The Absurd History of Bad Video Games

There is a saying by Irish writer and all-round witty fellow Oscar Wilde that I think about quite often: "Bad art is a great deal worse than no art." Considering the author, it's probably just meant to sound amusing and nothing more. But it's a phrase that has always really stuck with me as I've had to sit through a lot of bad art while making videos for this channel.

When you're neck-deep in a terrible 3D platformer that barely feels functional, or a crazed genre shift that has nothing to do with the wider series, or a horrible portable demake that was clearly made on the cheap, it's very hard not to think, wouldn't it have just been better to make nothing at all? And yet, despite these games being torched by critics, being torn apart by fans, becoming nothing more than jokes at the developers' expense, and never returning a dollar of profit, there always seems to be someone willing to choose bad art over no art. So, in the interest of trying to better understand this dark side of the industry, today we're going to investigate the whole sorry scene and work out, once and for all, why exactly do bad video games get made?

Of course, this is still a finished video game. So, we're going to answer this question in quite a bit of detail, exploring the whole history of the phenomenon by diving deep into a handful of key explanations—a sort of seven deadly sins that result in terrible video games. What this video is not is a review of every single bad game that has ever been released or an attempt to catalog everything wrong with the industry. So, if something doesn't get mentioned, that doesn't mean that I secretly think it's good. If you think I've missed out a particularly egregious case, feel free to explain its sins down in the comments below, and we'll turn this video into a shrine dedicated to the worst of the worst.

So, fire up that second monitor, plump up your pillow, or get those paint brushes ready, as we're about to embark on a journey into the absurd world of bad video games. But before we get too excited, I just want to say a quick thank you to my patrons. YouTube can be a pretty fickle mistress at the best of times, and with all the changes they're making to how ad revenue works, their constant fiddling with the subscription system, the support of you guys over on Patreon means more than ever. If you'd like to join in and help keep the channel going, you can use the link down below where you'll get 40% off your first month and access to two unique videos: "The Licensed Games That Should Not Be" and "A Descent into Arx Fatalis," two sister videos that build off the ideas in my X-Men and Dishonored retrospectives. I'll keep saying it until I run out of breath, but to everyone who has pledged, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

So, with the pleasantries out of the way, let's start this banquet of banality and try to get inside the minds of those responsible for the worst that this great industry has to offer. Our voyage begins with a big one. A game so notoriously bad that it single-handedly triggered a market-wide recession. The legendary ancestor of all bad video games: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. Now, its reputation likely precedes it, as it's still being spoken about today as one of the worst games ever produced. But I want to take a deeper look and work out how and why it was ever made, and if that reputation for crashing the industry is truly deserved.

So to understand E.T., we first need to understand the video game market in the early 1980s, a place that was entirely dominated by a single company called Atari. They had formed in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, two electrical engineers who had grown up loving board games. And after seeing a prototype Magnavox Odyssey at a local trade show, they decided to quit their jobs and combine their two passions. This proved to be a very profitable decision, as their fledgling electronic gaming company, which they named Atari, quickly took over the North American market thanks to the release of Pong, a single-screen, two-player tennis game that sold tens of thousands of units.

With the arcade coin-up market firmly within their grasp, Atari attempted to move into the home. And after the success of a version of Pong that you could play on your television, they went one better in 1977 and released the first commercially successful video game console, the Atari VCS, or 2600 as it's now become known. While it took a little while to catch on, the fact that you could swap out your games and build a collection of your favorites made the system very popular. And by the early 1980s, lots of companies other than Atari had begun to develop games for the platform, which only further fueled hardware sales, thanks to the release of titles like Nintendo's Donkey Kong, Taito's Space Invaders, and Activision's Pitfall, not to mention a host of self-produced Atari games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Defender. The 2600 was a monster hit, and by 1983, it had sold an estimated 18 million units. At this point, the video game industry and Atari Incorporated were essentially one and the same thing.

But fast forward just two years, and both had utterly collapsed. By 1985, Atari were drowning in debt and ended up being sold off for pennies, while the wider video game market, which had at one point been worth $3 billion, had crashed down to a mere $100 million. So, what happened? What caused the market leader to implode in such dramatic fashion? Well, the most common answer is that in late 1983, they released E.T., a game so bad that they destroyed their reputation and put millions of people off of video games for good.

The story goes that despite being on top of the industry, Atari was starting to worry about the growth of their competitors: software-focused publishers like Activision that didn't need to worry about producing hardware, the rising number of personal computers that could also play video games, and even a handful of emerging console rivals like the Magnavox 2 and ColecoVision. The solution to all this was to create a game so massive and so popular that it refocused consumer attention on Atari. And for some reason, Atari CEO Steve Ross believed that an adaptation of Steven Spielberg's upcoming E.T. movie could be this game. So, they entered into negotiations with Universal Pictures and ended up paying $25 million to secure the video game license—an eye-watering amount considering the movie only cost $10 million to produce. Now, this meant that E.T. would have to sell an absurd number of copies to even come close to breaking even.

But any chances of that were ruined by a request from Spielberg himself. You see, he'd been involved in the Atari adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a strange proto-adventure game that replicated scenes from the movie with pixelated puzzles, and had been designed by a programmer called Howard Scott Warshaw. As Spielberg had loved Warshaw's unique approach to game design, he agreed to the E.T. deal on the condition that Warshaw be placed in charge, and this effectively signed Atari's death warrant. Now, that isn't because Warshaw was a bad designer. In fact, his work really pushed the boundaries of what a video game could be. But he was never going to make a big commercial hit like Space Invaders or Pac-Man.

So, what emerged in late 1983 was a very odd game that is not particularly fun, but also isn't quite as bad as people make out, at least if you can understand what Warshaw was going for. The idea is that you control E.T. and need to phone home. A process that has you hunting across six unique screens for pieces of an interstellar device, which you can then use to hail your mothership. It's a straightforward objective that masks quite a lot of complexity, as you also need to avoid capture by the FBI and their researchers, complete your mission before you run out of energy, cash in candy you find for more time, and use a host of different powers that all do different things depending on which screen you're on. By the standards of most 2600 games, it's actually very complex. But the problem is that without the manual, which outlines not only what you're seeing on each screen but how to actually go about playing the game, it just looks like an inscrutable jumble of pixels.

Now, unfortunately, even with the instructions, E.T. does have one pretty glaring flaw in the form of its pits, which you constantly fall into as you move around the screens. They require tricky movement to get out of, but also can't be avoided, as that's where you find the pieces of his phone. If you know what you're doing, it's perfectly possible to see the end of E.T., especially as it even has difficulty settings which you can use to reduce the amount of enemies. But it still isn't a particularly enjoyable experience, and it certainly wasn't what Atari had paid $25 million for.

So, given the massive cost of production and the extremely weird end product, it's little surprise that E.T. has been remembered as the game that killed Atari, but that's not really the full picture. E.T. was actually quite successful on release and ended up selling 2.66 million copies, which makes it the eighth best-selling game on the platform and means that it can't be solely responsible for Atari's financial problems and the subsequent video game crash. No, the cause of these is found in the company's managerial incompetence, as along with spending huge amounts of money on strange licensed games, they were in the process of accidentally destroying their distribution network.

Another one of Atari's great ideas to try and stave off growing competition was to make their distribution partners order all of their stock a year in advance. With the idea being that this would fill up shelves and keep their rivals in the back of the warehouse. Now, the trouble with this was that companies like Babbage's and Toys "R" Us had no idea how to tell the difference between a good video game that would sell and a bad one that would get returned. And this led to a lot of disappointed kids ending up with copies of King Kong and Snake instead of Donkey Kong and Centipede. Without any quality control from Atari, store shelves were filling up with games that nobody wanted to buy. And to make matters even worse, this had the unintended effect of blocking Atari from sending out more copies of their own games, which were not only printed in advance of store orders but were the only part of the business where they actually made money. Thanks to these insane business practices, Atari amassed a huge amount of unsold stock but plowed on with development and production regardless, amassing huge debts in the process, as the company's leadership had no idea how to turn around the situation. It was this, rather than the failure of Warshaw's E.T., that brought down the company and caused the video game crash. But that's not a particularly exciting way to remember it. So, as the years have passed, it's been boiled down to a folktale about the danger of producing an expensive flop. In truth, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a symptom rather than a cause. And even if Warshaw had produced a totally different game and it somehow sold 15 million copies, Atari would have still gone under and would have still found themselves in the New Mexico desert filling a landfill with all their unsold inventory.

So, while the obvious lesson is to not spend $25 million producing a game that is going to confuse your audience and never make a penny of profit, there are quite a few other mistakes that Atari's successors needed to not repeat. Which brings us nicely onto our next batch of bad video games and the growing world of Japanese development. Despite its name, the video game crash of 1983 was largely confined to North American shores. And in the rest of the world, the industry was still growing at a healthy rate. In Europe, personal computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were selling very well. And over in Japan, home console sales were booming, largely thanks to the release of the Nintendo Famicom. By the middle of the '80s, it was estimated that over a quarter of all Japanese homes owned one of these little game players. And spurred on by an internal software division that was creating hit after hit, Nintendo decided to jump across the Pacific and attempt to revive the dormant American market. Now, that might sound crazy considering it had literally just imploded. But Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, had a clever plan to avoid the pitfalls that Atari had fallen into.

When the NES released in America in late 1985, it had some key differences to its Japanese counterpart that were designed to specifically control what was released on the platform and make sure that Nintendo's own games weren't overshadowed by poor-quality competition. These were an internal lockout chip called the 10 NES, which prevented unlicensed games from working on the system, and the Nintendo Seal of Quality, that was supposed to assure consumers that they were getting a high-quality game. Now, the irony is that while the NES went on to be an extremely popular console that totally revitalized the American video game market, neither of these safeguards remotely worked, and the platform became home to pretty much every strain of bad video game imaginable.

So, let's start with a look at that lockout chip and try to work out why anyone would want to get around a measure designed to make video games better. Funnily enough, big American publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts, and Atari, who had reinvented themselves as a software producer, did not like how strict Nintendo were. And in particular, they hated a rule that restricted them to just five NES games a year. These guys had cut their teeth churning out as many titles as possible for the Atari 2600, and to not be able to do the same on the NES really boiled their blood. So, Atari took matters into their own hands. And during a large court case that accused Nintendo of antitrust violations, they reverse-engineered the 10 NES chip and began publishing unlicensed games under a brand called Tengen. Now, funnily enough, Tengen's games were actually really good. And between high-quality ports of Tetris, Pac-Man, and some pretty great sports games, they ended up with a better catalog than plenty of developers that had the official go-ahead.

The problem was that by doing this, Atari let the cat out of the bag, and as their 10 NES workaround began to circulate, companies that didn't have access to experienced developers or popular arcade licenses began releasing their own unlicensed monstrosities. The most notorious of these was a company called Color Dreams, who released over 25 non-authorized games, all of which were horrendously low-quality and essentially existed to trick people into thinking they were getting something good just because it was on the NES. Between titles like Pest Terminator and King Neptune's Adventure, they quickly developed a reputation so bad that they had to rebrand multiple times, with the most famous of these happening in 1991 when they became Wisdom Tree. The goal here was to try and sell unlicensed video games in religious bookshops and churches, one area where they figured Nintendo wouldn't prosecute them for fear of negative publicity. While they seemed to get away with this, that didn't make the games any better, and between releases like the strange Super Mario 2-style platformer Bible Adventures and a perplexing religious quiz game that features living vegetables and fruit called Bible Buffet, it was obviously just another attempt to trick people into buying low-quality nonsense.

Now, if you can believe it, the most infamous unlicensed game of all time didn't actually come from Color Dreams and instead originated in the mind of a Miami-based investment banker who had absolutely zero idea how the industry worked. This was and is Action 52, a compilation of 52 different games so mythically bad that it's become pretty well known as fuel for comedy rage reviews, most famously being covered by the Angry Video Game Nerd, whose two-part take on it has a staggering 24 million views. We could go through each one of the games individually, but there really isn't that much to explore. They're essentially a mixture of very basic shooters, janky platformers, and unfinished maze games, most of which are just a single screen and constantly reused mechanics with ever-so-slightly different visuals. Instead, we're going to explore how this crime against humanity even got made, as it's almost as ridiculous as the content on the cartridge.

Action 52 was conceived by Vince Perry, a Miami-based banker who, after getting sick of constantly being asked for new games by his kid, decided to invest in a Taiwanese console that came preloaded with a bunch of pirated software. Apparently, Perry was so impressed by how well this went down with his kid's friends that he had the bright idea to try and make one of these devices himself. The only obstacle was that this was literally illegal. So, instead, he decided to put together a cartridge that would have lots of different new games on it and could thus be sold for a higher price. Despite claiming to have secured backing from Saudi and European investors, his new company, Active Enterprises, only employed four people and was led by Mario Gonzalez, a young computer programming enthusiast who only knew Perry because they had met at a local office share and also had no idea how to work with a Nintendo development kit. Obviously, the setup wasn't going to produce a good video game, let alone 52 of them. So Perry's solution was to send his team out to Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City, where they would watch the developer work for 7 days and then have just 12 weeks to produce the Action 52. As if that wasn't bad enough, late in development, Perry decided that the company needed a TMNT-like mascot and had the team frantically redesign their last game into the Cheetahmen, a team of three big-cat ninjas who starred in a genuinely unplayable action platformer. While the Cheetahmen in Action 52 somehow managed to get a TV advert, the whole project was a complete disaster. And amidst dreadful reviews and total retail disinterest, Active Enterprises went out of business without ever shipping another game.

Now, with all this talk of absurd unlicensed games, you might start thinking that Nintendo's strategy of locking out unapproved partners was actually doing its job, as after all, most of these games weren't available from major retailers and thus didn't impact perceptions of the NES. But my friends, that brings us onto Nintendo's Seal of Quality. As for all their good intentions, this supposed mark of design excellence ended up being slapped on the cover of a hell of a lot of awful video games. The issue was that a large number of third-party publishers simply didn't have the same level of ambition as Nintendo's own in-house developers and had no intention of even attempting to match their quality when shortcuts would return just as much profit.

The two biggest offenders were LJN and THQ, two pretty famous companies that were set up by the very same person, Jack Friedman. He'd been a toy executive in the early 1980s and, amazed at the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System, he decided to take his approach to the action figure industry and replicate it on home consoles. The idea was pretty straightforward: acquire the rights to a popular license or brand, say Back to the Future, The X-Men, or the WWF, and then hire a tiny studio to produce a game on a shoestring budget, effectively gambling that the box art would make up for any poor production quality. It was a cynical idea, but it worked extremely well. And by 1990, LJN had released 16 different Nintendo games and were making over $50 million a year—a sum of money that inspired Friedman to ditch his investors and set up another publisher, THQ. Despite striking deals with studios that would go on to be big players in the industry, notably Bethesda Softworks and Radical Entertainment, THQ's output was arguably even worse and led to aberrations like Where's Waldo?, Home Alone, and Wayne's World? All of which were plagued by poor programming, hyper-basic level design, and very dated graphics. Just like with LJN, this approach brought THQ a lot of financial success. And unfortunately, it proved that you could make vast amounts of money by striking a deal with a hot new property and then squeezing down development costs as low as physically possible.

Now, on top of the rise of cheaply produced licensed games, the popularity of the NES also brought with it a wave of cynical ports, where a successful game from another system would be condensed down into 8-bit form. Thanks to the large discrepancy in power between home consoles and their home computer or arcade counterparts, these often required big redesigns and usually always led to very poor adaptations that didn't remotely capture the magic of the original. The iconic example is Cinematronics' Dragon's Lair, which in its 1983 form was a groundbreaking arcade game that used a system of laser discs to weave together lots of high-quality animation that players would control with timed button presses. Obviously, this wasn't remotely possible on the NES. So, when it was ported to the platform 7 years later by British studio Motivetime, the best they could manage was an incredibly slow-paced side-scrolling action platformer that was outrageously difficult, looked absolutely terrible, and didn't appeal to any of the fans of the original.

So, given Nintendo were clearly waving through quite a lot of games that couldn't have possibly deserved a Seal of Quality, the question becomes, why were they doing this? Why bother having a system designed to prevent the release of bad games if you're not going to force publishers and developers to do better? Well, the explanation is pretty straightforward: cold, hard cash. You see, approved publishers had to purchase their cartridges directly from Nintendo for around $10 a piece. And as they had strict rules about console exclusivity and a 10,000-unit minimum order, this system ensured that even a terrible game that sold poorly would still end up making Nintendo money. If, by some sheer miracle, that game ended up selling a lot of units, well then they would make even more. So, this incentivized them to turn a blind eye to some of the worst stuff that was coming out on their platform. This publishing model meant that unlike Atari, who slowly sank under the weight of low-quality releases, Nintendo actually profited from them. And thanks to the sheer popularity of series like Mario, Zelda, and Dragon Quest, the perception of their console always remained really positive, despite just as many bad games being made. It was a clever way to avoid the threat of another video game crash. But ultimately, Nintendo's greedy practice of turning bad art into good money only served to reinforce the idea that there was little risk in making it.

So, while greed and hubris may have been the main forces creating bad video games in the early years of the industry, there was also a third, rather less sinister explanation: the honest failure found in over-ambition. These next two sections of the video are going to deal with this idea: how bad consoles and bad games are often the product of honest people genuinely attempting to do great things, and how failure isn't always rooted in commercial cynicism.

In 1989, Nintendo's global dominance of the video game industry came to a crashing halt as Sega released the Genesis, a powerful and affordable 16-bit system that paired aggressive advertising with lots of popular licensing agreements and proved that there was space for more than one console juggernaut. This led to a period known as the console wars, where these two titans of hardware production went head-to-head in every single territory. But what's often forgotten about this electronic battlefield is that milling around underneath these two giants were a whole host of wannabe console pretenders. If you can believe it, between 1990 and 1995, almost 20 different video game systems hit the market, all aiming to replicate Sega's success and carve out a piece of the market by being the next hot machine. Obviously, the vast majority of these had almost no success whatsoever. So today, we're going to take a closer look at three particularly egregious examples: three consoles that monumentally failed despite the best efforts of their creators.

Let's start with a very peculiar machine called the 3DO, whose story begins back in 1982 with a young businessman called Trip Hawkins. He had set up a little company called Electronic Arts. And thanks to his innovative leadership, which focused on taking commercial risks, setting up dedicated teams of developers, and attempting to support multiple different platforms at once, they had quickly grown into one of the biggest video game publishers in North America. Thing is, as the decade drew on, Hawkins found that being a publisher wasn't enough to satisfy his ambition and couldn't shake the feeling that he could take on the entire industry. It might sound like pure arrogance, but considering he had built a video game empire before the age of 35, Hawkins was clearly a guy who backed himself to do big things. So, in 1991, he resigned his position at Electronic Arts and set up the 3DO company, an entirely new kind of video game company that would design consoles but wouldn't actually produce them.

Now, as odd as that sounds, there was method in Hawkins' madness. You see, the way the console industry worked at the time was that companies would sell their machines at a loss to encourage sales and then would attempt to make back this money with software, either from creating their own games like Mario and Sonic, or by charging third parties to publish on their platform. Rather than doing this, the idea behind the 3DO was to license the designs of the console out to different manufacturers, with Hawkins theorizing that it would work like the VHS industry, with standardized technology but lots of competing producers. The trick was that as his company made money from these licenses, they could then afford to have very low publishing costs, which would hopefully attract lots of developers to the 3DO, as they would make far more money. It might sound like an absolutely crazy idea with the benefit of hindsight, but amazingly, there was serious hype around the 3DO company when the first versions were revealed at CES in 1992, which led to their machine being named Time Product of the Year and the company floating on the stock market before they'd sold a single piece of software. For a brief moment, it looked like Trip Hawkins actually would conquer the industry.

But alas, things went wrong pretty quickly. The first issue was that thanks to the 3DO's complex internals, developers had a tough time creating games in time for its launch. And when it finally hit markets in October of 1993, excited new owners could only buy a single game: Crash and Burn by Crystal Dynamics. Now, over the course of the next 12 months, games did start to trickle out. And between exclusives like Star Control, Gex, and Need for Speed, and high-quality ports of popular fighters like Street Fighter 2 and Samurai Showdown, the 3DO did eventually get quite a respectable library. The problem was nobody could actually afford one, as Hawkins' licensing model meant manufacturers had to try and make money on the hardware, which meant that the 3DO was wildly more expensive than anything else on the market. That acclaimed Panasonic model that Time magazine had loved was priced at an astounding $699, almost four times the cost of a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. And even when cheaper models came out, the 3DO was still far too expensive for most normal people.

Unfortunately for Hawkins, the death knell sounded in late 1994 when Sony and Sega released the PlayStation and Saturn, two powerful 32-bit consoles that meant the 3DO was no longer the most advanced console available. And just to put the boot in, they were both also substantially cheaper. While the 3DO lurched on for a couple more years thanks to some intense price cuts, it never remotely made the impact that Hawkins had promised investors. And by the time it was discontinued in 1996, it hadn't even sold 2 million units. In an interview that same year, Hawkins admitted to Next Generation magazine that the whole venture had been a huge mistake and that his idea of a hardware company that didn't actually make hardware simply didn't make sense.

So, if someone trying to do things differently couldn't break Nintendo and Sega's vice grip, what about a familiar face who came roaring back into the market with a big and bold new look? That's right. In 1993, Atari attempted a grand comeback with a console that was purpose-built to make the 16-bit SNES and Genesis look like relics of the past. This was the Atari Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit console. A mammoth upgrade in processing power that would sweep aside all competition by leaping two generations into the future. That made for some very easy marketing. Atari's new machine was four times as powerful as the next best thing, and they flooded American TV with adverts hammering home this exact point.

The problem was, it wasn't exactly true. Inside the Jaguar sat two 32-bit processors called Tom and Jerry, one designed to handle graphics and one to handle sound. A very advanced setup that did make it more powerful than most other consoles, but not by the gross margin that Atari were claiming. That being said, you wouldn't actually know this from the look of its games, as the system proved to be so difficult to develop for that most studios ended up totally ignoring Tom and Jerry and using a 16-bit command chip as their main processor, which meant that most Jaguar games barely looked any different to the competition. Given the whole point was to sell the system as a futuristic powerhouse, this put the Jaguar in a pretty terrible position.

But unsurprisingly, Atari did virtually everything possible to make this situation worse. For starters, they struck a deal with IBM to produce their machines. But as they had no experience producing gaming consoles, Atari ended up not having enough stock. Rather than delaying the release, they decided to cancel over half a million European pre-orders and focus all their efforts on the American market. A decision that massively backfired, as the system ended up barely selling a 100,000 units when it was released in late 1993. Just like back in the 1980s, Atari's managerial incompetence had destroyed any chance of a revival.

And I think this is a real shame, as for all the Jaguar's faults, it is nowhere near as bad of a console as many people make it out to be. It often gets criticized for its strange controller, which features a numpad underneath the standard buttons, but this was included so developers could implement more complex control schemes, which are used by placing a unique card over the top. Obviously, this sounds pretty strange, but it does actually work in practice. And having things like a quick save, or weapon hotkeys, or different camera angles on the controller starts to feel perfectly natural after a few hours of playing. Similarly, the fact that the console only ever got 63 games is seen as another big reason for its failure. But there are some real gems hidden away in the Jaguar's library. Most people don't realize that Ubisoft's beloved limbless mascot, Rayman, actually began life as a Jaguar exclusive and was only ported over to the PlayStation 1 after it became clear that his original home was going to absolutely bomb. Along with this, there is Alien vs. Predator, a first-person shooter with an incredible sci-fi horror atmosphere that lets you play as an alien, a Predator, or a marine, each with their own distinct play style and all taking place on a sprawling, non-linear space station. It's legitimately better than almost every other console shooter which released that generation and won so much critical acclaim that it kickstarted the career of its developer, Rebellion, who had gone on to make the Sniper Elite series and are still going strong today. Along with some great ports of Wolfenstein and Doom, solid versions of classics like NBA Jam and Flashback, and even some pretty well-designed early 3D games like Tempest 2000 and Cybermorph. The Jaguar might not have had many games, but it certainly had some good ones. Unfortunately, while all this might make the console worth a second look in 2025, it did nothing to save Atari in 1995. While they eventually cut the price to a laughably low $149, the writing was on the wall. And in a tax filing posted in 1996, it was revealed that the Jaguar had only managed to sell 125,000 units worldwide, which, along with the expensive TV adverts and the high cost of production, made the system the biggest hardware failure in video game history. The simple fact was that in order to take on Nintendo and Sega, you needed more than a flashy new machine, more than an aggressive marketing campaign, more than the excitement of global investors, and more than just a handful of interesting games.

So, to round out this look at the very worst of 1990s video game consoles, let's take a look at a machine that didn't have any of these: the utterly ill-fated Philips CD-i. Now, you might be expecting a scathing critique of what is commonly referred to as the worst console ever made. But this is the moment I get to be a true contrarian, as I don't think the CD-i quite deserves its torrid reputation. The reason for this is that I think a lot of people misunderstand what this machine even is, as it was never originally intended to be just a video game console and certainly wasn't supposed to compete with the titans of the industry. You see, the CD-i had originally been conceived by Philips as a multimedia device where you would use CD-i discs, a new disc-based format that could store interactive content. The intention was that the device would sit somewhere between a VHS player and a personal computer, allowing you to watch movies, show off photos, listen to albums, read digital books, and yes, play some video games—a sprawling set of features that supposedly had Bill Gates at Microsoft concerned about its potential.

Now, as it turned out, he had little to worry about, as the CD-i never really caught on, and it left Philips without a clear direction for their electronic Swiss Army knife. As video games were one of the few things that had sold in CD-i form, they had the bright idea to pivot the machine towards gaming. And thanks to a sneaky little deal from the company's past, they had the perfect way to kick this off. Back in 1992, Philips had partnered with Nintendo to produce a CD-based add-on for the Super Nintendo. And while this never came to anything, a quirk of the contract was that Philips could produce their own Mario and Zelda games. This is largely where the CD-i's foul reputation comes from, as its four Nintendo-licensed games—Wand of Gamelon, Faces of Evil, Zelda's Adventure, and Hotel Mario—are some of the most notoriously bad games of all time. Come on. They were produced by three very small studios: Animation Magic, Fantasy Factory, and Veridis Corporation, all of which were given tiny development times, minuscule budgets, and almost zero support. Philips had virtually no idea how to manage video game production. The result was four games that feel wildly out of step with their respective franchises: a nightmarish mixture of top-down digitized graphics, memeworthy animated cutscenes, horrifically unresponsive controls, crazy long load times, and extremely odd design choices. It's honestly still hard to believe that Nintendo allowed these games to see the light of day, and they've rightfully gone down in history for all the wrong reasons.

But there is more to the CD-i than just Mario and Zelda. Part of what makes these games so poor is that Philips were trying to create experiences that the system just couldn't handle. And if we take a step back and look at the rest of the CD-i's catalog, it's really not that bad. For starters, FMV-style games worked really well thanks to the CD-i format. And ports of Myst, The Seventh Guest, and a cyberpunk-style exclusive called Burn Cycle were all easily as good as anything found on the Sega CD or the 3DO. There was also a particularly great version of Tetris, which featured cozy Bob Ross-style backgrounds and a wonderful soundtrack that is well worth giving a listen if you love nostalgic retro synth easy listening. Along with these, there's a great vertical platformer called The Apprentice, solid versions of Pac-Man and Lemmings, and most surprisingly of all, a legitimately good game by Animation Magic called Mutant Rampage: Body Slam, which captures the zany energy of their Zelda cutscenes and transforms it into a post-apocalyptic beat 'em up. The truth is, if you compare the CD-i to the Sony PlayStation or the Super Nintendo, of course, it looks absolutely dreadful. But if you view it as a VHS player that could also play Michael Jackson albums and had a pretty wicked version of Tetris, well, there's nothing else quite like it in existence.

Now, admittedly, there are a ton of other terrible consoles from this era that we could go over: the Amiga CD32, the Apple Pippin, Sega's own 32X, and the ever-flowing vein of negativity that is Nintendo's Virtual Boy. But I think the three consoles we've spoken about really embody that endearing failure that we spoke about at the top of this chapter. Maybe I'm just blinded by nostalgia, but there's something about the Jaguar, the 3DO, and the CD-i that don't neatly fit in with the rest of the poor games we've spoken about, as their creators were genuinely trying to do interesting and original things, but simply failed in the face of a market that moves very quickly indeed.

But as discussed, this is only half the story, as we also need to dive into the video game version of this problem and take a look at the bad games whose developers deserve a little bit more of our sympathy. Something that is so often left out of video game discourse, whether in reviews or critiques or even just in conversations on social media, is quite how hard it is to actually make a video game. Maybe it's thanks to a hangover from when the medium was mainly marketed towards children, or that ever-present question about if video games count as art. But for whatever reason, I think we criminally underestimate how much work it takes to not only make a good game, but a functional one. I'm firmly of the belief that nobody ever sets out to make a bad video game. But when you step back and think about everything that goes into creating one, well, it's really no surprise that so many studios end up making so many mistakes.

So, with that in mind, we're going to dive into a period of video game history where this issue was at its most prominent: the wild transition from 2D to 3D. You see, while developing games for the NES and Sega Genesis could be difficult, that challenge blasted off into outer space once the PS1 and Saturn arrived. But suddenly, even a cheap licensed game needed complex 3D graphics to stand out from the crowd. For developers that had cut their teeth painting single-perspective images with pixel art and creating animations that lasted just a few frames, it was a crazy adjustment to make. And as we're about to find out, it led to some of the most notoriously bad games that have ever been released.

So, let's kick things off with a doozy, an icon of digital failure: Bubsy 3D. Now, Bubsy had sprung to life in 1993 as an attempt by Accolade Games to compete with Nintendo and Sega. They wanted a piece of the 2D mascot platforming pie. So, they contracted a designer called Michael Berlin to create a quippy cartoon animal who would race around colorful levels, which became Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Third Kind for SNES and Genesis. Obviously, it wasn't a very original idea, but surprisingly, Bubsy was initially quite popular, and thanks to pretty solid reviews and particularly stellar coverage from EGM, who called him the most hyped new character of 1994, it looked like Accolade had the cartoon mascot that they wanted.

Unfortunately, Michael Berlin ended up leaving the company shortly after work finished on Bubsy 1. And this meant the next few entries in the series weren't quite as hot, which left Accolade without a big title that they could release on the upcoming PlayStation 1. So, they did what any self-respecting publisher would do and went cap-in-hand to Berlin's new studio, Idetic, and begged him to make them another Bubsy game. Berlin wasn't opposed to this idea, as so far his young studio had only managed to work on crossword simulators and a live-action NFL game. So they agreed to the deal on the condition that they could use cutting-edge technology and try to make something in 3D.

This is really where the problems with Bubsy 3D begin. Because while that sounds like a very exciting prospect, Idetic only employed eight people, only had a single year to work with, and had nowhere near the budget that this sort of game would require. It's a story that we've heard quite a few times already: a greedy publisher signs a contract with a small studio, and without the proper resources, they end up making something not particularly good. But Bubsy 3D goes well beyond this in a very unique kind of way. As it's often spoken about as one of the worst games ever made, you might be surprised to hear that it's actually pretty functional, with a solid frame rate, virtually no bugs, and a higher native resolution than most other PS1 games. Rather than being poor because of its construction, everything wrong with Bubsy 3D is found in its design, which really highlights how hard Berlin and Idetic found it to reimagine platforming in three dimensions.

The biggest issues are found in the movement and camera, as you use tank controls to move Bubsy around the levels. But when you jump in the air, the camera switches to this disorientating downwards angle that's clearly been chosen so you can see where you land. It takes a lot of getting used to, especially as Bubsy's jump has a lot of height but not much distance, which means you're not really aiming before you jump so much as aiming as you land—something that feels very strange in 3D. Similarly, the way Bubsy's levels have been put together feels wildly out of step with what people wanted from 3D. As instead of using the new technology to create detailed visuals or complex spaces for players to explore, they're just made up of a random assortment of textured polygons. This gives the game a very cheap look, means that its 18 levels all blend into one another—a gross mash of weird jumping, zany visuals, confusing layouts, and Bubsy repeating the same few voice lines over and over until you want to break your disc. You'd have to be a real cartoon bobcat fanatic to not see that Berlin and his team didn't really nail the transition to 3D.

But this is where we need to change our perspective, as I'm not sure this was ever a reasonable expectation. We've already discussed how the team was very small and inexperienced, how they were working to a tight deadline, didn't have any support from the publisher, but you also have to consider that they were trying to do something that nobody had ever done. Bubsy 3D was in development at the exact same time as Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot 1, the two games that taught the world how jumping in 3D should work. So, it's really no surprise that without this frame of reference, Idetic came up with something pretty wonky. In fact, in one of the few interviews he's given about creating the game, Michael Berlin told Retrovolve.com that when he finally saw Super Mario 64 at CES in 1996, he immediately knew that they'd gotten everything wrong and desperately tried to convince Accolade to let them start over. Sadly, they refused. And to make matters even worse, the publisher wasn't able to get Bubsy out onto store shelves until two months after Mario and Crash, which led to terrible reviews, car crash sales, and even accusations that Idetic were trying to rip off Nintendo and Naughty Dog.

Obviously, Bubsy 3D is not a good game. Its art direction is awful, it's annoying to listen to, and the gameplay simply isn't fun. But there's something inside me that doesn't feel comfortable with the constant derision. Given that Idetic were genuinely trying their best in very awkward circumstances, rather than being a flag-bearer of terrible development, I think Bubsy 3D is more of an example of how hard it was to shift from 2D to 3D. And I really don't think Berlin and his team deserve to have their honest mistakes turned into a mark of shame.

If you're still not convinced, we only need to look at what happened to Idetic next, as it's really not what you'd expect from a team responsible for one of the worst games of all time. While the gameplay didn't quite cut it, Bubsy's impressive draw distances and smooth performance impressed Sony so much that they ended up buying Idetic, clearly convinced that they had a good grasp of the hardware but just needed a little more direction. This led to the creation of Syphon Filter, a PS1 third-person shooter that starred Agent Gabriel Logan, battling shadowy military organizations and taking influence from Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid. It reviewed extremely well and ended up selling over 1 million units, a number that prompted a further five sequels and shot Idetic into the upper echelon of PS1 developers. After this, the team was rebranded as Bend Studio and went on to work on the Resistance series, produce a couple of portable Uncharted games, and most recently shifted back to big-budget console development with Days Gone, which is seen as a real PS4 cult classic. It's a seriously impressive catalog for a studio that began life with Bubsy 3D. And I think it's an important lesson that bad games don't automatically equal bad developers, especially when they're trying to do something that takes the might of Nintendo or the genius of Naughty Dog to actually pull off.

Now, what's interesting about this little tale is that there are similar explanations behind quite a few other notoriously bad early 3D video games. For

example, let's take a quick look at Virtual Hidelight for the Sega Saturn. You might recognize it from various comedy YouTube reviews tearing to shreds, or even from its many appearances in the awful game blog during Games Done Quick.

But just like with Bubsy, there is a lot more to its creation than just the developer that didn't know how to make games. The studio in question here was T and Eoft, a Japanese team that had been making games since the early 80s and were most known for Hidelide, a 1984 PC game that blended action gameplay with RPG character progression and had sold over 2 million copies. That might be surprising considering it's usually seen quite negatively outside of Japan. But this is largely because it was released on the NES 5 years later, and by that point, it had been long since surpassed by games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

Now, for T&E, that didn't really matter, as they were still making money back home in Japan. And while they did produce a couple more Hidelight sequels in the late 80s, they found their true calling producing golf games like Kuku Canaru Augusta and the True Golf Classic franchise. Other than a brief foray into Virtual Boy development, where surprise surprise, they produced a game called Golf. They were a relatively uncontroversial company and not who you might expect to produce one of the most reviled games of all time.

This all changed in late 1994 when Sega approached them with a rather unique proposal. Amidst rumors that Sony had been able to secure an exclusivity deal with role-playing giant Squaresoft, Sega was scrambling to find RPGs that could launch alongside the Saturn. And so they asked if TNE could revive H Highlight, as this would be a big exclusive on a much-anticipated system. It was hardly an opportunity that the studio could turn down, but the problem was that they hadn't made an RPG in almost 10 years, and all of their processes were tailored towards making golf games.

The result was 1995's Virtual Hidelight, an action RPG formed out of the bones of Pebble Beach Golf, which they'd released on 3DO a year earlier. It used the same digitized models and style of animation. It had the same flat behind-the-character camera angle and suffered with all the same draw distance issues, a combination of things that makes the game both extremely ugly and very hard to actually play. Bafflingly, there is also absolutely no story, as for some reason, TNE decided to remake the 1984 MSX original, which means there are no NPCs, no cutscenes, and no dialogue of any kind. Just wandering aimlessly around the overworld looking for three fairies, which takes you to the final boss.

The thing is, just like with Bubsy 3D and Accolade, I'm not exactly sure what Sega were expecting. By this point, Final Fantasy 7 was still 2 years away from release, and virtually every other RPG was sticking resolutely to pixel art graphics. So, it's really no surprise that a studio that only made sports simulation games wasn't able to work out how the genre should work in 3D. So, yet again, it's not so much a case of foolish developers having no idea what they're doing, but just the wrong people at the wrong time. Even in those early days of 3D, making a good game had become so complicated that even if you had ambition and talent, or had already seen success with other kinds of releases, there was no guarantee that you could actually deliver what your publisher wanted.

So, with that thought, we arrive at the most notorious of early 3D failures. A game so legendarily bad that it is forever scarred the character in video game form. Superman: The New Superman Adventures, or Superman 64 as it's come to be known. It is a shining example of everything wrong with video games in three dimensions. But the story of how this monstrosity came into existence might very well shock you.

It all begins in 1997 with a man called Eric Kaine, who is the founder of Paris-based Titus Interactive, a plucky little studio who had produced everything from 2D sidescrollers to 3D chess games and even a racing sim for Lamborghini. They were a small outfit, but Kane had big ambitions. So, when he was tipped off that Warner Brothers was starting production on an all-new Superman cartoon, he picked up the phone and attempted to secure the rights to the video game adaptation. To his utter amazement, nobody else had come in with a bid. So, Titus Interactive, despite only having 10 employees, ended up working on a game featuring one of the most famous fictional characters of all time.

Now, the issues began mere months after this happened, as Warner Brothers revamped the way they licensed their properties and were horrified to discover that Superman had been shipped out to an unknown Parisian studio rather than some industry giant like Activision or Electronic Arts. This is where things got nasty. As while Kane had ambitions of an open world where players flew around as Superman, stopping various crimes and battling a host of villains, Warner did everything in their power to sabotage the project, presumably in hopes that they could somehow void the contract. Apparently, they made crazy demands about how Superman should look and act, forcing the developer to come up with masses of comic book reference justifications for every second of gameplay, and at one point even demanded that Titus rework the entire game into a Sim City clone where Superman acted as Metropolis's mayor.

According to Cain, this degree of corporate meddling had a huge impact on development and meant that fundamental parts of the process like polishing animations, testing gameplay, and writing dialogue all had to be abandoned, as the team constantly flew back and forth between Paris and California trying to appease Warner. Even after 2 years of work and multiple delays, the finished product was a complete mess. And when Superman 64 hit markets in May of 1999, the reviews were absolutely brutal.

Visually, the game looked at least three or four years out of date with simplistic blocky polygons, flat, washed-out textures, and the sections in Metropolis all clouded with this thick green fog, which Titus creatively called kryptonite gas, although it was obviously just to obscure the crazy short draw distance. Story-wise, there was literally nothing. You see a short screen at the start of the game where Lex Luthor kidnaps Lois, Jimmy, and Hamilton and takes them into a computer simulation. And then every level plays out without a single moment of dialogue explaining what's actually happening.

Now, apparently the simulation setting was another dictate by Warner, as for some reason they insisted that Superman do as little fighting as possible. So Titus thought they could get around this by having the whole thing take place inside of a computer when nobody Superman would actually be real. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to satisfy their insatiably unreasonable partner. And it means that the vast majority of Superman 64's 3-hour runtime is made up of truly horrible flying sections where you have to battle against unresponsive controls and fly through courses of floating rings. It is as baffling as anything I've ever seen in a licensed game.

But just like with Bubsy, Idetic, and Accolade, I find it hard to truly dislike this game because I don't see how Titus could ever have produced something good. Warner was trying to sabotage them at every turn. And even if this tiny little French team had somehow produced a stone-cold Superman classic, it would have likely still been picked apart by execs who thought they deserved to work with a better-known company. Now, delightfully, there is a little shred of shard and Freder in this story, as against all the odds, Superman 64 was actually quite commercially successful and ended up selling over half a million copies worldwide. My personal theory is that a lot of this is thanks to the box, which despite all the sins contained inside, is an absolutely rad piece of Superman art. No title, no font, just the Man of Steel tearing his shirt open with a big iconic S on his chest. What's funny about this is that it means Titus Interactive's abhorrent Superman disaster is still the bestselling Superman game of all time. And for all of Warner's future partnerships with big-name companies like EA and Infogrames, they never came close to matching its success.

Now, some people might look at these three games and say, "Well, they're still bad games, so the story behind them doesn't really matter." And to that, I don't really have a response. Bubsy 3D, Virtual Hidelight, and Superman 64 are all deeply unenjoyable games riddled with technical and design issues, but I think they present a challenge to how we think about bad games. They aren't the product of incompetent developers who had no idea what they were doing, or greedy cash-ins designed to swindle fans out of their money, or even necessarily the product of a pushy publisher that didn't back the project. At the end of the day, they are bad games because making good games is really quite hard. While we'd love to live in a world where every game can be a Chrono Trigger or a Resident Evil 2 or a Mario Kart or a Halo, these are exceptional works made by exceptional people. When a studio or team doesn't reach these standards, we need to be quicker to understand and less keen to rake them over the coals. Because even in three of the worst games ever made, you can find pretty reasonable explanations for why things went so badly wrong.

Now, I'm well aware that you probably clicked on this video looking for a bit more Venom. So, let's get back to devious publishers with cynical ideas and revisit an old problem that had only continued to fester as the industry grew larger. Out of the wreckage of the console wars and the chaos of the shift to 3D, there emerged a single winner: Sony and their mighty PlayStation. This little gray disc drive had managed to dramatically outsell the competition through a combination of low licensing costs and relatively straightforward hardware, which meant that it attracted a huge amount of third-party support and quickly took over as the number one console.

Now, while this led to big companies like Squaresoft, Namco, and Konami throwing their weight behind the system, it also opened the door to a whole new wave of cheaply produced licensed games, which thanks to the challenges presented by 3D, were now worse than ever. We'll start by staying in the world of comic book adaptations, as DC weren't alone in abusing their characters in digital form, as Marvel also published their fair share of stinkers, especially on the PS1.

In 1996, we got The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga, a bizarre-looking isometric perspective beat 'em up that developer Attention to Detail, for some reason, modeled after Doom. This means that our oddly pint-sized version of Bruce Banner spends more time looking for key cards and exploring labyrinth-themed levels than smashing enemies to bits, which also isn't even particularly good, as Marvel had mandated that the Hulk couldn't be seen to be too violent. Obviously, that doesn't make a lot of sense considering the character, but it makes even less sense when you consider that the following year they signed off on the Fantastic 4. This was a four-player side-scrolling brawler that saw Marvel's first family killing all manner of enemies in gameplay inspired by Streets of Rage, a formula that had worked beautifully for Konami's X-Men a few years earlier, but was utterly botched by developer Probe Entertainment. With extremely blocky visuals, stiff controls, and clunky animations, it's pretty much everything you don't want in an arcade-style beat 'em up. And apparently its publisher, Acclaim Entertainment, had only released it in order to keep hold of the Marvel license.

Now, while it's always pretty shocking to see such famous characters being adapted with such little care, there were even more unspeakable things happening outside of the world of Marvel and DC. In 1995, Image Comics sold Sony the video game rights to their biggest character, Spawn, with the idea being that they would produce a PlayStation exclusive that would release alongside an upcoming 1997 movie adaptation. Now, clearly someone at Sony didn't think much of this idea, as rather than sending it off to one of their big hitters, Spawn the Eternal was put together by a random team of programmers from the publishing wing at Sony Interactive America. While Spawn writer and artist Todd McFarlane was heavily involved in the development and even did a series of TV interviews trying to convince people that they were working on something special. The truth was that Spawn the Eternal was anything but. Gameplay was nothing more than wandering around empty levels and getting into strange one-on-one battles. A premise that makes it look like it might have started life as a multiplayer fighter before being hastily repurposed into a Tomb Raider-style action-adventure. If that's true, it's a shift that didn't pay off, as both the combat and exploration feel incredibly unfinished. And to make matters even worse, despite supposedly being made to capitalize on the movie, Spawn the Eternal had absolutely no dialogue, no cutscenes, and no story whatsoever. The whole thing is just perplexingly bad, especially considering the character was at an all-time high in the mid-'90s.

But if you can believe it, this isn't even close to the worst movie tie-in on the PlayStation 1. A few years earlier, Canadian studio Grey Matter had taken that crown with The Crow: City of Angels, a game so bad that it makes Superman 64 look like a generational masterpiece. Gray Matter had started life as a relatively successful 2D developer. But when the PlayStation and Saturn hit the market, they felt a lot of pressure to up their game, and this led to the creation of Perfect Weapon, their first foray into the world of 3D. The idea was to try and capitalize on the popularity of both Tekken and Resident Evil by combining the two. An interesting idea, but one that does not work in practice. Funnily enough, fixed camera angles, tank movement, and infantry management aren't a great fit with combo-driven fighting. And amidst terrible reviews and non-existent sales, Grey Matter had to cancel Perfect Weapon's Saturn port and scramble to bring in some money. So when Acclaim approached them about making a video game tie-in for the upcoming Crow movie sequel, City of Angels, they jumped at the chance.

Now the problem was all they had time and budget for was a repurpose of the ideas behind Perfect Weapon, which turned out even worse on a second attempt. The visuals were dreadful, barely resembling the movie they were adapting. The sound effects were so bad that silence would have been preferable. The fixed perspectives and tank movement were back, but now the angles were even more disorientating. And most confusingly of all, the titular immortal crow could be killed after just a few slaps from a local drunk. Reviews were absolutely scathing, with PlayStation Magazine and IGN both awarding it just a one out of 10. And in tandem with the movie absolutely bombing, it led to sales so low that Gray Matter immediately went out of business.

Now, you would think that all this commercial failure would be enough to warn publishers and developers away from cut-priced comic and movie adaptations. But incredibly, as the next generation consoles came out, they just kept coming. In 2003, DC completed a gross hat-trick of video game self-destruction when they signed off on Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis and Batman: Dark Tomorrow, a pair of GameCube games so bad that it's genuinely hard to believe they exist.

The first was produced by Lucky Chicken Games, a studio renowned for classic licensed endeavors like Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Driver and Casper the Friendly Ghost: Spirit Dimensions. And who would be bringing this same level of design skill to Battle for Atlantis? Its story is told entirely through static images without any voice acting or animation. There's only 90 seconds of music in the entire game. The environments look like they were directly inspired by Superman 64. And the gameplay, well, it only qualifies as a video game in the most literal sense of the word. All we do is swim around beating up identical-looking goons. And while there are a couple of sections that have us piloting a ship or disarming bombs, the level design is so basic and so repetitive that it would make most NES games blush. Clocking in at a wild 2 and 1/2 hours in length, Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis has no redeeming factors and no sympathetic backstory and would easily be the worst superhero game of the generation were it not for Batman: Dark Tomorrow.

Released just a few months later, Dark Tomorrow was put together by a joint venture that involved Japanese publisher Chemco, who mainly ported other companies' games, and Hotgen, a British studio that had only ever worked on the Game Boy. How these two ended up with the Batman license remains a complete mystery. But we do know from early magazine interviews that their intention was to make an open-world version of Gotham where Batman would fight various different villains and be able to drive around in the Batmobile. Unfortunately, actually creating this proved to be far too complicated for either studio. And as the release date approached, they had to carve up what assets and animations they had finished and throw them together into something that could actually be sold. The results were not pretty. Dark Tomorrow ended up as a mess of awkward camera angles and invisible walls in order to obscure unfinished environments, broken mechanics like non-functional rooftop platforming and frustrating combat where you had to handcuff every defeated enemy, and a near-constant parade of game-breaking bugs and visual glitches. All tied up with some of the most unsightly animations and art design that Gotham City has ever seen. While Superman 64 is the poster child of terrible superhero video games, Titus can at least say that Warner sabotaged their efforts. But when it comes to Chemco and Lucky Chicken's twin GameCube failures, it's hard to say that the Metacritic scores of 29 and 26 weren't entirely deserved.

Now, what makes these games stand out from the crowd is that it's really not hard to imagine them being better, as characters like Spawn, The Crow, and The Hulk all have bags of video game potential, and in Batman's case, would eventually go on to star in some very highly acclaimed games. But the thing about this era that makes it such a licensed game nightmare is that it wasn't just superheroes and action movie stars being thrust into terrible adaptations, but really anything that was remotely popular.

For example, we have House of House Creations' American Idol, which was also released in 2003. Now, a video game version of a singing competition might sound a little strange, but given the popularity of series like Karaoke Revolution and Singstar, there was actually a pretty lucrative market that you'd imagine American Idol would fit into perfectly. The problem was that American Idol on the PlayStation 2 released 6 months before either of these titles, and thus it didn't have access to the voice recognition technology that had been created by Harmonics and Sony. So, if you're putting together a game about singing, but can't actually have the player singing, what exactly do you build your game around? Well, in the case of American Idol, it's timed button presses, which for some reason keep your avatar's pre-recorded performance in tune with them hilariously warping off-key if you mess up, and nothing more than a compliment from the judges for beating a level. It's essentially Dance Dance Revolution without the dance map, with far worse music and a really unsettling graphical style that doesn't look anything like the show and wouldn't interest even the most hardcore of Simon Cowell fans.

If that all sounds like a bizarre concept for a video game, just wait until you see Pimp My Ride, which was created by Uteknix and Activision and released on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2006. For those who have forgotten, Pimp My Ride was a pretty popular show on MTV where rapper Xzibit went to people's houses and with the help of an LA auto shop transformed their beat-up cars into something that reflected their personalities, usually resulting in a zany car and lots of excited screaming.

Now, despite not exactly fitting neatly into video game form, it's not hard to imagine some sort of racer where you customize your own car with crazy parts and weird designs. But for some unknown reason, Uteknix envisioned Pimp My Ride as an open-world exploration game. That's right, you didn't hear that wrong. The way Pimp My Ride works is that in order to get enough money to pimp out said ride, you need to drive around a fantasy city that is legitimately called Pimp City and try to raise money by playing a bunch of mini-games and finding tokens hidden in the world. The whole thing is just utterly surreal. Not only because the fastest way to make money is by crashing directly into other cars, but because once you do end up in the auto shop, you can't actually design your own car and simply have to pick whatever parts are going to make your client happiest.

Now, we could go on examining all the nonsensical games that released during this licensed game gold rush: a baffling attempt to turn The Sopranos into a beat 'em up, a skateboarding game based on The Simpsons, cheaply made adaptations of movies like Flushed Away and The Polar Express, and a particularly awful third-person shooter where you play as 50 Cent. The list honestly goes on and on. But I want to end this chapter with my personal least favorite: Little Britain: The Video Game. An utterly horrific adaptation of an equally horrid TV show.

If you've never heard of Little Britain before, let me be the first to congratulate you and then ruin that bliss by bringing you up to speed. Essentially, it was a comedy show that aired on the BBC in the mid-2000s and was wildly popular, boasting almost 10 million viewers per episode and catapulting its two stars, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, to pretty massive levels of fame. Now, that might not sound all that bad, except for the fact that virtually every one of its sketches revolves around Lucas and Walliams dressing up as racist stereotypes, making fun of gay people, wearing grotesque fat suits, or impersonating the disabled. All of which has aged worse than milk on the surface of the sun. Even if you like edgy humor, the whole thing is just a mind-numbingly stupid parade of over-the-top accents and repetitive catchphrases. And in recent years, Lucas and Walliams have even apologized for writing it and said that it never should have been aired.

So, how on earth would this ever convert into video game form? Well, the answer is that it doesn't. As all developer Blast Entertainment have done is throw together six extremely loosely connected mini-games and then slap Little Britain characters over the top. As Marjorie Dawes, a fat club manager who's always extremely rude to her members despite being fat herself, you run around a supermarket eating cakes like Pac-Man and trying to avoid what the game describes as "fatties." As Daffyd Thomas, a caricature gay man who only wears BDSM outfits, you ride a bike through his town and try to avoid other gay men. As David, who only feels comfortable if he's the only gay in the village. As Maggie Blackmore, a racist old woman who's sick whenever she eats food made by non-whites, you play a terrible-looking version of Tetris, where the aim is to eat as much as possible and then sick it all over your friends.

Now, honestly, I think because this show was on TV in my home country, and I remember its absurd levels of popularity, this game feels even worse than it already is. But even when trying to speak objectively, it's just a truly ugly game full of ugly ideas and ugly comedy. And at just 20 minutes in length, it's also pretty ugly value for money.

So, let's take a step back from the individual games and try to take a look at what was going on. What was it about this era that made it so ripe for dreadful licensed games? Well, I think that the late '90s and early 2000s was a perfect storm of different factors that all collided in a way that made gambling on cheaply made nonsense far more attractive than at any other time in the industry's history. Thanks to the fact that the PlayStation 2 was one of the cheapest DVD players on the market, it had sold a huge amount of units into homes that weren't traditionally interested in playing games. And this opened up a whole new market that could be enticed by a familiar TV show or movie. Similarly, while 3D development was obviously still much more complex than in 2D, if you didn't actually care about quality and were just looking to sell something based on association, you could still pump out games without having to invest too much money.

What's really depressing about this is that a lot of these projects still made money. And as we saw with Superman 64, there wasn't really any reason to believe that rock-bottom reviews and non-functional gameplay would put people off from buying a game based on something they loved. In this sense, these games aren't even really games at all. They're more akin to a piece of merchandising like a toy or a poster and shouldn't even be graded in the same way that we would look at a Zelda or Castlevania game. Oscar Wilde's judgment was that it's better to make no art rather than bad art. But unfortunately, I doubt even he could have predicted that no art and bad art might sometimes be exactly the same thing.

So, while we're going to continue investigating the world of bad video games, I think it's time for a little detour, as I want to explore the topic from a slightly different perspective. Rather than asking what causes bad video games to be made, we're going to take a look at when bad video games stop being bad video games.

Now, this is a pretty strange concept, as depending on the era we're talking about, it takes on two very different forms. In our modern internet-connected world, where post-launch content and ongoing support are the norm, the idea of games changing long after they've hit shelves is really nothing particularly notable. People now automatically assume that things like balancing issues, game-breaking bugs, performance problems, and even awkward pieces of design all can and will be fixed if they're impacting a game's quality. In fact, in certain cases, like with No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk, this process has been so dramatic that their studios have managed to turn commercial and critical disasters into deeply beloved games. A full transformation from terrible to treasured, all thanks to how fluid modern games have become.

Now, on the other hand, if we head backwards to a time before online consoles, digital storefronts, and the concept of patching a live video game, this whole process simply didn't exist. When a game went gold and was pressed to disc, that was what players would be getting. While it did mean that studios had to take far more care with testing and optimization, it also meant that mistakes could never be fixed. And this is why so many of the most famous bad games come from this era.

But here's the thing. I want to challenge the notion that a game's life cycle ends when the developers stop working on it. Because there are a whole bunch of infamous bad video games that have been pulled back from the brink by fans who truly believed in them. Let's start with a clear-cut example so you know what I'm talking about.

Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, which released on the NES in 1987. It's a rather controversial entry in the series for a whole bunch of reasons. It abandoned the tight action platforming of its legendary predecessor. It removed the iconic boss fights in favor of non-linear exploration. It was full of poorly translated text that made the game very confusing. And worst of all, Simon's Quest would pause every 5 minutes to slowly switch between day and night. While it did have its own interesting ideas, like its sprawling open-world and light RPG systems, they're drowned out by these issues. And by and large, Castlevania 2 does deserve its poor reputation.

But the thing is, there are other ways to play Simon's Quest, and these shave off those jagged edges and leave a far more enjoyable experience. In 2011, a Castlevania 2 fan developer by the name of The Almighty Guru released a ROM hack that both re-translates the game's garbled hints, which makes its mechanics and systems far easier to understand, and speeds up the day and night transition, which ups the pace and makes the whole game flow far better. They are two relatively small changes, but they transform Simon's Quest from a largely incoherent jumble of ideas into a rather ambitious 8-bit action RPG, and importantly, one that no fair-minded person could genuinely call a bad game.

Now, I can already hear your skepticism. This is a fan mod, so it doesn't really save Castlevania 2, as the original version is still bad. Well, this is the exact mindset I want to challenge. Why is it that we only see changes made by the developer as legitimate? And why does something being official matter more than it being fixed? It's an odd thought, because in many ways, we already don't care about this. Take emulation, which helped popularize the use of save states and game speed control, both of which we've come to accept as a perfectly normal part of playing older games, to the degree that they're even included in most official re-releases. Along with this, nobody raises an eyebrow when a game is recommended because it has incredible mod support, or because a multiplayer game has a huge spread of community-designed modes and maps. In fact, there are even certain games like Knights of the Old Republic 2 or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, where fan patches are seen as mandatory if you want to enjoy them to their full potential, and where almost nobody recommends sticking to the final official version. The reality is that we already accept a ton of situations where the hard work of fans is included in the perceived identity of a video game. And it is really only in the case of bad video games where people withdraw this kind of thinking. Personally, I find it to be a real shame, as it ignores the possibility of redemption that maybe some of these games that we've always assumed to be unsalvageable are just a passionate fan developer away from being perfectly fun.

To further prove my point, let's take a look at Daikatana, an utterly notorious sci-fi first-person shooter that you'll likely see near the top of any self-respecting worst games of all time list. It was created by id Software veteran John Romero, after he'd left to form his own company, Ion Storm, which had been set up in 1996 with the express purpose of creating hyper-ambitious games. Now, the problem was, while Romero had bags of creative ideas, he was absolutely dreadful at running a studio. And Daikatana's development quickly descended into a complete mess of abandoned prototypes, crazy levels of employee turnover, constant embarrassing delays, cringe-worthy marketing campaigns, and millions in wasted dollars. When it finally released in May of 2000, reviews were not particularly kind. And as it was also a complete sales bomb, Daikatana ended up going down in history as one of the biggest video game failures of all time.

Now, before we dive into why someone would ever want to fix this, it has to be said that much of Daikatana's terrible reputation is rooted in its Nintendo 64 port, which wasn't actually put together by Ion Storm. Funnily enough, this was developed by Chemco, the madmen that would go on to make Batman: Dark Tomorrow. So, I don't really think it's fair to use this when judging Daikatana's objective quality. So, if we stick to the superior, but still highly flawed, PC version, the big problems are as follows: Thanks to the constant delays, Daikatana's graphics were very dated. And compared to the competition like Halo 1 and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, it didn't really look like a cutting-edge game that had cost millions to produce. Also, it had been built around a follower system that Romero had intended to create the feeling of being in an RPG party, but the companion AI was completely non-functional, and if one of them died, you got an instant game over. This was particularly brutal, as for some reason, they decided to limit your saves and have them work like the ink ribbons from Resident Evil, which meant it was very easy to lose your progress and even easier to just give up altogether.

Now, much like with Castlevania 2, underneath all these issues, there is actually quite an ambitious game that involves our protagonist, Hiro Miyamoto, time-traveling between four distinct settings in a battle to defeat the evil cyberpunk corporation, Mishima. Each of the periods has a ton of creative weapons, lots of aesthetic variety and unique enemies, fast-paced shooting thanks to the Quake 2 engine, and even a heavy dose of RPG mechanics as Hiro gains XP as you fight, which you can then spend on stat upgrades. It's a creative game weighed down by some pretty gross design missteps. So when John Romero released the source code as he left Ion Storm in 2003, a small group of Daikatana fans took over and began to fix the whole thing. Led by experienced modder Frank Sapone, this community effort eventually produced Daikatana 1.3, a patch that transforms the game from top to bottom and in my view totally redeems it. The save system has been replaced with traditional manual and quick saves. The companions have had the AI completely rewritten and can be made invincible in order to avoid those annoying game overs. The resolution, textures, and load times have all been massively improved. And in Sapone's own words, his team of volunteer developers fixed thousands of smaller bugs in order to improve performance. While some people might still turn their nose up at the comic book writing or the chunky Quake 2 visuals when played with the 1.3 patch, I think there is a lot to love about Daikatana. And when taken out of the context of its absurd development and ridiculous marketing, we're left with a pretty great old-school sci-fi shooter that is nowhere near one of the worst games of all time. It's a real testament to the power of passionate fans that can see potential where others miss it.

But if we expand our horizons beyond patches and out into the world of fan remakes, well, the future of bad video games gets even brighter. Now, the thing with most official remakes is that we tend to get new versions of games that were already good, like Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2, or Final Fantasy 7. And this is because those games were popular and have a high chance of selling when they hit the market again. It's a business practice that can often feel a little cynical, as while these games are usually very high-quality, it can feel like attention is being lavished on projects that don't necessarily need it. This is where fan games come into their own, as all it takes is a particularly enthusiastic developer with a taste for strange games, and we can end up with all sorts of crazy redemption stories.

For example, even many hardcore Metroid fans don't particularly enjoy the tight monochrome visuals and sprawling caves of Metroid 2 on the original Game Boy. But take its ideas and put them in the hands of Milton Gui, and we end up with AM2R, an incredible top-to-bottom remake that is amongst the best 2D Metroid games ever made. We've seen Street Fighter 1 transformed from an awkward proof of concept into a responsive and tightly balanced brawler. Mega Man 1 upgraded from an absurdly difficult slog into a highly polished widescreen wonderland. And I mean, we've even seen remakes of the Zelda CDI games that attempt to fix their awful controls and turn them into something that can actually be enjoyed.

Now, the poster child for this movement is Sonic '06, a genuinely insane project by developer Ian ChaosX Morris, where he is attempting to rebuild the widely detested 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog reboot entirely in Unity. Now, just like with Daikatana, I can already hear you screaming, "Why would anyone ever do this?" And well, the answer is surprisingly similar. You see, while Sonic the Hedgehog has largely been remembered for its dreadful storyline that revolves around a cringe-worthy romance between Sonic and a human princess, and its completely unfinished and unpolished gameplay, which is riddled with glitches, bugs, and long load times, there is actually quite a lot worth salvaging. In its original form, Sonic the Hedgehog was intended to be a fast-paced HD version of Sonic Adventure, where Sonic would blast through complex, multi-layered stages while his friends offered up a host of different play styles. The problem was that Sonic Team never got to this point, as they were beset by near-constant catastrophic issues like series creator Yuji Naka leaving halfway through development, Sega cutting the team in half in order to support the upcoming Nintendo Wii, and then the game being rushed out in order to meet an arbitrary anniversary date in late 2006.

What Morris is attempting to do is finish this process, adding in the polish, balancing, and extra care that Sonic '06 needs to reach that original vision. And what's incredible is that he is actually succeeding. Despite having no source code to work with, as of early 2025, he's rebuilt the Sonic, Shadow, and Silver missions entirely from scratch, and they play amazingly well with all the janky movement and broken environments replaced with super-smooth gameplay that lets the complex level design actually sing. What's funny about this is that the only thing Morris has left to remake is Sonic '06's cutscenes, its open hub sections, and its final scenario, which are all the original game's worst elements. So, in its current unfinished state, Sonic '06 is arguably the perfect version of the game: an all-killer, no-filler, high-speed 3D Sonic experience without any of the nonsense.

Now, the whole point of this interlude was to not only shine a light on some of these redemption stories, but to question if the terrible games we've covered so far will necessarily stay this way forever. Who's to say that in a few years, some crazy genius won't dive back into Superman 64 or Bubsy 3D and carve out something that actually works well? Would they still deserve the reputation they have if they eventually get fixed? It's an interesting thought, and one that we might see put to the ultimate test in the very near future.

While working on this video, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, the worst-reviewed game of all time, was announced for Steam completely out of the blue and is now available for purchase. For those that don't know, this is a completely broken and unfinished truck racing game that has the honor of the lowest review score in Metacritic history, an 8 out of 100, largely thanks to its non-existent AI, lack of physics and collision detection, and infinite speed when going backwards. In reality, it's hardly even a video game, more a collection of assets that were thrown together and then given a title. But with it coming to Steam, that opens up the possibility for someone to get stuck into the underlying code and maybe, just maybe, forge something out of the chaos. Could we see a version of Big Rigs that actually works properly, that fleshes out the gameplay into something that properly resembles truck racing? It seems like it would never happen. But if someone can save the largest mistake in FPS history and rebuild Sonic's worst hour from the ground up, then surely there is no game so bad that someone won't try to fix it.

So with our hearts full of hope for the future, we can open up a can of worms that is virtually overflowing with terrible ideas: the hopeless landscape of video game gimmicks and peripherals. Now, there is no other strain of game production that has remotely as many misfires and mistakes. But before we dive into all that, I think it's important that we try to understand why companies make them.

On the surface, most of these hunks of plastic sound utterly ridiculous: a heart rate monitor that attaches to your Nintendo Wii, a printer that plugs into your Game Boy Color, a plastic turntable that you can play Guitar Hero with, a full-size skateboard controller that you jump up and down on. The thing is, a lot of these gimmicks only sound so stupid because they failed to catch on or didn't work. And if we compare them to their more successful cousins, usually the ideas behind them are no less crazy. If you rewind back to the 1980s and tell people that Nintendo would rake in millions selling a battery-powered pack that makes your controller shake, and that this would then become an integral part of controller design, I'm sure they would look at you like you've gone insane. Or if you tried to explain Dance Dance Revolution to someone who's never heard of it: a video game that involves absolutely no dancing and instead revolves around timed button presses with your feet. The point is that many peripheral ideas are weird precisely until they become popular, and I think that's why so many different companies have produced so many strange things over the years.

But the unassailable king in this space is Nintendo. Experimentation is just in their DNA. And it was this willingness to push boundaries that led to huge success with things like the Game & Watch, the original Game Boy, and eventually the Nintendo Switch. Now, the problem is that when you experiment this much, you're bound to eventually get things wrong, which is exactly what happened in 1995 when they released The Virtual Boy. The story goes that it had been a pet project of legendary designer Gunpei Yokoi. But after a sudden delay in the Nintendo 64's development, Nintendo leadership had panicked and pushed the half-baked VR system out the door in the hope of keeping up with their rivals. Obviously, this was a horrible mistake. And between the black and red visuals that strained your eyes and couldn't be used by children, a confused design that was meant to be portable, but also required a table to be used, and a complete lack of first-party support, the Virtual Boy was a complete commercial failure. After selling just 700,000 units when it was released in November of 1995, the system was discontinued after less than a year.

And for a while, it looked as if this had been a lesson hard learned. Nintendo stuck to more traditional consoles for the next 10 years. But as the sixth generation came to a close, and they found their much-loved, but not all that profitable GameCube in a distant third place, they decided to take another wild swing. This was the Nintendo Wii. A little white box that was substantially weaker than its competition, couldn't handle ports of popular third-party releases, couldn't play any media other than Nintendo games, but did have motion controls, an all-new concept which changed everything. Rather than creating yet another complex multi-buttoned controller, Nintendo's Wii Remote used physical gestures for interaction. And as the system's most popular games were based around simple ideas like tennis and bowling, it quickly became very popular with an all-new type of game player. This marked the birth of the casual audience, a new kind of video game consumer who weren't interested in graphics or level design and just wanted to have fun with their families. But as it turned out, there were a lot more of them than hardcore traditional gamers. When it was released in 2006, the Wii outsold the combined sales figures of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, leaping into a hardware lead that would eventually grow to over 100 million units, making it Nintendo's most successful console ever at that point.

Now, thanks to the monster popularity of the Wii and the unique profile of its owners, the system saw a lot of pretty terrible video games, usually mixing the worst of licensed game nonsense with half-baked motion controls. But I want to focus on a slightly different problem that the system created: the issue of trend chasing and how Nintendo's rivals fruitlessly tried to emulate their success. We're going to start with Sony, as while they eventually settled on simply copying Nintendo with the somewhat well-received PlayStation Move, their first attempt was far less respectable and actually led to the destruction of a much-beloved studio.

This was Factor 5, a German-American developer that had a pretty great reputation in the '90s and 2000s thanks to a partnership with LucasArts that had produced all manner of cool Indiana Jones and Star Wars games. Their biggest seller was Rogue Squadron, a critically acclaimed third-person space shooter that paired cutting-edge visuals with hyper-tight gameplay and was a mainstay during the Nintendo 64 and GameCube eras. Now, the trouble was when Nintendo showed Factor 5 the upcoming Wii, it was clear that all the waggling and waving wasn't really their jam. So, studio director Julian Eggerrect went in search of a deal with either Sony or Microsoft. Luckily for him, Sony were looking to bring in new studios to develop for their next console. And so a deal was struck to take the ideas behind Rogue Squadron and transform it into a PlayStation 3 dragon-riding game called Lair. With a big production budget, next-generation power, and gritty fantasy visuals, Lair sounded like a great next move. But actually, it would prove to be the downfall of Factor 5, as within 3 years of signing the contract, they had gone out of business.

So, what happened? Well, the answer is found at Sony's E3 2007 press conference, where they unveiled the PlayStation 3 for the very first time. Now, this conference has become legendary for quite how badly it went. But there was one reveal in particular that killed Factor 5's onlooking developers: the PlayStation 3 Sixaxis controller. This was Sony's answer to the Nintendo Wii, a motion sensor inside of the PS3 controller, which was supposed to work like the Wiimote, but was nowhere near as responsive, but didn't allow for anything like the same range of movement. According to Eggerrect, soon after the conference, a missive came down from Sony headquarters: Lair would be switching to be entirely Sixaxis controlled, as they wanted a high-profile game to help sell the concept. The team at Factor 5 were beside themselves. But nothing could convince Sony to change their decision. And even after preview builds of the

game were heavily criticized by the press, Sony still blocked Factor 5 from implementing even optional analog controls. When Lair finally released in November of 2007, it was praised for its gripping story, its cool premise, its high production values and cinematic score. But none of that could make up for the fact that controlling a dragon with six axis movement simply did not work. With a mere 53 out of 100 on Metacritic and less than 300,000 units sold, Lair was a complete catastrophe. And to add insult to injury, Sony then cancelled their other outstanding Factor 5 projects, which left the studio with no work and on the cusp of bankruptcy, which eventually found them in 2009. The story of Lair is one of the most egregious tales of misguided jealousy in video game history, costing us a supremely talented studio that would have surely gone on to make more great games.

Also, a large manufacturer could make a grab for a casual audience that likely would have never bought the game anyway. Now, if Sony's lurid attempts to court this new market sound foolish, just wait until you hear what Microsoft were doing, as their attempts at motion control proved to be so bad that it virtually knocked them out of the console race. In 2009, they were already in a tricky position. As while the Xbox 360 had been a big seller, its red ring of death fault had really damaged its profitability. And as hardware sales was starting to lag behind the PS3, the Xbox needed an injection of new life. This came in the form of new Xbox head Don Matrix, who was enamored with Nintendo's casual market success and saw this as the future of his system. A pretty wild conclusion considering the Xbox brand had been built on hyper serious sepia ting shooters. Regardless, at E3 2009, Matrix announced this big shift in direction with something called Project Natal camera that would sit on top of your television and take the ideas of the Wii one step further, enabling you to play games without a controller. In hindsight, this is a pretty wacky idea. But if you can believe it, the hype was very real. As Microsoft produced all manner of impressive tech demos that showed off the potential of the Natal, it could recognize and respond to human speech, instantly identify complex body movement, and apparently bigname studios like Rare and Lion Head were working on showcase games.

Now, in reality, none of this made it to market as thanks to spiraling costs, Project Natar transformed into the Microsoft Connect, a far less powerful device that suffered with serious lag problems, required lots of space to work, and cost an astounding $150. It was a big climb down from what had been promised, but such was the size of this new casual audience that the Connect ended up selling very well when it was released in late 2010, shifting a whopping 8 million units in just 60 days. This would eventually become 35 million over the course of its life. and its pack-in showcase, Connect Adventures, a miniame compilation built around waving your arms in front of your TV, became the Xbox 360's bestselling title, outs selling even Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. By any possible metric, Dawn Matrix plan had been a huge success, as the Connect recharged the Xbox and helped the system end the generation with a bang. But the money was masking some pretty serious problems. You see, outside of Connect Adventures, nobody else could produce a Connect game that made any money, with its second bestselling title, Dance Central, only managing to sell a couple of million units. And more hardcore projects like From Software's Steel Battalion and Sega's Sonic Free Riders, completely bombing. The problem was that thanks to Microsoft downgrading the hardware, the Connect was very limited in the movements it could read. Without any buttons that could be incorporated into the gameplay, developers could only create extremely basic experiences that didn't appeal to anyone. This led to third-party support drying up pretty quickly and created an odd situation where Xbox owners were split between traditional gamers that bought lots of games but not the connect and casual connect owners who bought the peripheral but virtually nothing else. Now, that wasn't such an issue when this weird disconnect was making money. But as the next generation rolled around, Microsoft's trend chasing camera contributed massively to their downfall. While their bafflingly named successor system, the Xbox One, had all manner of design issues at launch. A particularly big problem was that it came bundled with the Connect, which added $100 to the cost of the machine and handed the generation to Sony on a silver platter. a situation that Microsoft and the Xbox have never really recovered from.

So, this is the point where we pull back and look at what this teaches us about bad video games. And I think the lesson here is pretty obvious. You need to be original and not just produce things because other people are having success. Sure, that means you might end up humiliating yourself with the Virtual Boy, but it also means you might make a ludicrously successful portable system with two screens, or a hybrid console that actually works. And yes, you might well convince everyone that waggling a remote control is the future of gaming. You've got to be a trend setter rather than a trend chaser. And if you find yourself racked with jealousy, destroying your top studios and forcing your audience into an idea that they don't like, well, maybe it's best to leave the waggling and experimentation to someone else.

Now, before we get into the home straight, we've got another oddity to address, and that is the role that critics play in how we think about bad video games. We might not necessarily like it, but tastem is a huge part of how the video game industry works. And unlike other popular mediums, games live and die based on their review scores. It means that we often put a lot of weight behind the words of critics. And even in this video, which was produced by someone who prides themselves on coming to their own conclusions, we've used review scores constantly as evidence of a game's positive or poor quality. But do we ever stop to actually think about this influence? Can we really trust critics to sort the bad from the good? And are there bad games whose reputations are born from reviews rather than reality? We'll start with that first point. As while I'd love to say that the world of video game journalism is a bastion of honesty and integrity, there is a certain episode surrounding a certain review of a certain bad game that throws a lot of it into question. The game is Cain and Lynch Dead Men, a totally unremarkable game that released in 2007 and inadvertedly revealed quite how corrupt the review ecosystem had become. You see, Kane and Lynch had been developed by IO Interactive, a very talented Danish studio that was responsible for the Hitman series, but who had been tasked by their parent company, Idos Montreal, with producing something more commercially successful. So, they settled on a thirdp person shooter that heavily revolved around online co-op and really lent into its M rating. Now, there's nothing wrong with these ideas, but IO were only given 10 months to work with. And this meant that lots of corners had to be cut and big portions of the game had to be outsourced to smaller studios in Shanghai who weren't able to match IO's typical output. The result was a very sloppy game. The graphics were unpolished and ugly. The shooting was loose and repetitive. Its level design was extremely generic and based around cookie cutter ideas. And to cap it all off, the whole game was only 4 hours long. While the narrative of two amoral killers on the run from cop and criminal alike was kind of interesting, the actual video game underneath was dreadful. And yet, from a look at Kan and Lynch's reviews, and you'd think this was a pretty average shooter, maybe even a good one. Only two outlets went against the grain. A three out of 10 from Anthony Burch at Destructoid, who raked the game for its awful controls and unpolished presentation, and a 6 out of 10 from Jeff Gman at GameSpot, who described it as an ugly, ugly game.

Now, while the assessment from Destructoid was far more negative, it was the GameSpot review that grabbed all the headlines. as soon after it was published, Jeff Gersman was fired as GameSpot editorial director with rumors flying that it had been for this review. Well, years passed and there was no official confirmation until 2012 when Gersman's NDA expired and he revealed what had actually happened. As it turns out, Idos Montreal had been livid after seeing his review, as they had paid GameSpot a huge amount of money to run an exclusive Kane and Lynch ad campaign on the website and had threatened to pull all future revenue unless something was done. It was too late to retract the review. So instead, GameSpot's leadership decided to fire Gersman with them telling him that they couldn't trust him in his role, an obvious lie, as they were simply choosing money over integrity. Now, as if that revelation wasn't bad enough, Gman also explained how this wasn't an isolated incident and that the practice of publishers pressuring websites over bad reviews was actually fairly common. Apparently, it had been happening as far back as he could remember, but editorial teams had always traditionally been protected, or at least they were until the amounts of money involved in reviewing games started growing very large. Now, while this incident really damaged GameSpot's reputation, incredibly, it didn't really impact the wider review industry. Despite it basically confirming that the entire system was crooked, if this was happening at GameSpot, who is to say it wasn't also happening at IGN or game trailers or in any number of struggling magazines? How could we believe that review scores were actually accurate if bribery and editorial pressure was standard practice for publishers when releasing a bad game? Now, that isn't to say that every review ever published is totally worthless or that every journalist and outlet is on the take, but the Kanan Lynch episode really damaged trust in traditional corporate reviewers and helped pave the way for its replacement.

You see, eventually the popularity of dedicated websites gave way to social media. And with that came the rise of a much more casual form of video game review, one that was no less influential, but which came with its own set of issues. Now, rather than being paid directly with advertising campaigns, publishers could build loyalty through access, a different sort of bribery that involved giving creators early review codes, which would allow them to get out ahead of the crowd and make more money based on being first on the scene. It's not quite as sinister as the old system, as it's very easy to ignore the more blatant bad actors and find review channels that are genuinely operating with integrity. But there are other problems. You see, the online world has a tendency to operate like a game of Chinese whispers, where hard facts are often drowned out by the weight of repetition. For example, a personal gripe of mine is that you constantly see people saying that Square Enix no longer has the rights to Parasite Eve due to a conflict with the original novel's author, despite there being no evidence of this whatsoever, and the company continually doing things with the IP over in Japan. In the online world, misinformation can become fact very quickly. And this is particularly true when talking about older video games that people don't want to play for themselves. We've already touched on this a few times in this video. When talking about Bubsy 3D and the context of its development, when talking about how Dicatana gets incorrectly judged against its Nintendo 64 port, how systems like the Jaguar and CDI actually do have good games. But for me, the biggest example is The Hatred of Dr. Jackekal and Mr. Hyde for the NES. It was developed by a tiny studio called Advanced Communications. And when it was released in 1988, it was not particularly wellknown and made almost no impact with critics or players on either side of the Pacific. Really, its story begins in 2006 when James Rolf posted a video on YouTube proclaiming it to be one of the worst games ever made. Now, as this video spawned the angry video game nerd, who soon after became a massive online celebrity, Dr. Jackekal and Mr. Hyde developed an allnew reputation as one of the worst games ever made. But the thing is, while it's not a very fun game, the nerd's original review is not really fair or accurate. For starters, James clearly bought the game from a flea market without the instruction booklet, which much like with ET on the Atari, is required reading if you want to know what's actually going on. The aim of the game is to bring Dr. Jackekal through six levels to a church where he can marry his beloved. But you have to do this while avoiding obstacles that if hit will raise his stress level. If this gets too high, you'll transform into Mr. Hide, who then battles physical representations of his internal demons in a race against time. If the autoscrolling screen reaches where Jackal collapsed, you'll be struck by lightning and it's game over. But if you manage to defeat enough enemies, you'll transform back and can carry on your journey. Conceptually speaking, it's actually pretty interesting for an NES game and does a decent job of representing the two characters in one premise of the novel. But importantly, without the instruction booklet, all this is virtually impossible to understand. So when James complains that Jackal can't attack or kill any of the innocent towns people, or the Hyde randomly dies for no reason, these aren't really legitimate complaints, but they've transformed into a concrete reputation thanks to the fact that this video is the only way that most people would have ever heard of this game. In reality, even with the instruction booklet, Dr. Jackekal and Mr. Hide is not a particularly fun game as your movement speed is far too slow and it ultimately boils down to memorizing the location of obstacles as Jackal, but it really doesn't deserve its astronomically bad reputation and highlights just how quickly opinions can snowball on the internet.

So, if we can't always trust the integrity of professional critics and YouTubers are often placing entertainment over analysis, how exactly do we guard against the bad video games of the future and past? Well, when it comes to newer games, we've got to make sure that we're engaging with a range of different reviews and try to understand the voice behind the script. What sort of games do they usually like? Who is funding their work? Why are they making this review? I know it's tempting to just click on Metacritic and mindlessly absorb the aggregated score, but you'll get so much more out of reviews if you engage with them on this level, as you'll be able to find critics and outlets that see games in the same way that you do. Now, when it comes to older games, the solution is even simpler. Just form your own opinions and do away with tastem altogether. You might find that you genuinely enjoy the strange platforming of Bubsy 3D or get a kick out of the zany atmosphere of Pimp My Ride. But the important thing is to find out for yourself and not let an arbitrary number dictate what is good and what is bad.

So, we arrive at the final stop on this journey. one last strain of bad video games that is decidedly modern and decidedly different to all the others. These usually have boundary pushing graphics, gratifying and well-designed gameplay, eye-catching art design, and high production values. They're not built by tiny unknown studios, but by teams of thousands, and rather than being funded on a shoestring, they have budgets that sprawl out into the millions. And yet, they are not good games. And that is because of an outofcontrol phenomenon that we have come to call monetization. Now before we can dive into this subject properly, I think it's important that we first establish something. Monetization in the video game industry is not inherently bad. I know that might sound controversial, but the reality is that for all the artistic endeavor and creative brilliance that drives developers forwards, video games exist to make money. While you might recoil at that thought, it's really not a bad thing. When studios are profitable, they can afford to pursue more ambitious versions of their ideas, pay their developers higher wages, and bring in more staff, take creative risks without threatening their future, and importantly, hold off the advances of predatory publishers. So, if that is the case, why is monetization such an unpleasant subject to talk about? Well, I think it's because in recent years, a line has been crossed and many modern experiences now feel like they were designed to be hyper optimized money makers before they are enjoyable video games. A shift that is particularly noticeable when you look at how games were monetized before the internet. Back in the 1980s, '90s, and 2000s, the way you got more money out of your audience was through franchising. You'd strike gold with a popular game, say Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, or Halo, and then you'd make a bunch of sequels, spin-offs, and expansion packs in order to drag in more money. Now, this could get pretty cynical, like Capcom releasing six Mega Man games for the NES in just 5 years, or Nintendo creating a Mario version of every single sport in human history. But, as these were popular series, there was generally little complaint. What kept companies in check was that if the quality dropped, so too did the sales. And while you could always sign up with a popular license or cheap out on development in order to increase profits, the optimum way to make money was to just make good games.

Now, when gaming went online in the seventh generation, things started to change, and we began to see companies experimenting with new ways to get at our wallets. Large physical expansion packs transformed into downloadable content, which was often created long after a game had launched and would help keep popular titles making money even as sales were dropping. We saw the start of microtransactions, most famously in The Elder Scrolls Oblivion, where Bethesda controversially charged a few dollars for a unique set of horse armor otherwise couldn't get in game. Along with these, the astounding popularity of World of Warcraft helped to normalize video game subscriptions and the idea that in some games you had to consistently spend money in order to get the most out of the experience. Now, while the roots of our modern monetization problems can all be traced back to this era, the truth is that for all the attempts at publisher nickel and dimming, we were still getting highquality video game content. Sure, you had to pay every month to play World of Warcraft, but in exchange, you got a virtually endless RPG. Sure, lots of multiplayer games launched with microtransactions, but there was also plenty of things to unlock for free. While games had started to be developed with DLC in mind, this didn't feel quite so bad when that DLC was The Knife of Dunwall, The Shivering Isles, or The Ballad of Gay Tony. For a brief moment, there was equilibrium. But in 2009, this came to an end. That year, Apple made a change to their iPhone app store, which allowed developers to charge users for inapp purchases. And this seemingly small piece of functionality ended up altering the entire face of digital monetization. You see, the iPhone had already cannibalized the entire casual audience that had made the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Connect so much money, as mobile games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope were just as easy to play, but cost less than a dollar to buy. Now, you'd imagine that these low costs would also mean tiny profits. But once Apple allowed for in-app purchases, the design of these games rapidly shifted towards encouraging players to spend as much money as possible. Games like Candy Crush Saga sold extra lives. Clash of Clans would give you faster build times, and almost everything on the platform had some kind of paid in-game currency. It was cynical as hell, but it was wildly successful. And within just 3 years, the top app store games were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. All thanks to an enormous amount of people making enormous amounts of tiny digital purchases. This didn't go unnoticed by the big traditional video game companies who were not only struggling with the loss of their lucrative casual market, but were now having to cope with ballooning costs. As the need for every AAA game to have highdefinition visuals, complex online multiplayer, and curated DLC was pushing costs up at an exponential rate. The solution was to try and implement some of the ideas behind these mobile success stories and create games that would better encourage player spending outside of that initial retail cost.

Over the next few years, these concepts slowly began to take over the industry. And we increasingly saw games released with almost every single element outside of the core gameplay loop involving some degree of monetization. Unlockable cosmetics completely disappeared behind pay walls. Properly designed in-game progression morphed into timegated battle passes. Carefully crafted DLC became vague development road maps. And even microtransactions themselves changed from straight payments into pseudo gambling with loot boxes. While this was all often offset by the games launching for free, a clever marketing move which caused millions of players to flock to platforms like Hearthstone, League of Legends, and Fortnite, the core experience was still very much designed around encouraging player spending, an endless cycle that refreshed with each new patch. Eventually, this all came to be known as the live service model. And what's really depressing is that it was very successful. Within a decade, publishers that had fully embraced the idea, like Activision, Blizzard, and Electronic Arts, had exploded in value, raking in billions every year from FIFA, Madden, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, and World of Warcraft. All while smaller companies like Epic Games, and the Roblox Corporation transformed into juggernauts off the back of a single big live service game. Given all this, attempting to make the next Zelda or Final Fantasy didn't seem quite as appealing. And so, the face of bad video games began to change as all the greed, hubris, and envy that had fueled their creation in the past all began to focus on this new golden goose.

In 2015, Turtle Rock Studios attempted to convince the world that asymmetrical monster hunting could be the next great innovation in online multiplayer with Evolve, a live service game where one player would take on the role of a giant monster, while four others attempted to bring them down. Despite actually being a lot of fun, Evolve launched with very little in-game content, a huge amount of cosmetic and functional microtransactions, and a particularly hard to stomach $40 price tag. All of which meant it didn't capture anywhere near the amount of players it needed to be profitable. While it limped on for a few years after eventually going freeto play, it was shut down in 2018 and proved conclusively that having an excellent multiplayer idea was far less important than having a carefully designed monetization plan.

Now, while Turtle Rock were newcomers trying to break into the scene, even well-known household names had big live service problems, none of which were more notorious than Bowar's Anthem. While the studio had become renowned for singleplayer RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Anthem was their attempt to get in on the games as a service party by giving players a customizable flying mech suit and a world full of looter shooter combat. Just like with Evolve, this was a pretty interesting idea and had a lot of people excited. But when it finally released after half a decade in development, the end product was really not that great. Its systems were very repetitive and grindy. It didn't have that famous narrative heft of Boware's past efforts, and most importantly, it didn't have the addictive multiplayer qualities that a good live service game needed to be successful. Despite selling 5 million units and making over a hundred million dollars in digital sales, Anthem somehow still ended up being unprofitable. And while there were initially promises of a reworked version that focused more on its singleplayer potential, Boware's parent company, Electronic Arts, instead decided to pull the plug.

Now, the crazy thing was that despite Anthem and Evolve being two of the largest commercial flops in video game history, this didn't put off other companies from chasing the live service payday. And rather than acting as a warning, the genre kept seeing highprofile failed attempts. In 2020, Square Enix spent $170 million trying to turn Marvel's Avengers into the world's next online obsession. An idea that should have been easy considering the team's monstrous cinematic popularity, but one that went disastrously wrong. It released with an absurd number of bugs, almost no postgame content, and extremely expensive cosmetics, which meant that it barely had any appeal as an actual ongoing experience. And amidst a tiny player base and middling reviews, it was discontinued after less than 2 years. What's incredible is that that wasn't enough to dissuade Square Enix, who made another stab at live service glory with Babylon's Fall, a mashup of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter, produced by Platinum Games. While they were responsible for a ton of classic games like Bayonetta, Near Automata, and Vanquish, none of this shone through in Babylon's Fall, which was rad by critics for its dated visuals, unoriginal ideas, janky animations, and a progression loop that was pretty much entirely based on grinding. Much like with the Avengers, it launched to almost zero player interest. But without the popular license to fall back on, that failure was even more pronounced. With some outlets reporting that Babylon's fall had only 10 concurrent players after just 4 weeks on the market.

Amazingly, the biggest failure of them all has only just happened as Sony released Concord, a garish sci-fi hero shooter in mid 2024. Apparently, the aim had been for Concord to be the tentpole release of the PS5 generation and for it to act as a springboard for a new franchise that could compete with Star Wars and Marvel. An objective which meant its developer, Firewalk Studios, had been given 8 years to work with and a budget that was reportedly well over $400 million. This proved to be a massive mistake as Concord launched to astoundingly low player numbers. Just 700 on Steam and 1,500 on PSN, making it the largest commercial failure in video game history. Now, the crazy thing was that its gameplay wasn't even that bad, as it had tight shooting, balanced gameplay, and well-designed maps. But such was the ferocity of live service competition that merely being functional is nowhere near enough to survive.

So given all of these dramatic and highprofile failures, you're probably wondering why these companies keep doing this. Why do they keep pouring all of this money into a genre that seemingly only has space for a handful of games, especially when they could just go back to producing interesting and profitable singleplayer titles? Well, the truth is that in the eyes of a mega publisher like Warner, Square, or Sony, those failures are just the price you have to pay while you hunt for your big hit. In a world where even a moderately successful live service game will make 10 or 15 times as much money as the greatest single player games of the generation, there's simply no incentive to do anything else. The truth is that the face of bad video games has changed. And this is no longer the same industry that might accidentally produce Superman 64, fumble together Batman Dark Tomorrow, or cram motion controls into lair. It's a place where bad video games have become the norm. A conveyor belt of live service experiments, all hoping to be the one that catches on, not caring at all if they dump another failure on the pile.

If I'm honest, this has been a hard video to know how to conclude because the reality is that the history of bad video games is an ongoing story and one where the lessons and warnings will continue to be written as more terrible games seep out into the industry. It's not something we can prevent any more than we can stop companies becoming overconfident or publishers lusting after others success or developers biting off more than they can chew or the wealthy desperately clawing for more. The truth is that if we want to have the best of the video game industry, the creative experiences, the wonderful stories, the breathtaking graphics, the sumptuous music and ingenious design. Well, we have to put up with everything that comes in its wake. If we want to have The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros., you need to also accept that LJN and THQ will use their fame to pedal cheap nonsense and piggyback on the NES's success. If you want to have Tony Hawk and Spider-Man on the PS1, you also need to accept that others will see the license money pouring in and try to grab a piece of the action. If you want to have Super Mario Galaxy and Wii Sports, you need to also accept that rampant motion control jealousy will cause Sony to destroy Factor 5 and Microsoft to gamble everything on the connect. It's unfortunately a natural consequence of an art form where profits always plays a role. And as long as there is ground being broken, there will also be those happy to dive into the mud.

So, let's return to that quote which started this whole video. Bad art is a great deal worse than no art. Well, I think we've conclusively proved that no matter the circumstances or the decade or however impossible that bad art success might be, the chance of an industry-wide turn towards no art seems rather unlikely. But that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. As for all the negative stories and doomsaying about the future, there are always things to be excited about. Always new innovations that re-energize the industry. Always new classics lurking just over the horizon. That endless wave of greed-driven development may well never cease. But we don't have to sit with our face up against it as there is more than enough good in this industry, both past and present, to sustain you for a lifetime. In fact, there is another saying by Mr. wild that rounds things up perfectly. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars. So, when it comes to the crazy world of video games, both good and bad, let's not worry about what's happening in the gutter, and keep our eyes fixed firmly on the stars. Thanks for watching. So before