  • Mismanagement plagued the game and the company at large. The release of RAID World War II while Payday 2 was receiving content regularly left many at Starbreeze confused as to why they were competing against their own game, which helped RAID drop to a mere 40 concurrent players within three months of release. Starbreeze spent tens of millions on Virtual Reality projects, nearly all of which failed.
  • On the game itself, producers would make wild demands for features based on the latest games they had seen, such as Far Cry and Dying Light. The showcase at E3 2018 had management assuring the team that reactions to the game were glowingly positive, even as team members saw news and videos showing that actual impressions had been lukewarm at best. The team was forced to work up to 100 hours a week during the last months of development to get the game done by the deadline, severely affecting the mental and physical well-being of many working on the game. By the end of development, the team had been thoroughly disillusioned about the quality of the game.
  • When the game released in November 2018, it staggered out as an Obvious Beta that was panned for being riddled with glitches and various online issues, and others criticized the game's pacing and gunplay. Expected to sell millions of copies, it fell disastrously short of Starbreeze's expectations and Starbreeze's stock price went into freefall. The company would continue to be rocked by bad news throughout the year as the beginning of December saw Starbreeze CEO Bo Andersson leave his post as the company announced it was filing for reconstruction. Two days later, Starbreeze would have their offices raided by police, who arrested at least one person and confiscated multiple computers on suspicion of insider trading. In February 2019, Starbreeze had the license to The Walking Dead ripped away, removing the game from digital storefronts and cancelling planned releases on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
• Atari's home port of Pac-Man was supposedly the demo version, made with great difficulty over six weeks due to the differences in underlying hardware. When the developer showed it to the suits, they said "OK, we're shipping this." It did well on the strength of the title but took a pounding in the media and contributed to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
• The production of the third installment in the Pac-Man World series was pretty chaotic. Namco commissioned Blitz Games to develop the title after a previous game, Pac-Man Adventures, was cancelled, but financial problem kept causing hurdles to the point Namco wanted to cancel the game entirely. They eventually allowed the game to continue, but Blitz Games had to pay for it out of their own pockets and had to take the loss. On top of that, they still had a tight deadline to finish the game in order to tie it to Pac-Man’s 25th anniversary. The result was met with mixed reviews, and a rather divisive reception among fans. That, combined with poor sales, led to the game becoming a Franchise Killer for Pac-Man Adventure-platform games outside of a duology of tie-in games for Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures.
• Parasol Stars, a spin-off from the Bubble Bobble series, was ported to several systems in the early nineties. However, the Commodore 64 version was cancelled because of a relatively minor Troubled Production. The port was assigned to a programmer whose marriage was falling apart. One night, the programmer got into a heated argument with his wife, so she got on his computer and erased all his work on the port. You're probably thinking "But why didn't he make backups?" Actually, he did, but his wife found those and destroyed them as well. At first, Ocean Software tried to cover for the programmer by claiming his computer had been stolen, but later came clean.
• As shown in the final part of the “Making Of” documentary, The 8-Bit Guy’s Planet X3, the MS-DOS sequel to his Commodore 64 strategy game Planet X2, went through trials and tribulations during the stressful 14 month development cycle.
  • The game was originally envisioned as an enhanced port of Planet X2 for DOS, with extra features that weren’t in the C64 version due to RAM limitations. No longer being limited by computer RAM of DOS machines, a new limitation came in the form of disk space. Like with Planet X2, David wanted to fit the game onto a single disk, shipping it on both a 360K 5.25 inch disk and a 720K 3.5 inch disk. David had three graphics modes for the game in mind: CGA, Tandy and VGA. The maps were larger in file size than the C64 prequel and took up a huge chunk of space. Furthermore, a planned intro sequence was cut from the game due to the numerous graphics modes and the fact that it would not fit on a 360K disk. The intro sequence was uploaded as a standalone YouTube video. The large map file sizes also meant that certain maps from the 720K disk version had to be removed just so the game could fit on a single 360K disk, and the VGA graphics mode was cut altogether on the 360K disk version.
  • David had plenty of experience on the 6502 assembly language, but he had no knowledge on assembly language programming for x86 processors. It took him a full month before he got to know how to program assembly language on x86 processors and he found a good assembler to use for coding the game. When David was adding extra features, this made the game even more complex than the C64 prequel, but this came at a certain cost. As he kept adding more code, the game had difficulty running properly on IBM XT machines running at 4.77 MHz, David’s primary goal to make the game run on all MS-DOS computers, so he had to leave off features he wanted to add to keep the game stable on old hardware. Also, David and beta testers discovered several bugs, some of which David considered almost un-fixable as they seemed random and impossible to reproduce. At two points of development, David almost considered quitting and he even went almost a month without any coding.
  • Producing physical copies of the game wasn’t an easy task, either. David decided to start a Kickstarter campaign for the game, earning over $110,000, most of which was spent on materials like box design and disks. Unlike Planet X2 boxes, which came pre-assembled, the Planet X3 boxes were flat, and so a lot of time was spent folding over 2000 boxes of the game, some of which were defective. Duplicating disks was also a challenge, due to the fact that the 720K disks had no write protect notches, forcing the developers to stick paper over the holes to write the disks. Writing 360K disks also required vintage hardware with 360K drives, as 360K disks that were written on 1.2 MB disk drives cannot be read on 360K drives. Even with over 2000 disks for each format produced, that only covered about 20% of the Kickstarter fulfillment, and David realized that he couldn’t do all of those disks and ship the product on time.
  • When the month of February of 2019 came along, David started shipping the game to the backers who funded the game. He had estimated that it would take 2-3 weeks to complete the shipping process, but in reality, it took 3 months. David spent over $22,000 shipping the packages, and most of them came back as undeliverable (most of them being from the UK) because either people never responded or the post offices never informed them of the packages. Thus, he asked the backers to update their shipping addresses and pay for the shipping, as he can’t afford to pay refunds for all of the packages that returned to him undelivered.
  • Even though David still has plenty of leftover Planet X3 materials, which take a up a lot of storage space, the game was successfully shipped and received positive reviews, with plans for a shareware demo, opening the game’s source code, and a possible Sega Genesis port.
• PlayStation Home, a virtual world created by Sony for the PlayStation 3, effectively existed in a state of limbo for its entire lifespan. This article on Kotaku UK lays out the whole story of "Sony's most successful failure".
  • Home began life as an online mode for the PlayStation 2 game The Getaway: Black Monday, but soon expanded once Phil Harrison, vice president of Sony Europe, had a look at it and decided that it could be something far more. Harrison envisioned the project, then known internally as 'the Hub', as a 'space between games' that would function as a lobby system of sorts for a whole slew of games. While Harrison was able to secure funding for what was becoming his dream project, many of Sony's other executives didn't understand his vision for the Hub, a problem that would plague Home for its entire lifespan. The Japanese executives especially couldn't get their heads around it — to them, multiplayer gaming was a social activity where friends get together in the same room, the antithesis of the Hub's Western model of playing with strangers through online matchmaking. (A similar philosophy was visible in Nintendo's much-maligned "friend code" system.)
  • With the announcement of the PS3, what was now being called Home was soon positioned as a flagship title for the fledgling console. This led to a number of problematic design changes. The original animesque character style, for instance, was thrown out in favor of a more photo-realistic one designed to showcase the new console's power, but it soon turned out that having hundreds of such highly detailed, player-controlled characters in a virtual space (especially an online one) was incredibly taxing on the PS3's hardware; the number of avatars in any given space had to be capped at fifty. Furthermore, these more realistic models fell straight into the Uncanny Valley.
  • The greater world's introduction to Home came at E3 2007, in the form of an incredibly awkward presentation featuring the digital avatars of Sony executives Jack Tretton and Kaz Hirai. It was a poor first impression, and it added to the woes that the PS3 suffered early in its life cycle. Furthermore, Home missed its planned autumn 2007 release date, being pushed back into the following year.
  • Phil Harrison's departure from Sony at the beginning of 2008 produced a revolving door of producers, many of whom didn't understand the concept of Home and whose expertise came in widely disparate fields. Oscar Clark, the man brought in to sort out the disorganized project, remarked that, in early 2008, there essentially wasn't a Home, the project having been filed with all manner of half-formed ideas.
  • When Home finally launched in December 2008 after more than a year of delays, it was an Obvious Beta. The massive amount of detail on the avatars and the worlds they inhabited produced outrageous load times of up to ten minutes, and there was a good chance players couldn't get into the areas they were trying to enter due to the strict, resource-mandated caps on the number of avatars in any given space. The team could do little to fix these problems, as they were small and underfunded and the bugs so numerous and deep-rooted; there's a reason the game never left its Perpetual Beta. There was little content to see either, and a number of features planned for later updates were scrapped. One such feature was the Hall of Fame, a personalized room where players could see physical, three-dimensional trophies corresponding to their achievements in various games; most studios, even Sony's second-party developers, saw designing dozens of unique trophies as a waste of time.
  • Developers' skepticism extended to Home in general. Few of them saw any point in creating virtual spaces and other content in Home for their games, especially given how difficult the process of creating such content was, and as a result, most of Home's actual content had little to do with video games. While a few companies like nDreams and Veemee did create a number of unique original games for Home, shopping for clothes, houses, yachts, and other items for players to customize their avatars with became the main activity. Home had gone from a gaming hub to a bizarro version of Second Life...
  • ...which actually allowed it to start turning a profit and develop a passionate fanbase. Commercially, it was a huge success in the long run, even if it was swiftly forgotten outside its cult following. In fact, it was precisely this financial success that caused Sony to wait until 2015, after the PS3 had become a Daddy System, to finally shut down its servers.
• Postal III was a nightmare in development according to developer Running With Scissors. As Matt McMuscles chronicled on an episode of What Happened?:
  • After the release of Postal 2, RWS lost their main publisher Whiptail Interactive, who bailed on them after the game was released. Seeking a new publisher for the next Postal game, RWS decided to make Russian publishing company Akella develop it instead through their in-house studio Trashmasters, since Akella had handled publishing for P2's Russian release, promising to still design and write the game themselves. Akella assigned their A Team to work on the game, planning on releasing the game on the Xbox 360 and PS3 alongside the PC port with a 2008 launch date. So far so good.
  • And then the 2008 financial crisis happened. Russia was hit hard by the crisis, especially Akella. So to cut costs, Akella fired their A Team. Then their B Team. Next their C Team. And finally their D Team. All of whom never received payment. Akella also had to make downgrades to the core game in order to stay in business, like replacing the promised open world with a more linear level based structure. RWS suggested cancelling it to put the game out of its misery, but because Akella had sunk so much money into the game, they had no choice but to complete whatever they could and ship it after numerous delays. The console versions were cancelled as well, and promised patches were never released.
  • The game finally saw release in 2011, where it received incredibly poor reviews from not only critics, but fans as well, who balked at the game for its weak graphics, numerous glitches, poor controls, and its obnoxious sense of humor. RWS would completely disown the game on their website, to the point where it was retconned in the Postal 2 Paradise Lost Expansion as a coma induced fever dream by the Postal Dude. The game would also serve as the killing blow to Akella, who ultimately went defunct a year after the game's launch, no thanks to the game's abysmal sales, plus a massive lawsuit filed by the fired staff for unpaid royalties. RWS would eventually work on their own in-house Postal sequel, Postal 4: No Regerts, without Akella's help.
• Another 3D Realms game with development issues was Prey. The first attempt (1995-1996) of the developers failed because the creative director left the company to join his friend's new business and pretty much the rest of the team did not stay in the project, either. The second attempt (1996-1998) failed due to technological problems the team could not solve. In the third time (circa 1999), there was only one person working on the game, the tech programmer. This attempt, too, was unsuccessful because of technology-related issues. The project was eventually transferred in 2001 to Human Head Studios, which then developed the game. It was finally released in 2006.
• The sequel Prey 2 suffered from a similarly chaotic production to the original game; unlike the first game, it only made it to alpha before Bethesda unceremoniously canceled it in 2014.
  • Originally the game was going to be a direct sequel announced in 2006 and made by 3D Realms. However, basically nothing came out of it, and the trademark wads bought by Bethesda in 2009 before being given to Human Head Studios for development with a 2012 release date.
  • As the release date came and went, virtually no information came out from either Bethesda or Human Head about the game. It turned out that for then-unstated reasons, Human Head had quietly stopped development of Prey 2 near the end of 2011, after having spent about two years of development on the title, throwing the game into Development Hell. At this point, they had only managed to create an alpha version of the game; said alpha wasn't shown publicly until it was leaked by several former Human Head employees in March 2018.
  • According to an article by IGN, Bethesda had agreed to give Human Head an additional six months or more on the project to complete the game and still make the planned 2012 release; however, this extension was not written into their contract. Bethesda was disappointed by the state of the game and also wanted to buy out the studio, so they used this as an excuse to start cracking the whip on the devs to make development milestones, causing Human Head to basically go on strike by stopping development completely.
  • Frustrated by the issues with Human Head, Bethesda took the IP back when their contract with Human Head ended, then instantly moved development of the game over to Arkane Studios. Arkane was actually chosen among a number of other developers Bethesda wanted to take over the game (some of their other choices were Obsidian Entertainment and Rebellion Developments). Arkane promptly scrapped everything Human Head had made and started the game over completely for the second time.
  • After about a year of further rumors, Bethesda officially cancelled Prey 2 and Arkane set the IP on the backburner so they could finish work on Dishonored. Eventually they went on to dust off the project and "reboot" the entire IP with Prey (2017).
• Princess Maker 2 was slated for an English release in 1995, but publisher Intracorp went bankrupt before it could be released. MS-DOS becoming obsolete, and the dominance of first-person shooters in the PC market, did it no favors. The English beta of the game eventually leaked to the internet several years later... but thankfully, a fully-translated version of the Updated Re-release Princess Maker 2 Refine was released in September 2016 by CFK on Steam.
• Psychotoxic, a First-Person Shooter released in 2004, took six years to make and shipped in an Obvious Beta state, as elaborated upon in this video from DXFan619, who refers to it as "The Craziest Game Ever Made".
  • The game got its start in 1998 when Frank Fitzner, a German game designer who had made a number of edutainment games before then, recruited a number of people from the Half-Life modding community to form Nuclear Vision Entertainment and begin work on what was then called Psychotoxic: The 4th Horseman. The first levels they made for the game were originally created as tech demos for Vulpine 3D Technologies' Vision game engine, with an eye towards later using them for their game to attract the attention of publishers. It worked, and they were picked up by CDV Software, one of Germany's largest game publishers.
  • CDV, unfortunately, would only spend 1.5 million Deutsch Marks on the game, enough to recruit a team of six people and one part-time freelancer, far less than the 2.6 million Marks (enough to hire eleven people) that Fitzner felt was necessary to bring the project to fruition. That said, Fitzner took the deal, and sure enough, the lack of budget forced Nuclear Vision to cut many corners, leaving multiplayer, a number of the protagonist's angelic powers, and numerous other features on the cutting room floor. Furthermore, Vulpine's planned update for the Vision engine fell far behind, delaying production to such a degree that CDV at one point asked Nuclear Vision to inquire about what it would cost to license the Unreal Engine.
  • Work started in earnest in late 2001, and went smoothly through 2002 and early 2003 despite the prior problems. In August 2003, however, things began to fall apart virtually overnight as Nuclear Vision realized that CDV, having expanded far too quickly in the last several years, was in a perilous financial state. Psychotoxic only avoided the waves of cancellation and firings that befell CDV's other games and staff by virtue of the fact that Nuclear Vision had met all of its milestones for the game's development, but that didn't stop CDV from cutting the game's budget in order to stave off bankruptcy.
  • By September, Fitzner, seeing the writing on the wall, was searching for a new publisher, and seemed to have found one in Ubisoft. However, this led to a breach-of-contract lawsuit from CDV, forcing Nuclear Vision to pay 30,000 Marks to get out of its old contract, a bill that was paid for by Fitzner and other project leaders going for three months without pay while borrowing from family and friends in order to keep the studio running. Worse, the lawsuit also killed the deal with Ubisoft due to how long it dragged on for, causing Ubisoft to lose interest. The only thing that stopped the game from getting canceled outright was when Vidis, a gaming accessories company that mostly published smaller titles before then, agreed to publish the game.
  • Psychotoxic finally staggered into stores on September 3, 2004... just in time to get run over by Doom 3, which had come out a month prior. Its behind-the-scenes woes and shoestring budget were evident in the amount of Game Breaking Bugs that it shipped with, the worst of the bunch caused by a faulty batch of DVDs that made the Starforce copy protection system go haywire. Fitzner was willing to make a patch to disable Starforce, but Vidis, afraid of piracy, wouldn't let him do so. Furthermore, due to the game's lousy sales, Vidis cut the price to 30 euros (which Fitzner had originally wanted) — and used that as an excuse to deny Nuclear Vision the rest of the money promised to them in their contract, as Nuclear Vision had agreed to the price change. This led to another lawsuit.
  • Nuclear Vision closed its doors the following year. Fitzner left video game development to become a graphic designer before suddenly passing away, while the other developers went to work for other companies.
• The Ratchet & Clank series is no stranger to this.
  • According to a podcast with Mike Stout and Tony Garcia, the development of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal was very turbulent, hence the heavily scaled down and rushed feel of the games content. The dev team was forced to split up programmers and designers in order to focus on the games new multiplayer mode, forcing them to cut numerous corners in the single player mode (repetitive enemy roster to save on animation time, shorter and more linear planets, proposed content like racing and starship levels getting axed, and diversions like Giant Clank and grindboot segments getting scaled down or axed altogether, recycling multiplayer maps in the single player mode to pad out the games length, etc.) There was also getting Insomniac's new propietery Phoenix level editor for the game functioning, as well as the Galactic Rangers A.I. to work, which took the entire development timeline to get right and it was reportedly a nightmare the whole time. On top of that, the game had a tight development timeline of a year (3 months preproduction, 9 months full production). There was a genuine fear that the game was going to be a flop, with one of them going as far as saying the game was seen as a disaster until mere weeks before it went gold, with the dev team scrambling before then to even make the game presentable for release.
  • According to Mike Stout, Ratchet: Deadlocked was an even harder game to make than Up Your Arsenal (itself having a turbulent production) and basically broke the dev team behind it. They were operating on the same period of time to make it as the previous two Ratchet games (three months preproduction, nine months full production) but the first few months were spent on three attempts to retool the game (one was the proposed but aborted Nexus game^note ]not to be confused with the later released Into The Nexus, an R&C racing game that was scrapped to avoid competition with Jak X Combat Racing and a failed attempt to expand the mission segments of UYA into a full but non-linear game), leaving only 9 months left to get a finished game ready for the 2005 holiday season. Making matters worse was that the Deadlocked engine was built almost entirely from scratch as opposed to reusing the engine of the previous games and, like UYA, had to be built with multiplayer in mind, forcing the main gameplay variety, enemy lineup and length to be even more scaled down than the previous game.
• According to emails released following Leslie Benzies' departure from Rockstar Games and subsequent lawsuit against the studio and its founders, Sam and Dan Houser, two of the games that Rockstar made after the mid-'00s fell into this category in one way or another.
  • Red Dead Redemption was apparently so rough and unplayable just months before release that Sam Houser desperately emailed Benzies for help in getting the game in working order. According to the lawsuit and emails, while the Housers were Rockstar's "idea guys" who handled most of the creative aspects, Benzies oversaw programming and development management, and things turned nasty when the Housers tried to go without Benzies in RDR. While Benzies did save the day, the frantic development crunch and resulting tangled mess of code ensured that RDR will likely never get an Updated Re-release on PC or eighth-gen consoles, as Rockstar did not want to risk a Porting Disaster like Grand Theft Auto IV's PC version. Worse, the crunch required from the staff to get the game finished was bad enough that several anonymous spouses of Rockstar San Diego employees wrote a scathing letter that accused Rockstar's management, in no uncertain terms, of destroying the lives of their employees through stress. While RDR won rave reviews and became Rockstar's biggest success outside of Grand Theft Auto, the experience soured the working relationship between Benzies and the Housers.
  • The strains that developed with RDR burst open during development on the online component to Grand Theft Auto V. Grand Theft Auto Online, as it was known, was Benzies' pet project, though the Housers cared little for it and preferred to focus on the single-player story. The big sticking point for the Housers, however, was when Benzies' name was placed at the end of GTA V's opening credits, a spot normally reserved for Sam Houser, indicating that he was the lead producer on the game. Apparently, Sam only found out when he sat down and played the game after release, a point that Benzies brought up in the lawsuit to question just how involved Sam was in the game's production, if he hadn't seen its opening credits until it was already released.
  • After production on GTA V wrapped, Benzies received what he was told was a six-month paid sabbatical as a reward for his hard work. Instead, according to the lawsuit, this sabbatical turned out to be a prelude to a termination. When he found his work email and cell phone disabled, he went back to the studio only to find that the locks on his office had been changed, leaving him wondering if he was even still employed at Rockstar. Upon concluding that he had indeed been fired, Benzies sued Rockstar for $150 million, claiming that they had screwed him out of royalty payments. The Housers maintain that Benzies had left Rockstar voluntarily, thus dis-entitling him from royalties.
• Scalebound, a game about a badass smart-aleck who could fight and control dragons that was stuck in Development Hell for seven years, finally looked like it was going to get out of it in 2015 as a collaboration between PlatinumGames (specifically Hideki Kamiya) and Microsoft Studios. Unfortunately, the game ended up being cancelled in early 2017 due to the two companies' different creative ideas and design philosophies clashing together, resulting in a negative impact on the moral of the development team. Platinum wanted a large world that had a consistently great frame-rate, while Microsoft wanted a more scaled down game that showed off the graphical capabilities of the console. All of these disagreements caused the game to remain in limbo until its cancellation, and for Kamiya and producer J.P. Kellams to take a month long absence from their respected companies to recuperate their mental health.
• Sega went through a lot of grief in producing a CD add-on for the Genesis/Mega Drive. Technical hurdles to getting the Sega CD to work with the Genesis, as well as paranoia about the capabilities of competing hardware, pressed the development team into continually beefing up the add-on’s specs to the point where it became ridiculously expensive. Adding to the mess was the lack of cooperation and coordination between Sega's Japanese and American branches (which would go on to derail the Sega Saturn), with Sega of Japan refusing to send prototypes to the West, rendering Sega of America and Sega of Europe unable to promote the add-on to consumers and developers before its release. When systems finally arrived at Sega of America, they found them plagued with manufacturing defects up to and including spontaneous combustion. All of this scramble to simply get the hardware out the door meant that Sega couldn't properly solicit game developers for the system, causing the Sega CD's library to consist mainly (though not entirely) of FMV games, with only a few or so games that actually made (comparatively) more innovative use of the system's specs^note Including Sonic CD.
• Secret of Mana's development is an example that had profound ramifications for Nintendo, Sony and Squaresoft, as its fate is closely tied to the collapse of the SNES CD-ROM.
  • The SNES CD-ROM was a joint project between Nintendo and Sony with Secret of Mana being developed as a Killer App for the new add-on/hybrid console, but the CD-ROM project collasped due to a bitter falling out between Nintendo and Sony; Sony's contract terms insulted Nintendo and Nintendo publicly snubbed Sony to partner with Philips at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show (which itself would fall through). The game fell on the brink of cancellation as a result of the drama, but Executive Meddling and contractual obligations forced the developers to continue working the game as a standard title for the SNES.
  • The game went through massive cuts and reworking as a result of being forced onto the limited storage space of a cartridge. Director Koichi Ishii estimated that 40 percent of the game's content was axed in the transition, though most of the content and concepts cut from the game would find use in other Square RPGs such as Chrono Trigger and Trials of Mana. While the game was ultimately a success in both reviews and sales, the SNES CD-ROM incident and its impact on the game's development was a major catalyst behind Square's decision to sever its ties with Nintendo and partner with Sony, who would turn the CD-ROM console idea into the wildly successful PlayStation. To add insult to injury, many of Squaresoft's games would prove to be major hits on Sony's system, most notably Final Fantasy VII.
  • The English localization deserves special mention: Ted Woolsey had only one month to localize the game and was given the script out of order. Due to issues compressing the game's text space and the limited time given to localize the game, the English script was cut by about 40 percent with conversations chopped down to the base elements.
• Shaw's Nightmare's development had a long and troubled history as detailed here:
  • The project began in 2007 when the developer got the idea to make the game when his sister got an idea for a series. The series idea didn't get very far. Due to lack of a programmer the project was cancelled.
  • The project was revived a year later and the Build engine was chosen to be the engine that powered the game. A programmer joined early on but he left when the author discussed commercial licensing with Ken Silverman.
  • The developer tried to program it himself but he ran into issues and he tried to ask for help in the Allegro forums but he wasn't able to find anyone to help him.
  • The developer continued to make the game but he eventually lost interest. The project was revived in 2011 but he lost his work due to hard drive formatting and he had to restart the project.
  • Another developer joined the project but he left without warning and did not do any work on the project.
  • The sequel was also delayed due to level designers joining and leaving the project without any warning. OBLIGE (a random level generator) was used to fill in the missing levels.
• Sierra Ops had a lengthy development with some hiccups, as detailed on the developer’s website. They had to find a new lead artist in 2015 after the original one left the project, and progress was slow from 2016 to 2018 for various reasons. Things sped up mid-2019, at which point InnoMen decided to release it as an Episodic Game so that the people who backed Sierra Ops on Indiegogo would have something to play while the team finished development.
• Silent Hills immediately emerged as one of the most anticipated horror games on the horizon after a demo called P.T. (for "Playable Teaser") was released at Gamescom 2014 and scared the pants off nearly everybody who played it. It was to be a Silent Hill game made by a Dream Team of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, with Norman Reedus voicing the protagonist. Unfortunately, P.T. was all that ever came of the project, as production came to a halt several months later thanks to a bitter feud and falling out between Kojima and publisher Konami (described in the section above on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain), with both Del Toro and Reedus confirming that the game was delayed indefinitely, if not outright canceled. Rumors briefly swirled that Microsoft was looking to buy the rights and restart production as an Xbox One exclusive, but those hopes turned out to be little more than wishful thinking. The experience (together with that of inSANE, a previous video game project of Del Toro's that became vaporware when THQ went bankrupt) caused Del Toro to swear off working on video games. Fortunately, some good did come of the experience, as Kojima and Reedus would later collaborate on Death Stranding, with Del Toro confirmed to be making a cameo appearance.
• The Simpsons: Hit & Run, as described in this video by James Tyler of Cleanprincegaming, faced massive headwinds. While it was a smash hit that became a Cult Classic acclaimed as one of the best licensed games ever made, it did not have an easy time getting there.
  • During production, Radical Entertainment was facing a lawsuit by Sega arguing that their previous Simpsons game, Road Rage, was such a blatant ripoff of Crazy Taxi as to constitute copyright infringement. While the lawsuit was settled out of court, it was a close enough call that Radical decided to retool their next Simpsons game into a Wide Open Sandbox game instead, shoehorning in on-foot segments to a game that had already gone into production as a vehicle-focused sequel to Road Rage. It is a testament to the quality of the work done by Radical that the nature of the shoehorning doesn't stand out too much and hurt the actual gameplay, but it is still visible in things like the lack of on-foot enemies and the use of fade-to-black wipes whenever characters get into or out of most vehicles (since they didn't have time to create the animations for such).
  • Needless to say, morale on the team was low, with many thinking that the game would bomb. Two entire levels were apparently cut from the game due to time constraints, the code still present in the game files.
  • Furthermore, the game was slated to come out on the Nintendo GameCube, but publisher Vivendi didn't want to spend much money on porting the game to a system with a limited install base, so they gave the job to just one person, lead programmer Cary Brisebois. Amazingly, he managed to convert all of the game's code to work on the GameCube in the few weeks he was given to port the game, though the fact that the port was entirely the work of one man shows in its Obvious Beta nature compared to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions.
  • Despite the game's success, it has not been rereleased on modern consoles due to licensing issues. For starters, a pair of terrible licensed games, The Simpsons Wrestling and The Simpsons Skateboarding, that were released shortly before Hit & Run caused Matt Groening and Gracie Films to pull the Simpsons license for games in order to preserve the franchise's reputation, with only The Simpsons Game, released in 2007 just a few months after the movie, and The Simpsons: Tapped Out, released in 2012, coming out after. Even discounting them, a tangle of other rights issues means that fans will have to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
• Though not as extreme as its successor, The Simpsons: Road Rage also faced its share of development troubles, most of which clearly shows in the final product:
  • Development began smoothly, as Radical Entertainment's pitch for a Simpsons-themed Crazy Taxi game was accepted thanks to standing out at a time when every other licensed driving game was a Mascot Racer. The team was given a short 11-month deadline to complete the game, which limited the scope of the project but was not an issue by itself.
  • The game was shown at E3, where it displayed an art style very faithful to the cartoon and a large rendition of Springfield to explore. When Matt Groening was shown the game however, he believed that the game didn't look video game-y enough and advised that Radical not try to emulate the show too closely. This resulted in much of the game's textures needing to be remade.
  • When it came time to port the game to various platforms, the Xbox and GameCube versions worked fine, but the PlayStation 2 version showed serious frame-rate issues, primarily caused by the new, more detailed textures. The programmers eventually fixed this issue, but it created a new one regarding the game's streaming ability: If the player moved fast enough, they could outrun the game's ability to load new areas. With the strict deadline looming, the developers made the decision to slice the game's map up into six different areas independent of each other, an obvious downgrade that nobody was happy about. This decision is very obvious in the final game; the transition zones between areas are blocked by quickly-placed props, and even the mini-map clearly shows that the areas are supposed to be seamlessly connected. This extra work also meant a few additional features had to be cut, including side-missions during the main taxi mode.
  • The final result was a game seen as So Okay, It's Average at best, and severely hurt by the string of compromises made to deliver the game on time. Some good did come from this game however, as Radical's experience in making the game would be put to good use with the far more polished Hit & Run, and helped to smooth out that game's rough development too.
• According to Raven Software employee Keith Fuller, Singularity's development was a mess. After two years, the game was nowhere near complete despite repeated delays and siphoning staff from other teams within Raven Software, and a good chunk of the game's maps could not load on either of the console version. The game was basically cancelled when Activision's then VP visited the studio and saw in what a sorry state the game was in, but a deal was made at the last minute where the team behind the X-Men Origins: Wolverine licensed game would take over the project and get a 10 month extension to ship (not finish, ship) Singularity in a presentable form - a very short development for an AAA game. Managing this required taking an hacksaw to basically every aspects of the game, with the TMD mechanic mainly serving for repetive box-dragging puzzles and a heavy reliance on Bioshock-style audio logs to accomodate the plot rewrites. Despite the rough development, however, Fuller goes on to concluce the team was proud to be able to make a solid game out of a disaster.
• Skullgirls was hit with a litany of production problems, mostly after its release in April 2012:
  • In May 2012, Autumn Games and Konami, the publishers of Skullgirls, got hit with one heck of a lawsuit involving the game Def Jam Rapstar. This led to the development staff for the game being laid off by the original developer Reverge Labs. The game's development team was able to form a new studio called Lab Zero, and were allowed to maintain the game and release the planned Downloadable Content because Autumn Games owned the Skullgirls IP. The legal and financial hurdles in the formation of the new team is what caused the six month delay.
  • The first patch for the game arrived in November 2012, but only for PlayStation users (and from an entirely different developer) — Xbox Live Arcade size limits prevented the patch from being released on the Xbox 360.
  • After a Japanese localization was released and the developers used crowdfunding campaigns to raise enough money to realize the first four DLC characters (as well as the Xbox patch), Konami wouldn't respond to any contact from Lab Zero, meaning the DLC couldn't be released on consoles. Lab Zero decided to cut their ties to Konami and seek publishing from Marvelous AQL, who published the PC version. In response, Konami requested the game be delisted from both Xbox Live and PSN in December 2013. Lab Zero was only notified of this after Microsoft and Sony approved the delisting. Thankfully, due to the transfer of publishing rights from Konami to Marvelous AQL, the game was re-released as Skullgirls Encore in January 2014, and included the long-awaited console release of DLC character Squigly (for free, no less!).
  • Not long after the announcement of Encore, Cyberfront, the game's Japanese publisher, closed up shop, and the game's future in Japan looked uncertain. Thankfully, some time later Arc System Works stepped up to publish the game's 2nd Encore version there.
  • And just when everything semed like it would be going smoothly, the Red Cross requested that Valentine's crosses have their color changed (the symbol of the Red Cross is protected by the Geneva Convention; this is why you'll never see a Nurse Joy with a red cross on her hat). Lab Zero at least took advantage of the necessary patch to add a new character (Fukua) to the game.
  • In 2020, following a series of allegations of harassment and poor working conditions against Lab Zero Games's owner, Mike Z, followed by employees leaving in droves, it seemed like the future of Skullgirls was about to meet its end. Fortunately, this was averted as the IP ownership was able to be transferred to Autumn Games, the developers of the mobile version of Skullgirls, while said employees who left Lab Zero Games went to found a new company, Future Club, thus ensuring continued development. Unfortunately, the game could not be said for Indivisible, which has abandoned all its plans for future content as a result.
• The 2010 Splatterhouse reboot had a very rocky development. Originally greenlit in 2007, the game went through multiple dev studios before settling on BottleRocket Entertainment, with them announcing a 2009 release date. Namco ended up not being satisfied with the final product, so they ended up having to scrap everything BottleRocket did and develop the game in-house, with only a year left to go before its new 2010 release. As a result of the rushed development time, Namco wasn't able to iron out the game's problems, such as the long loading times, some graphical issues, and platforming bits. The game was released to lukewarm reviews and poor sales, but has now become a Cult Classic.
• Splinter Cell: Conviction: It took almost four years from the time the game was announced (via an internal leak of images from the game in mid-2006) to its release because of several major gameplay shifts, including a halfway-finished product that was essentially thrown out midway through production. The original game, helmed by Ubisoft Montreal, featured Sam Fisher (now on the run from Third Echelon) as some type of homeless drifter sporting a beard, hoodie and makeshift weapons and devices, and the gameplay was intended to be a sandbox-type shooter where Sam would investigate various locales to get information (and memories) about his daughter. The game was seen as a serious departure from the franchise, and Ubisoft canned it midway through development over negative fan reaction and claims that its gameplay was too similar to the original Assassins Creed (also made by Ubisoft Montreal). Several features were unceremoniously thrown out (including several abilities that enabled Sam to blend into his environment, move objects around and fight hand-to-hand against enemies), and the game's entire structure was revamped. Conviction would eventually be released in early 2010.
• The production history of Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly could very well be a horror story. A large part of it came from the outlandish demands of Universal Entertainment, often demanding certain changes and retracting them at a drop of a hat, and shooting down ideas for the game if they didn't consider it "Spyro enough". Crunch time was in full effect, the game would be completely rewritten multiple times, and it still ended up being Christmas Rushed. The pressure resulted in hostility between the employees, including one who would snap at random and would often spiral into violent behavior, to the point of choking a programmer for disagreeing with one of his suggestions.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl suffered from almost a decade of Development Hell due to the developer GSC's grand ambitions battling with their own X-Ray Engine, along with near-endless feuding between publisher THQ and GSC on the road to becoming known as the Eastern European analogue to Duke Nukem Forever. Originally announced in 2001 and not released until 2007, the result was an amateurish Obvious Beta the eventually became Vindicated by History as a huge Cult Classic and got two sequels, but it had quite a hard time getting there.
  • What became Shadow of Chernobyl started as a completely different game called Oblivion Lost, and was originally intended to be a sci-fi game in a futuristic setting akin to Quake before GSC opted to put the game in a more grounded setting. Some on the team were apprehensive about the game's setting, as the effects from the Chernobyl disaster was very much still in recent memory.
  • The team's wild ambitions constantly ran afoul of reality. Initially planned as a realistic and massive open world game with cutting edge AI and photorealistic graphics, the team regularly fought against the X-ray game engine, which was less than well suited for the monumental task asked of it. Many of their prototyped gameplay ideas proved to be unworkable as various mechanics fought against each other, such as drivable vehicles clashing with the deadly anomalies in levels. In late December 2003, a pre-alpha build of the game was leaked to peer-to-peer file sharing networks. This build, marked as version 1096, inadvertently acted as a fully functional tech demo of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s engine, despite its lack of NPC enemies and fauna.
  • A version of the game dubbed Build 1935 was the closest the game got to its original ambitions. Despite being in a near feature-complete (albiet very buggy) state, much of this build's content was axed due to issues with the engine and THQ demanding a more linear, story-driven game upon being shown the build. This forced GSC to hastily cut the game's story to pieces, and thanks to the issues with the engine and amount of cut content, the game was delayed multiple times for almost two years by THQ, while GSC frantically tried to make the messy remains of the project into a playable game. This build would later be released in 2009 by GSC to the community.
  • Additional problems followed in 2005, when some members of the development team, most notably Oles' Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk who had worked on the X-ray engine, were becoming frustrated with the constant delays, workplace conflicts and abysmally low pay. THQ's representative at GSC, Dean Sharpe, faced language barrier issues and open hostility from the development team, with one incident leading to a physical altercation between himself and a developer. His attempts to get the game focused and cut down to something releasable also made him a target of scorn and death threats from the community. These factors ultimately resulted in a mass exodus from the company on October of that year, with many of the former GSC developers forming 4A Games to begin work on Metro 2033. Sharpe, despite his icy relationship with many of the GSC development team, would himself move to 4A and eventually become its CEO. Sergei Grigorovich would later accuse 4A of stealing assets and engine code from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for Metro 2033, though no legal action was taken.
  • THQ ran a competition in January 2007 offering the winners the chance to play the beta in a 24-hour marathon session. The event, scheduled to take place on 24 January 2007, was subsequently changed to a 12-hour session merely days before it was supposed to occur. On the morning of the event, the winners were met at the venue by the THQ staff that had organized the event... who told the winners that they couldn't get any copies of the game, because it was "unplayable" according to GSC and the developers refused to give THQ any beta copies.
  • Clear Sky suffered even worse from this, as the entire X-Ray Engine was retooled for DirectX 10 support halfway through development with only a year of development time. The final result was a somehow even worse Obvious Beta than Shadow of Chernobyl; the game shipped as a near-unplayable mess of glitches, awful optimization/performance, insanely unbalanced Nintendo Hard gameplay that flew headfirst into Fake Difficulty, and bugs - including several bugs that made the game literally impossible to finish. Thankfully, Call of Pripyat was much smoother and the result was the most polished game in the series.
• The development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 managed to surpass both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky in the sheer scale of troubles that the development team faced. According to different sources, GSC was facing serious financial difficulties throughout the development as well as having trouble finding investors or publishers for the game and as internal conflicts within GSC were becoming increasingly severe, GSC's CEO, Sergei Grigorovich, was becoming dissatisfied with the direction that the game was taking, ultimately leading to the studio shutting down in December 2011. What little remained of the game's staff desperately continued their work without receiving any financial compensation or pay for several months. They tried to find new investors and a publisher to finance the project, but Grigorovich still wanted to hold onto the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. license and he forbid the development team to continue work on the game, which forced the remaining staff to finally kill off the project in April 2012. Most of the remaining development team would thereafter go on to found a new company called Vostok Games that began work on a free-to-play Spiritual Successor called Survavarium, while Grigorovich and some other old GSC workers went on to re-establish GSC in December 2014 and announced in May 2018 that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was back in development and would be released in 2021.
• Star Fox Adventures had a production period that not only dragged across two console generations, but was torturous enough to irreperably break the partnership between Rare and Nintendo:
  • The game started life on the Nintendo 64, as a stand-alone title named Dinosaur Planet. Considerable technical wizardry was required to make a game of the scale that the development team were aiming for feasible on the Nintendo 64, but the team nonetheless got the game engine working and had the product about two-thirds complete... when Shigeru Miyamoto suddenly ordered them to move the game over to the GameCube, rework the gameplay systems to make it more like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and most significantly, make it an entry in the Star Fox series. The development team were unsurprisingly furious with this, but were forced to comply.
  • Despite their initial anger, the developers quickly came around to the idea of developing it for the GameCube, as it was not only a lot more powerful, but far easier to work with than the notoriously finicky Nintendo 64. They ended up creating a whole bunch of new features, including the game's distinctive fur shading technology, but the time required ended up bumping the game from the GameCube's launch window to Christmas of the following year.
  • There were disagreements, both internally within the development team and between Rare and Nintendo, with some parties wanting to keep the game true to its origins as an RPG, and others wanting to incorporate more of the space shooting that the series was known for. The former group won out, with the shoot-em-up aspects relegated to a minimal part of the game.
  • Speaking of which, the game was originally meant to climax with a hand-to-hand battle between Fox McCloud and General Scales, only for Nintendo to instead demand literally just a couple of months before release that the final battle instead be between Fox and the series' Big Bad, Andross, despite Andross having had absolutely no part in the game's storyline. This resulted in one of the most clumsy and notorious instances of Hijacked by Ganon in gaming history.
  • Similar to the above point, Krystal, one of the protagonists of Dinosaur Planet, was reworked into a Deuteragonist meant to help Fox recover the Plot Coupons. However as the game was Christmas Rushed, the majority of her gameplay sections were Dummied Out. This made Krystal playable for only the tutorial level before ending up as an egregious Damsel in Distress who would not be freed until the game's climax.
  • Nintendo's Executive Meddling in the development of Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark — in the latter case, encouraging the game's development team to all quit after production was over and form Free Radical Design — along with the Invisible Advertising of Conker's Bad Fur Day had already caused enough problems. Star Fox Adventures pushed things to the breaking point, causing nearly all of Rare's remaining staff to threaten to walk out unless the company was decoupled from Nintendo.^note (The staffers were also motivated largely in part by the fact that by then it was clear that the GameCube was selling even worse than the Nintendo 64, causing many of them to predict that Nintendo had no future as a hardware developer, and would be forced to follow Sega's then-recent move into becoming a third-party developer) The studio's founders and main shareholders, the Stamper Brothers didn't have enough money to buy out Nintendo's shares, and Sony, whom most of the employees favored selling up to, weren't interested. After an abortive attempt to sell up to Activision, the Stampers eventually persuaded console newcomers Microsoft to buy up all the shares in the business, officially ending their long partnership with Nintendo. Even then, their partnership with Microsoft wasn't exactly glamorous, as most of the next few games they released afterwards for the Xbox such as Grabbed by the Ghoulies and the Live and Reloaded remake of Conker's Bad Fur Day were critical failure, culminating in the release of the infamous Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. That said, Rare did continue to develop games for Nintendo's handhelds for a while, as Microsoft didn't (and still hasn't as of this writing) have a handheld console of their own.
• Star Trek Online started out being owned by Perpetual Entertainment and was given a set schedule for launch. However, two years into development, they had plenty of pretty conception work, but no actual gameplay and it's been said that Perpetual was only doing this for shadier reasons. Either way, CBS was angry at the waste and gave the license to Atari and Cryptic, who forced the companies to rush out the game (though it was thankful that Cryptic had the easily compatible engine from Champions Online to use). However, even that wasn't enough as the game was bleeding players as Atari used the money the game brought to pay off their massive debts. It wasn't until Perfect World Entertainment bought Cryptic that the game would flourish.
  • A good example of Cryptic's forced rush was the Klingon faction. Compare the group at launch and compare the group during the first expansion, "Legacy of Romulus": Klingons were not chooseable at the start, they were unlocked when a Federation player reached Level 20. The Klingons started out at Level 20, but had no extra places to actively gain levels like the Federation did and had very little ships to play with. As well, the Gorn race was laughably bad in design, looking almost as bad as the Star Trek: The Original Series versions. Nowadays, the Klingons are chooseable at the start, the Gorn look much better and there's an entire starting story for the Klingons.
• One would think that, as bad as Superman 64 was, it was solely developer Titus' fault. However, in an interview with Eric Caen, one of the founders of Titus, with ProtonJon, it's revealed a lot of the reasons for the game's poorness was politics with Warner Bros. and DC Comics towards Titus (the virtual reality world? They didn't want Superman kicking real people). In fact, Caen mentions that the game was "not even 10% of what they envisioned" and that while it was a money-maker, it hurt them in the long run because they were forced to cancel the PlayStation version of the game.
• An odd one — Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 was actually held back a few months because of a music problem: JAM Project just couldn't hit a specific high note for the game's theme, GONG. Even now, they'll still sing the song in their shows, but they will not attempt to hit that high note.
• "Troubled" doesn't even begin to describe the genesis of Tattoo Assassins, Data East's Mortal Kombat clone. According to insider accounts, the idea was born when Data East Pinball executive Joe Kaminkow got a script treatment from Back to the Future's Bob Gale^note The two became friends during development of the BTTF pinball and decided to turn it into a game — with a development schedule and budget that was less than half of the typical arcade game of the time. The developers were promised lucrative bonuses for making the deadlines, which resulted in 12-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week grinds. To make matters worse, the team was hamstrung by nonstop demands for additional fatalities, time was spent preparing demo prototypes for trade show demos, and the final hardware was far underpowered for the game's intended design. The playtesters had to be forced to test the game, while the developers simply wanted to finish it and move on — and at the end of it all, the game was never released.
  "We knew the game was crap, and that we were no longer capable of fixing it. After we got back from the show, we were so 'crispy' that we no longer cared about the money — our only true reward for finishing up was that we wouldn't have to work on it any more."
• There was never one single Creator Killer for Telltale Games; instead, according to insider accounts, virtually every game they ever made, save for The Walking Dead Season One (the studio's Breakthrough Hit) and Minecraft: Story Mode, lost the studio money. Given reports of a toxic work environment and culture at the company as it grew from an indie upstart to a behemoth — and came crashing back down — it's perhaps no surprise that the studio's management didn't exactly have its hand firmly on the wheel.
  • To make a long story short, after The Walking Dead blew up and singlehandedly turned around the studio's perilous finances, Telltale grew eyes bigger than its belly. The small studio rapidly grew from fewer than a hundred people to over three hundred, and started greenlighting games based on licensed properties left and right in hopes of making the lightning of The Walking Dead strike twice. However, the studio's culture remained stuck an indie mindset that valued tribalism and buddy-buddy relationships over professionalism and open communication even as it entered the big leagues.
  • The inevitable consequence of Telltale's indie mentality running head-first into its emergence as a major studio was that quality control suffered as camaraderie broke down. Developers were cycled around various projects willy-nilly, especially when a game was under a tight deadline and management simply threw more developers at it to get it out the door; one former employee described this as trying to get nine women to bring a baby to term in just one month. Crunch time, of course, also existed, but whereas most studios restrict it to the final few months of a game's development as they scramble to finish it, former Telltale employees describe workdays of 14-18 hours as near-constant thanks to the episodic nature of Telltale's games; there was always a project that was approaching completion. Burnout was inevitable, especially given that salaries were reportedly lower than at rival studios (bad news given the sky-high housing prices in Silicon Valley), and the studio burned through talent at a rapid rate.
  • Most of the blame for Telltale's deterioration goes to co-founder Kevin Bruner, who wanted to be seen as the driving creative force behind Telltale's games. When The Walking Dead became a hit and most of the credit for it went to project leads and co-creators Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, Bruner did not take it well, as he saw the game as his baby and the product of his company, and the resulting fights between him and Vanaman and Rodkin led them to leave Telltale and start Campo Santo Productions. The success of Campo Santo's Firewatch, as well as of Night School Studio (co-founded by former Telltale dev Adam Hines) and its game Oxenfree, drove Bruner to take a far more direct creative role in development, fearing that allowing anybody else to take the spotlight would give them the clout to run off and start their own studios like Vanaman, Rodkin, and Hines before them. Former employees describe Bruner as a "creative bottleneck" who micromanaged games in order to leave his mark on them, belittled those who disagreed with his decisions, and left the studio creatively stagnant as he came to favor certain story beats and narrative structures (often those lifted from The Walking Dead season one), especially after he took over as CEO from Dan Connors in 2015. By the time he left in March 2017, the writing was already on the wall.
  • That's not to say that Bruner wasn't himself eventually screwed over by Telltale. He later sued them in 2018, saying that he was effectively forced out of the company and that information (specifically, information on the studio's finances and management) was withheld from him as he prepared to sell his stock, in violation of his contract.
  • While conditions improved somewhat after Bruner's departure, the announcement of new CEO Phil Hawley (formerly of Zynga, where he had overseen widespread layoffs) in September 2017 immediately raised alarms, and for good reason: within two months of his arrival, Telltale had fired a quarter of its workforce. Most of the rest would go in September 2018, at which point Telltale announced it would cease production on all new games except for Minecraft: Story Mode season two (out of contractual obligation with Netflix, which commissioned the game). This news came as a shock to employees, especially given that none of them received severance pay, leaving many of them bitter and frustrated with management. Within days, former employees filed a class-action lawsuit against Telltale for violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, mandating sixty days of advance notice in the event of a mass layoff, and California's more stringent version of the same.
• Thief (2014) was in various states of Development Hell for nearly six years, and the results showed greatly in the final product.
  • Prior to Eidos Montreal overseeing development of what would eventually become the final game, ION Storm Austin (producers of Thief: Deadly Shadows) apparently planned to create a modern reboot, which would take place in the present day and feature Garrett working in an urban city. The concept was only worked on for a short time before ION Storm closed its doors.
  • Eidos began development on Thief 4 in 2008, and intended for it to be a sequel to the original series. After a teaser website and logo appeared in 2009, there was no word for years on the status of the project or where development was at, and various reports and rumors claimed that it had already been worked on for a long time prior to its announcement, that work was being outsourced to another studio, and that Eidos Montreal still hadn't decided on whether it would be a sequel or not.
  • Work went on for so long that an incomplete leak of a CGI trailer from the game's prologue mission made news in 2012, and after the game's release, it was revealed that Stephen Russell, the original voice actor for Garrett, had provided dialogue for the unused trailer, but he was replaced for the final version. Additionally, an unused (but completed) OST from the game was released by ex-audio director Paul Weir after the game's release, which featured many cues (including the one from the unused trailer) and pointed to an earlier version of the game's plot (suggesting that "Erin" was originally named "Ariel").
  • In March 2013, a damning report came out stating that the development team was completely fractured. Designers were coming and going constantly, and all of them had differing visions on where to take the game. Screenshots released around this time also showed a third-person gameplay perspective. The same month a Game Informer cover story came out, lead designer Dominic Fleury left the team.
  • The dev team then spent nearly a year working on press demos instead of the game proper, with heavily modified code being shown to media outlets (which was not released to the public because the team was unhappy with the end result). That also coincided with Eidos being forced to secure additional funding for the game from a German investment firm.
  • During the development of the press demos, the animators were tasked with animating sex scenes for the House of Blossoms level, which they were reportedly very uncomfortable with.
  • The game was eventually released in February 2014 to middling reviews. Three years later, rumors of a fifth game being in development (in tandem with a feature film supposedly being produced by Straight Up Studios, which was later removed from the studio's site) led Eidos Montreal boss, David Anfossi, to mock the announcement, claiming that fans should just "forget" any chance of seeing a Thief 5.
• An interesting case for the indie game This Is the Police - the game had to be delayed a few days because... they forgot to send it to Steam for final approval.
• This Is Vegas was envisioned as Midway Games' answer to the Grand Theft Auto series, and spent half a decade in development. Unfortunately, as this video by Liam Robertson lays out, it proved to be a boondoggle that stood as a symbol of Midway's downward spiral in the latter half of the 2000s.
  • Surreal Software, makers of The Suffering, had recently been snapped up by Midway, who assigned them a pitch by CEO David Zucker for an open-world crime game set in Las Vegas. After several rejected pitches, they eventually settled on something much like GTA, albeit with the lighter tone of Saints Row owing to the game's Vegas setting, its focus on nightlife and gambling, and its heavily satirical script written by former Cracked editor Jay Pinkerton that sent up the city's real-life '90s Dork Age. Surreal took several trips to Vegas for research, though attempts to get the city's actual casinos to appear in the game were shot down by their owners, who objected to having their properties used as the scenes of violence in a GTA-style video game. This led the team to use fictionalized versions of the Strip's casino resorts.
  • The problems started when Midway required Surreal to use the brand-new Unreal Engine 3 to run the game, owing to an expensive licensing agreement that Midway had made with Epic Games in 2005. Many people who worked on the game regard this decision as its death knell in hindsight, as Unreal 3 was still an experimental, untested game engine that few people had worked with and which no games had been released for yet, and furthermore, it was overly specialized for linear action games and was ill-suited to the demands of an open-world game. As a result, production was plagued by technical difficulties from the word "go" as Surreal struggled to build their ambitious game within the limitations of the engine they'd been saddled with, especially given that the naturally flat, open geography of Las Vegas, which they'd hoped to depict in the game, meant that they couldn't easily cover up pop-in and other visual issues.
  • There was also a great deal of internal strife over the game's tone, leaving it with something of an identity crisis. On the subject of guns, some developers felt that they clashed with the game's Lighter and Softer tone and its focus on living the good life, and that requiring players to shoot people (as opposed to get into non-fatal fistfights and Mixed Martial Arts matches) would produce a bad case of Mood Whiplash, while others felt that guns were a perfect fit for an open-world crime game and wanted to add blood on top of it. Similar arguments arose over the game's depiction of women, with some feeling that the focus on wet T-shirt contests in the marketing materials made the game look like fratbro juvenilia.
  • The game was revealed to the press in February 2008, with a promised release date later that year. In truth, it was nowhere near meeting such an optimistic date, and it was pushed back to 2009 just four months later. Midway's ever-growing list of demands for new features consistently led to more work for the team, exacerbating the technical headaches caused by Unreal 3, and Midway's tech-sharing initiative, an attempt to cut costs by recycling assets from other games, backfired as it often turned out that it took significant work to get those assets to work with different games. Worse, Midway at this point was losing money hand over fist; it hadn't reported a profit since 2000, it had lost over $250 million since 2005, and its lifeline from National Amusements CEO Sumner Redstone was cut in December 2008 as the Great Recession hammered his finances and caused him to sell his majority stake in the company. Two months later, Midway filed for bankruptcy.
  • Even after Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment bought out the remains of Midway in May 2009 and saved This Is Vegas from immediate cancellation, morale at Surreal was low and an aura of doom hung over the project. Several Surreal staffers were laid off that year, and plans for post-launch Downloadable Content were scrapped. While work did continue, few had any illusions that the game would be finished, and indeed, in August 2010 it was finally canceled. A total of $60 million had been spent on the game by Midway and WB, and one developer estimated that WB would've needed to spend another $15 million to finish it. Rather than continue throwing good money after an unproven new IP with a troubled production history and a lot of edgy humor that the higher-ups were uncomfortable with (not least of all because of the pot shots it took at various celebrities, including people who were in working relationships with WB), they pulled the plug.
  • After This Is Vegas was canceled, Surreal was merged with Monolith Productions and worked on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, while Pinkerton went to work for Valve and co-wrote Portal 2 and Half-Life: Alyx.
• Based on The Digital Antiquarian's coverage of the game (1•2•3), the development of Time Zone, the sixth adventure game by On-Line Systems (later known as Sierra), was among the earliest major examples of this in the computer game industry. To make a long story short:
  • Time Zone was the latest of the Hi-Res Adventures, whose selling point was the colorful artwork accompanying every room at a time when most adventures were text-based. It was not to be just another adventure game, however; Roberta Williams, the designer, envisioned an epic adventure through time and space where the player must travel to different points in history, culminating in a climactic showdown in an alien planet of the future that would itself be bigger than any adventure game of the time.
  • To this end came the first semblance of modern "AAA" game development where instead of a few jacks-of-all-trades, it would be created by a team of people performing different specialized tasks for the game—the largest ever assembled at the time. Williams designed the game; three people translated her design into game code, with each "time zone" coded as a game in its own right; and three people handled the game's artwork, with one drawing on graph paper and two others digitally tracing the art into the game. All of this was managed by Bob Davis, who himself had just finished and shipped his own game, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, as the fifth Hi-Res Adventure.
  • Alas, Davis did not have the experience or temperament to be a manager, and almost immediately, the project devolved into a desperate attempt to figure out how to fit all the different sub-games together in time for a Christmas 1981 release. It was not until Jeff Stephenson, an experienced programmer who had last worked for the developers of VisiCalc (the first PC spreadsheet application), joined the company that the team managed to fit the whole thing together. The final result is essentially the bare minimum of Williams' vision, with each sub-game essentially stuck together with duct tape and glue.
  • Worse yet was what the lead artist had to go through. The one person who drew the art, Terry Pierce, had to draw 1,400 images for Time Zone... most of which were empty landscapes, as the Hi-Res Adventures brand dictated that every room of the tediously-oversized game grid needed its own artwork no matter how important or interesting it was. The stress of having to scribble hundreds of featureless "fields," "forests" and "city streets" on a tight schedule eventually drove Pierce into a nervous breakdown that reportedly led him to walk down a freezing highway shirtless and barefoot. Unsurprisingly, Pierce not only never worked on a game again, but never spoke to anyone at On-Line for over two decades.
  • All this, and yet there was no way the team could make the Christmas deadline. Instead, On-Line settled on a March 1982 release, at an ambitious and unheard-of price of $99.95 based on the sheer number of locations. Adjusted for inflation ($239.96 in 2012, when the blog articles were written), this makes Time Zone the most expensive single computer game ever made, and the game indeed became a flop largely because of its price tag. One of the few team members remaining afterward was Stephenson, who became the lead programmer because of his leadership, and thus eventually the head architect of the AGI and SCI engines that would power On-Line/Sierra's future and greatest hits, beginning with Williams' King's Quest two years later. Much of the rest left the industry altogether, happy not to work on another game.
  • Worst of all, however, was what happened to Bob Davis. He had a long past of alcohol and drug abuse, but had become clean by the time he worked for On-Line. Unfortunately, by the end of Time Zone's production, the money he made with Ulysses and the Golden Fleece led him to fall off the wagon big time, and soon he quit On-Line with the ambition of making his own games to sell to publishers. Alas, he could never do this without development tools to work with, even when sober... and even if he hadn't tried working with the Atari 2600, one of the most infamously difficult platforms to code for. He lost his shirt and his marriage when the royalty checks dried up, he was reduced to constantly calling On-Line to try to get hired again (or, increasingly, to try to get money), and he ultimately ended up in jail after burning bridges all over his hometown by writing one bad check after another. His downfall would taint On-Line's memories of Time Zone's production, and haunt the company for many years after.^note Fortunately, Davis' story has a happy ending: after years of training, he became the owner of TTL, an IT company in Hanford, CA.
• The Tomb of the TaskMaker, the sequel to the mid-1990s Apple Macintosh RPG TaskMaker, ended up being the undoing of its publishers, Storm Impact. After the success of Storm Impact's first two products (the first TaskMaker and a skiing game called MacSki), the company's next two products (a debug program called Technical Snapshot and a space game called Asterbamm) both failed to catch on. A publisher who kept losing money orders didn't help, neither did the rush to get Tomb out on time — the game has a huge number of cut corners, and version 1.0 just barely got out before Storm Impact went under. See more information here (Wayback Machine archive). The deciding factors were undercapitalization (Storm Impact was mostly just two guys), an inability to get the product out on time, a declining Mac market at the time, and considerable advances in computer gaming since the first TaskMaker came out.
• Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was beset by a litany of problems that began the moment the game entered development.
  • With Core Design's main team working on Tomb Raider Chronicles, an underfunded new team was put in charge of the Tomb Raider series' next-gen debut on the PlayStation 2. This team had no experience with the PS2's exotic hardware, and spent a year just trying to figure out how to work with it. When Richard Morton, the lead programmer on Chronicles, finished that game and went on to bring his team to work on The Angel of Darkness, he was mortified at what he saw. He and his team had to dump the entire year's work and start from scratch.
  • The game was essentially made by committee. The senior management at Core was seeking to play Follow the Leader with the big games of the time, and told the team to incorporate Metal Gear Solid's stealth gameplay, Shenmue's character interaction, and RPG Elements, among other features. They also commissioned a Darker and Edgier 'epic' story that would span multiple games and take place mostly in modern city environments, as opposed to the tombs and lost civilizations that were the series' hallmark. This led to the game being essentially cut in half midway through development, leaving behind a tangle of plot holes, inconsistencies, and characters and story elements that felt tacked-on. None of this went over well with the developers, who had enough trouble getting the game to work properly on the PS2 hardware.
  • The public first became aware of these problems at E3 2002, when Eidos and Core showcased 'playable' levels that were little more than tech demos, showing that the game was nowhere near a state where it could be finished by its Fall 2002 release date. Another demonstration at a buyers' conference saw Core co-founder Jeremy Heath-Smith cursing on stage over the buggy state the game was in.
  • The game finally came out in June 2003, whereupon it met a scathing reception and sales numbers to match. The fiasco was a Creator Killer for Core and a Franchise Killer for Tomb Raider, which only survived by way of a reboot from Crystal Dynamics.
• Silicon Knights (as documented in the Blood Omen and Eternal Darkness entries above) hit its creative nadir with CEO Denis Dyack's pet project and self-considered masterpiece Too Human. It took second place to Duke Nukem Forever as the king of Vaporware: announced in 1999 and released in 2008, having effectively existed in three incarnations on three console generations (PlayStation/Sega Saturn, Nintendo GameCube, and the final released product on Xbox 360. It was cancelled the first time around by the original publishers (a partnership between Electronic Arts and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) for reasons unknown to even the developers, and sidelined the second time around due to too much workload with Nintendo. The reason why the Xbox 360 was ultimately chosen? Because Dyack, a man of graphics and technology, was utterly disgusted by the Wii hardware's lack of horsepower and immediately burned bridges with Nintendo.
  
  This proved to be a fatal mistake, for without Miyamoto and Iwata to keep watch over him and his work, Dyack's ego spiraled out of control and he grew progressively more hostile towards virtually everyone, including his own staff (see one interpretation of the X-Men Destiny situation for more details). Development on the game suffered dearly for it. This resulted in mediocre sales and reviews, a bunch of projects left in the garbage bin over the next few years and most importantly of all, a disastrous lawsuit against Epic Games. Silicon Knights paid a license to use the Unreal Engine 3 for Too Human, didn't like it, and began reverse-engineering it until they decided the engine was now 100% Silicon Knights and 0% Epic. They stopped payments to Epic and demanded refunds for the money they already paid to them. Problem was, the "new" engine used in the final product still contained portions of Epic code... and Silicon Knights lost big time and paid the ultimate price in 2013.
• Turok: Evolution ended up killing that series and contributing to the downfall of Acclaim due to troubles in development. Initially the development team intended to produce a direct follow-up to the events of Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion, but the underwhelming critical response and poor sales of that game resulted in them deciding to instead make a prequel starring the first game's protagonist, Tal'Set. Development went smoothly for the most part, though the team were placed under the same two-year schedule as with the three prior games, which didn't help when they also had to transition to the new GameCube hardware, and then add in a version for the original Xbox to maximise potential sales. Thing really started going wrong near the end of development, when Sony started making thinly veiled threats towards any publisher who was thinking of releasing a game on the other two consoles, but not the PlayStation 2, resulting in Acclaim grudgingly producing a quick-and-dirty PS2 port, figuring that the franchise's previously Nintendo-exclusive status would mean the game would sell the most on the GameCube. Which ended up going completely pear-shaped when sales of the PS2 version eclipsed those of the other two — the GameCube version actually ending up selling the least of the three by some distance — meaning that the enduring image that most were left with was of an ugly, slowdown-riddled, barely functional mess of a game. The other two versions, while not being reviewed as poorly, were still affected by this mess, as the need to produce a PS2 port cut badly into the time the developers had to test, debug and optimise the game.
• The Typing of the Dead: Overkill was developed under constant threat of cancellation: It began development with a deadline of four months at Blitz Games Studios, which went bankrupt before the game was completed, taking down Sega's original contract from the game with them. Afterwards, the developers negotiated for a new contract to release the game, which they got... with a measly deadline of six weeks. Also, due to not being employed, the staff had no choice but to become bedroom coders in a crowded apartment; fortunately for that one, Sega saw the location situation and granted the staff temporary office space at one of their subsidiaries. That it sold well with this history is a complete miracle.
• Ultima IX: Ascension spent 5 years in development — and it shows. As noted on Hackl's Ultima Page, "The Conquest of Origin" and its Executive Meddling entry, the game was fraught with problems behind-the-scenes:
  • Lead creator Richard Garriott originally planned to have IX pick up exactly where the previous game left off (the Avatar confronting the Guardian on the latter's homeworld). However, after realizing that the fanbase likely wanted a return to the series' roots, he scrapped the idea. Shortly afterwards, in 1997, the team came up with a new concept for the game, using an isometric 3D engine. However, this idea was scrapped when the rise of 3D accelerators forced the team to jettison their existing project and begin another new version of the game.
  • During this time, Don Mattrick (later of Microsoft's Xbox brand), who was president of EA Worldwide Studios at the time, assumed control of the division. Mattrick pushed the development teams to stick to their schedules, and began cancelling Origin's projects for unexplained reasons (or outright killing in-production titles). As a result, Origin began to move into the online gaming sector.
  • Garriot went to EA CEO Lawrence Probst to get funding for Ultima Online, and it was initially treated as near-irrelevant by the publisher. However, after said game's beta test drew 50,000 volunteers, EA insisted that Garriott shelve Ascension and work solely on Online...
  • ...and that's when everything fell apart. The original lead designer, Robert "Bob" White, fed up of EA's meddling by this point, led virtually the entire development team in walking out of Origin in favor of Warren Spector's Ion Storm Austin, where he co-designed Deus Ex, leading the "Western RPG faction" opposite Harvey Smith's "Immersive Sim faction". Garriott, under pressure from EA to produce an Actionized Sequel, hired a veteran of the Command & Conquer series as the new lead designer, but was forced to fire him after six months when it turned out he really didn't understand the series. This left Garriott himself having to take over as lead developer again (a role he hadn't occupied since Ultima VII, six years prior) and hastily having to cobble together the game from whatever bits of code and artwork they could find. In the rush to finish Ascension for retail release (after EA set a firm deadline when Garriott wouldn't acquiesce to their original demand), many shortcuts were taken. As a result, the engine was bug-ridden, the team didn't have the time to fully implement the plot from the isometric version of the game into the 3D version, and cutscenes and dialogue were left unfinished.
  • Things finally came to a head afterwards, during pre-production on what was to become Ultima X: Odyssey. EA cancelled all of Origin's planned projects (including Ultima Online 2) and forced relocation of Odyssey's development from Austin, Texas to California, leaving developers who couldn't make the move due to family issues out of work. This subsequently led to the project being scrapped altogether, and Origin eventually being disbanded a short time later.
• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, the second-to-final installment in the critically-acclaimed Uncharted series, wasn’t exactly smooth sailing for developer Naughty Dog. In March 2014, it came to light that series writer and creative director Amy Henning, along with game director Justin Richmond, the who worked Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception and — at the time — Uncharted 4, had left Naughty Dog to work at Visceral Games and Riot Games, respectively, citing Creative Differences with Naughty Dog. Later, Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, the game directors for The Last of Us , were revealed in June 2014 as taking Henning and Richmond’s place. Conversely, this meant that some plot ideas and eight months of shooting were scrapped. Todd Stashwick was also set to play Drake’s brother Sam, but he was later replaced by Troy Baker. As a result of this, the game missed its 2015 launch to ensure extra development time, and after several small delays was finally released in May 2016.
• Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians was a kickstarter game that had loads of promise, talent, and potential behind it. But instead, what resulted was loads of false promises, miscommunication, and delays.
  • The game was created by Yasumi Matsuno as a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics as a partnership alongside board game company Playdek with a goal of $600,000 and a release date of July 2015. Problems instantly arose when the game couldn’t make its required funding in time despite the big names attached (including composer Hitoshi Sakimoto and artist Akihiko Yoshida). That is until a Kotaku article by Jason Schreier got people’s attention and allowed it to reach its goal in time (something Schreier would later come to regret).
  • After a few mundane backer updates, backers were getting concerned when Playdek was hyping up the digital card game rather than the actual game. The company’s PR manager had to calm down the fanbase a few weeks later making some promises, such as an update in August 2014 (which didn’t happen, and was the first of many broken promises).
  • A year after the game received its funding, development became slow, until an update showed off some work-in-progress screenshots of the game, which were poorly received, looking like something made in a few minutes on the cheap. On September 2015 (a month after the game’s expected release date), Playdek CEO Joel Goodman apologized for the slow development (a contradiction to the previous month’s update, which talked about how smooth development was), and explained that the game was being delayed due to trying to find an outside publisher for the game, and Playdek suffering from a financial crunch. Out of nowhere, Joel Goodman promised an online PvP multiplayer mode, something that not only wasn’t promised, but also wasn’t what backers wanted. On an AMA session on Reddit, Goodman confirmed that Matsuno jumped ship, despite the game being far from complete.
  • In October 2015, gameplay footage was finally shown, and, well, to say fans were disappointed would be an understatement. The footage contained slow gameplay, and amateurish graphics that look no better than a mobile game. Info about the gameplay was going to be released immediately after, but Playdek, as always, went silent.
  • Four months later, Playdek delivered some bad news. Development was facing more setbacks such as financial issues and losing key staff members; worse, development on the game would be put on hold so that Playdek can create other games in order to secure a proper budget, even requesting an outside development team for assistance. Backers requested refunds, but to no avail. Playdek later announced that they have gotten a budget for the game, and that they have already spent $1.5 million on development. A playable beta build was promised for October 2016 (which ended up not happening, and would never be brought up again). In September 2016, it was announced that Unsung Story would be turned into a franchise thanks to a partnership with a big development company (sound familiar?).
  • No updates would be announced until August 2017 (the last one being in December 2016), where Playdek announced their biggest bombshell: they would be leaving development of the game, throwing the game in publisher/developer Little Orbit’s hands. Little Orbit had to start development of the game from scratch and pay for it out of their own pockets, this time focusing on the single player aspect of the game, and promising to deliver on the backers' interests and requests.
• Uru: Ages Beyond Myst nearly proved to be a Creator Killer for Cyan Worlds. After the success of Riven in 1998, Cyan began work on what was originally called 'Project Mudpie', a Massively Multiplayer Online Puzzle Game allowing players to cooperate to solve puzzles in the cavern of D'ni.
  • The game was originally intended to be multiplayer-only. However, when the game was to be pushed for sale, the multiplayer component wasn't ready, so a handful of the ages were retooled for single-player solving and released under the Ages Beyond Myst title, with the multiplayer subscription component called Uru Live launching later.
  • At the beginning of 2004, Ubisoft decided that the game wasn't selling well enough, so they pulled the plug on the multiplayer servers. This led Cyan to do some more retooling and release some of the locations that were available online only in the expansion pack To D'ni, and some that weren't yet available in The Path of the Shell. More assets intended for Uru Live were later used in Myst V: End of Ages, including the age from which the very first screenshot of Mudpie was taken. Meanwhile, the fandom launched Until Uru, a fan series of online servers, with Cyan's blessing.
  • In 2006, Cyan partnered up with Gametap to provide official multiplayer servers again, and to continue the online story, under the title Myst Online: Uru Live. Since official servers were going to be available, fans were asked to shut down Until Uru. More content was made available than had been previously released. This lasted until February 2007, at which point Gametap also pulled out.
  • After this, Cyan started hosting their own server, donation-run and free-to-play this time, under yet another title, Myst Online: Uru Live Again. However, the damage was done, and besides another remastered version of the original Myst, Cyan was only able to produce a couple of mobile games, and at one point were reduced to a production team of only a handful of people, before risking everything on a crowdfunding scheme for Obduction which was a great success and saved the company from closing altogether.
• According to a YouTube comment from an anonymous Carbine Studios ex-developer on nerdslayer's Death of a Game review of WildStar, the demise of the MMO came down to a hot mess of behind-the-scenes design issue and office politics that ultimately destroyed both the game and Carbine Studios in 2018.
  • Leadership from the top down was reportedly very poor. Most of the first 5+ years of game development were thrown out completely by project lead Tim Cain. He was also quite difficult to work with according to the report, vetoing ideas he didn't like left and right. There was also intense mandatory 10am-3am, six-day-a week crunch time for several months, during which the morale among the staff plummeted and turnover rate skyrocketed.
  • A large number of issues were also caused by the art director, who "couldn't keep his nose out of anything" to the point of driving off several of the company's best artists - including lead Cory Loftis, who originally designed the entire art style for the game. The same art director was also responsible for hijacking the story and gameplay design as well; the reason for the lack of new raids and dungeons was allegedly because he thought that several (already completed and tested) levels didn't fit the story anymore and threw all of them out.
  • The decision to turn the game into a WoW-esque hardcore raiding game came very, very late in development, when the devs only had a few dungeons and a single 40-man raid ready to go on launch, so they were forced to hastily throw in a long attunement grind involving speedrunning dungeons and killing world bosses in order to access the endgame. This ended up backfiring badly; the resulting attunement grind caused a mass exodus of non-raiders and casual players weeks after launch, while the "hardcore" raiders the endgame was explicitly designed for quickly accessed the first raid, beat it and put in on farm, and quickly ran out of content to do. This was further exacerbated by the buggy launch, as development time that could be used to create new content was instead focused on fixing glitches and bugs.
  • Warplots were an "utterly broken mess" on launch because it was rushed out the door in a barely tested state; the only reason it worked at all was because several people on the 3D prop team actually learned to script just so they could try to fix it.
  • All of the game's PVP systems were mostly tossed into the game with very few play tests; the system barely worked on paper let alone in practice. The "telegraphing" mechanic for attacks worked well in 1v1 fights, but quickly proved unworkable in any fights larger than 2v2, as it was impossible to see any attacks over the multitude of telegraph effects on the floor. Every single piece of feedback on this was completely ignored.
  • Any ideas or issues that conflicted with the vision of the higher-ups were shot-down and most of the more well-liked features of the game had to be done in secret. The Hoverboards mechanic was snuck into the game by a bored animator, who eventually got written up for working on it in his spare time. The Double-Jump mechanic was put into the game by one of the artists, who eventually got fired for it and other reasons.
• Sir-Tech Software were so confident that Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna would be available by the end of 1984 that they actually told a magazine to announce it was available in its November 1984 issue. The game wouldn't actually see release until 1987; when it was released, a combination of still using tech from 1981 and ludicrous difficulty even by dungeon-crawler standards made it the poorest-selling product in the company's history. The Other Wiki has more on the story.
• The World of Darkness MMO, as detailed in this Guardian article, spent nearly a decade in Development Hell before finally being canceled. Those years had all the makings of this trope.
  • Icelandic developer CCP, fresh off the booming success of EVE Online, bought out a troubled White Wolf in November 2006 hoping to get its hands on that company's lucrative tabletop gaming IPs, chief among them being The World of Darkness. Almost immediately, CCP began production on an MMO based on the game, opening a studio in Atlanta to work on it.
  • Troubles began almost immediately. While CCP, to their credit, kept on most of White Wolf's important staff and trained a stable of programmers and artists to work on the game, The World of Darkness was very much of secondary importance compared to the golden goose that was EVE. Developers wound up frequently poached to work on expansions for EVE, often for months at a time, causing constant delays in production that saw features being planned, partially completed, and then scrapped. During production on the Apocrypha expansion for EVE in 2009, production on The World of Darkness halted entirely as the whole team was put to work on that project.
  • Furthermore, the manager in charge of the project had little in the way of a coherent vision for the game beyond "buzzword-laden rambles", exacerbating the delays and the problems of work wasted on various abandoned gameplay mechanics. Much of this was driven by CCP's corporate culture of "the war on the impossible", the idea that they should strive to outdo all of their competitors and deliver things that nobody had ever seen before in an MMO. These grandiose ambitions led to the EVE spinoff DUST 514, which further cannibalized the staff. Thanks to all of this dysfunction, the game reached alpha stage (i.e. with the fundamentals of its core gameplay mechanics all implemented) a total of three times, with the staff going back to the drawing board for each one as all of the disparate game mechanics failed to gel together. As production stretched out, management frequently attempted to deflect blame for the delays onto the programmers. Design meetings were described by one former developer as "whoever shouted longest and hardest would dominate".
  • In 2011, the Incarna expansion for EVE experienced its own troubled production, causing CCP to bring in the Atlanta team to help finish the job that their main team in Reykjavik, Iceland was struggling with. When the Atlanta team got the job done in a fraction of the time that the Reykjavik team took to do just a quarter of the work, their work ethic was vindicated, but the Reykjavik team was left bitter that they'd been shown up so badly.
  • The beginning of the end came in late 2011 when, between the failure of DUST 514 and the backlash against CCP for introducing microtransactions to EVE, a humbled CCP began cutting costs. Morale fell apart as developers saw cuts to their pay, to their free meals, and to their medical benefits, and twenty percent of the workforce was laid off by the end of 2011. A teaser trailer was released at EVE Fanfest in 2012, but while it got the feel and style of the source material down, it notably didn't contain anything even resembling gameplay footage. Resources were stretched even further in 2013 when CCP announced EVE Valkyrie, a Space Fighter game for the Oculus Rift set in the EVE universe. At that point, its cancellation in 2014, the only product of its development being some cool concept art, was a Foregone Conclusion. CCP eventually sold White Wolf to Paradox Interactive the following year, washing their hands of the failed World of Darkness MMO and driving the final nails into its coffin.
• World of Warcraft's fifth expansion Warlords of Draenor became infamous for its barren content and flawed gameplay systems, largely as a result of several unfortunate factors all converging on the team at the same time.
  • Coming off of Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard didn't have a solid idea of how to follow up for some time. Their plan was to have previous Final Boss Garrosh Hellscream left alive and out for revenge with a new army, but the concept of an Alternate Timeline uncorrupted Horde was the last of several different hooks that were brainstormed after an unknown length of time.
  • As is usual, a great deal of work for the expansion had been completed by the time it was revealed to the public. Fan response was less divisive than Mists, but a large number complained about an entire expansion fighting evil orcs, coming off of an evil orc final raid tier, and distaste with Time Travel plots. Partway through the publicly-visible Alpha stage, Blizzard reworked several mostly-complete zones from scratch to avert this complaint. Not only did the resulting zones have their own issues, but the time required to do this was devastating, and they seemingly had to spend more time altering later content or scrapping it with no replacement. The Time Travel aspects were also excised, including the expansion's introduction sequence, forcing them to rewrite it entirely. Man-hours intended to go towards a proposed max-level zone at launch and patch content later were instead spent here.
  • Blizzard's intended new title, Titan, had been reshuffled, downsized, then cancelled after years of development around the same time. Many of the employees that worked on Titan were reassigned to different teams around the company, including the one making Warlords. On paper a larger team would get more work done faster, but Blizzard underestimated the time it would take to get the new members acclimated and up to speed with the tools, engine and workflow. This slowed down the team's pace of work until it was too late.
  • A much-hyped feature of the expansion was revamped versions of the game's oldest player character models, which were intentionally bare-bones and dated even at the time they originally released. Developing brand new art assets for the expansion, while also creating twenty player models more-or-less from scratch, was too much for the art team to fully handle. The result was a set of models that while functional and customization-complete, were extremely hit-or-miss. Players cite unpolished animation work (many of which were unaltered from their originals), inaccuracy to the looks of the older versions, and more—which could have been refined or fixed with more time but weren't, and years later likely never will be.
  • Systems-wise, the central features of the expansion recieved heavy iteration, thanks to Blizzard's gradual realization that the proposed systems were either fundamentally flawed or not feasible in the limited time they had. The expansion shipped with stripped-down versions of its original pitched systems, which were often exploitable or underwhelming and sometimes had glaring holes where a cut aspect would have been. It took months in some cases for fixes to be implemented.
  • Demand for the expansion was higher than Blizzard had been remotely prepared for, which itself was higher than they thought they would need. A heavy marketing push, as well as a perceived 'return to form' for players who wrote off Mists's premise, resulted in a huge spike in returning players that overloaded the servers and rendered content unplayable for days at launch, the game's rockiest launch yet. There were also murmurings of a possible DDOS attack... but whatever the case, even the release was troubled.
  • With the expansion out the door, with little in the way of content and janky systems, Blizzard hardly supported it at all. Patch 6.1 invited mockery for being a big "point-number patch" with barely any content but instead Twitter integration and a selfie system. The second half of the expansion's first raid tier, Blackrock Foundry, had opened just before the patch which placated players somewhat - but as a knock-on effect led to the perception that 6.1 had zero new actual content. But seven months into the expansion, Hellfire Citadel dropped—not a middle raid, but the final one, hastily wrapping up the story and leaving players with only two full raid tiers and the game's longest end-of-expansion content drought. It's clear that Blizzard realized it was too late to fully salvage Warlords, and instead of keeping players in a broken expansion for longer, put those man-hours into the next expansion Legion.
• Two conflicting accounts on the difficult development of X-Men: Destiny exist. Whichever rings more true is, as of the end of 2015, up to the reader's discretion.
  • According to Silicon Knights chief Denis Dyack, licensing problems with Marvel Comics threw a wrench in the game's budget. The game was intended as a major AAA release by then-Marvel license holder Activision, with Silicon Knights pumping even more money into the game's budget than its employees' salary. But no one expected Disney to buy out Marvel during development, and with Disney publishing games themselves, Activision and Disney argued over the former's Marvel game license; the budget kept shrinking, and since Silicon Knights wasn't paid by Activision during negotiations, they started funding development out of their own pockets. Because Activision's Marvel contract was "so complicated and detailed to unravel", Disney couldn't do anything to help the project, and the game was released as it was.
  • Meanwhile, a few anonymous ex-employees claimed that Dyack's ego turned nasty after Silicon Knights broke ties with Nintendo, and insisted on taking absolute control of game development and throwing down with anyone who disagreed with him inside and outside of the company. Dyack, who was said to not be a fan of the X-Men and thus didn't care for Destiny effectively procrastinated on production of the game as much as possible for about two years by stalling communications with Activision and shuffling manpower onto his pet projects, like a sequel to Eternal Darkness. Nothing came of Dyack's projects and it became harder to get more funding and time from Activision. Eventually, Activision got fed up and retaliated by publicly announcing the game about a year before its release date with no possibilities of delays while development was still severely messed up, forcing Silicon Knights to crunch under a 12-month deadline.
• Development on Yandere Simulator began in 2014 by its sole programmer, "YandereDev", and ever since then has trudged through a very lengthy (and rather stressful) production.
  • YandereDev had always wanted to garner a fanbase from something of his creation. He ended up getting his wish, and it far exceeded his expectations; on a daily basis, he was literally flooded with emails and comments, all of which he tried reading (which consequently gave himself less time to develop the game). YandereDev quickly became loathe to reply to fan emails and comments. Furthermore, he issued constant reminders to discourage his fanbase's misguided efforts to assist (including unhelpful bug reports, offers of help without a proper resume, and suggestions that were impossible, already considered, or outright stupid)^note Fan art is the only exception. The fact that YandereDev was forced to do so on the game's two-year anniversary and created an Audience Surrogate character based upon those who annoy him speaks volumes.
  • As of January 2016, Twitch has banned the game and threatened to immediately suspend anyone caught streaming it. YandereDev stated in a video that he was provided no explanation for this, arguing that the violent and questionable content in Yandere Simulator can be seen in other games allowed by Twitch. An official response finally came in February 2017, stating that things in early builds like the naked Titans and violence against minors^note (no peaceful executions existed at the time) had violated guidelines. While later versions have rectified most of the complaints, Twitch has nonetheless refused to re-review the game until it is closer to completion.
  • Numerous schedule slippages — all of which documented on the game's Trivia page — plagued development with delays. Among the reasons include YandereDev's hard drive dying on January 10, 2016 (which fortunately didn't delete progress) and a trip to Anime Expo later in July 2016. YandereDev projected that the game would be released in 2015 with a Kickstarter project for higher production values and to get it on Steam. The game is still at its alpha state since 2020.
  • Money troubles were apparent, as the $5,000 a month from Patreon that YandereDev received wasn't enough to hire volunteer animators or riggers who were competent (at least, not while also paying voice actors and 3D modelers). This in turn made implementing Rival-chan excessively difficult, who was incompatible with the animation rigs YandereDev currently had.
  • Despite his best efforts, YandereDev continued falling behind on updates, and on February 2017 finally had a Creator Breakdown. A video revealed that, for the past two years, YandereDev had sacrificed most of his personal life and health to work on the game 24/7—all while operating under fears of under-delivering fan expectations and the game dying from a subsequent loss of interest. Additionally, he called into question his own programming skills, expressing interest on hiring a more experienced programmer to help refurbish the game engine. Thus, YandereDev ended up partnering with tinyBuild for further development on the game... except that plan ended up getting scrapped a couple of months later due to complications involving rewriting the game's code and adding features at the same time.
• The Yogscast video game Yogsventures! met an untimely end because of this.
  • It all began when the developer, Winterkewl Games, started a Kickstarter campaign to get support from fans, which resulted in $500,000 dollars in funds raised. The first problem came up when the game's artist left the team to work with LucasArts, who didn't give him any accessibility in his contract to spend time on working on the game. This was a huge setback for Winterkewl, as they already had a contract that guaranteed each of the main artists a $35,000 lump sum payment and they made no clear clause as to how and why someone could legally stop working on the project. This basically equated to the artist working on the project for about 2 weeks with pay, and then suddenly abandoning it later, much to the surprise of Winterkewl.
  • Upon hearing about Winterkewl's troubles, Yogscast co-founder Lewis Brindley immediately expressed his confusion and disdain over what happened, and became hesitant to trust Winterkewl leader Kristafer Vale. The development team ending up giving $150,000 to Yogscast for them to create and ship the Kickstarter campaign's physical rewards to fans who had already pledged for the game, along with aiding in hiring a main programmer for Winterkewl (which they still didn't have at this point in development). Meanwhile, with currently no actual programmer in his team's roster, Vale found himself taking on that role, and worked tirelessly for 18 months on the game.
  • Various design changes and Vale's inexperience as a project lead and developer ultimately marked the end of the line for Winterkewl, who, by this point, had paid so much money for licensing fees and finding a programmer that they had little left to continue the project. Winterkewl ended up going bankrupt and announced the cancellation of the game. Yogscast also officially announced this bit of news as well, calling the whole thing a failure that was "a deep regret". Out of sympathy for the tens of thousands of people who had funded the game and had no chance of getting any money back, Yogscasters gave out free copies of Landmark, a massively multiplayer online RPG (which would itself shut down in January 2017). At the end of it all, Yogsventures! has since been regarded as one of the biggest failures in Kickstarter video game projects.

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