(bright tones) - [Falcon] Video game history has tons of highs and tons of lows. And although most of the
time we're trying to look at the bright side of life, sometimes to appreciate the good, you have to really take in the bad. Hi, folks, it's Falcon,
and today on Gameranx, 10 of the worst moments
in video game history. Starting off at number 10,
the scalpenning, also known as the Next Gen Console's
massive launch shortages. So the PlayStation 5 and the
Xbox Series launched in 2020, and we all know what was going on then. It was a little pandemic
or something like that, and the global supply chain
pretty much got messed up. About a year later, a lot
of us were kind of thinking, "Eh, you know, it's about
to get better, right?" And then it started coming out that, like, major electronics component
suppliers told Bloomberg, "Yeah, no, we're not gonna
catch up anytime soon. It's gonna be tight 'til September, 2022." And a lot of their
customers, meaning, you know, console makers, weren't even
going to be served until 2023. So that told everybody, yeah, this is gonna be a long-term problem. And all the while, scalpers were laughing all the way to the bank. Like, there was a pandemic
going on with a disease, but there was an epidemic
going on with scalpers. They just swooped in and
bought up all the consoles and left a lot of gamers not
playing PS5 and Xbox Series, but instead empty-handed,
sobbing in the corner. Like, you can understand
why consoles sell out quick, but these folks would set
up these bots to buy up every single console they
could as fast as possible, and they didn't even want the
damn things for themselves. Just hoarding it like a dragon with gold, waiting for some kind of a
sacrifice or something from us. I mean, higher-end customers,
who were willing to pay, like, $1,500, even more
sometimes for a PS5. Most of us were just turned
into console-starved maniacs, waiting in suspended
animation for the time when they finally have
these damn things again. It got better. I was at the store the other day, I saw, like, a ton of PS5s just on the shelf, and I got, like, whatever
the opposite of nostalgia is. And at number nine, the
terrible 2013 Xbox One reveal, which was kind of supposed
to be this big triumph, with Microsoft winning this
generation of the console wars before they even began. Instead, it kind of was a disaster, like, with even the lead up
to it being kind of a parade of negative press for Microsoft. It was their chance to show
a lot of it wasn't true, or at least kind of massage it to justify the extreme measures of, like, forced connectivity,
stuff that was rumored, and you know, kind of
turned out to be true. Probably the thing that
pissed off people the most was if you were gonna
buy a game on a disc, you weren't able to, like,
take it into GameStop and sell it, which was
obviously much bigger then than it is now, but that thing
was basically bound to you, which was unheard of. So the company failed
spectacularly with this thing. Like, most of the key
announcements just fell flat. Like, the TV integration was all right if you're in the United
States, but most people aren't. Mandatory connect was
also, like, disturbing, like the cameras listening out for you, even when it's quote, unquote "off," which it never actually was. And Microsoft tried to say, "Ah, there's strong privacy
protections," but you know, it was an always-on camera
inside your living room. I just remember all the HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey comparisons, alongside the Big
Brother, 1984 comparison, like, there was not a lot
of positivity towards that. There was also the loss
of backwards connectivity, which that stung a lot. So instead of winning the
console wars before they began, Microsoft found itself on the back foot. They came out early and laid
down all their core features and they were just widely unpopular, not just with, like, vocal
video game forum regulars but people who typically were
evangelists for Microsoft. It was such a disaster for Microsoft that they actually considered
abandoning the Xbox brand, and that came right out
of Phil Spencer's mouth, like that's bad. At number eight is the death
of the Adobe Flash Player. Like, I know not everybody here is my age and remembers the golden
age of Flash games, where there's tons of
free interactive content you could just access all the time because Adobe Flash Player was something that anybody could make a game in, and man, oh man, are there some good ones. I mean, not just games,
there was cartoons and stuff, like Homestar Runner. That's pretty much
inaccessible for quite a while, but worse, a lot of games are just gone. It killed access to thousands
of Flash games online, and so many of them were never
remade in another platform, because, frankly, that's
the way that these people knew how to make games. We had Dynamic HTML and HTML5
kind of take over the space that Adobe Flash existed in, and I'm not gonna defend
Adobe as a company, but Apple was probably
who really led the charge to destroying this. They criticized the closed
nature of the Flash platform, and claimed that Dynamic HTML
and HTML5 were the future. They were open and way
better, and you know, funny thing about that, there is absolutely nothing like that now. Like, when all of these
independent, random people could just make games and upload them, and it was like a thing, it
was a movement in its own way. While the protocol might
not have been open, that sure seemed way more open than whatever the hell we have now. Like, fortunately, there are
Flash emulators out there and the internet archive has
worked to preserve this stuff, but still, there was a time
where this was the internet. Like, there was this crazy
movement of odd, strange things, fun games like QWOP and Hot
Wheels, and a lot of other just, like, really interesting original stuff, and it's just kind of dead now. I don't really think a
substitute's happened. At number seven, let's talk about the 2014 cyber attacks at Christmas. Ah, Christmas morning, the sound
of wrapping paper rustling, children laughing, and millions
of gamers cursing loudly at their television screens after plugging in their new game consoles. You see all these gamers
curled up on the couch, ready to sink their
teeth into the new game they were waiting for,
particularly the multi-player ones, but let's say somebody
wanted to use the PSN or Xbox Live Game Store
and download something, or there's a day one patch or whatever, there's a lot of stuff
that involves the internet in video games, the last
couple of generations. For millions of gamers in 2014, you just got an error message
and couldn't do anything. So a group called Lizard Squad, which, I mean, is a funny name, I gotta at least give them that, didn't like them a whole lot though 'cause it was a DDoS, distributed
denial-of-service attack, they launched on Christmas
Eve on Xbox Live and PSN, just rendering the services
completely unusable. And went on for a second day too. Like gamers across the globe
got bricks for Christmas, at least, again for a couple days. What's interesting is there
was a rival hacking group called the Finest Squad, who
didn't have as good of a name. I'm not gonna lie, lizard
Squad, much better name. The Finest couldn't beat the Lizards, and the Lizards claimed
responsibility for this huge, annoying attack that took several days to fully recover from. And although it seems like
a distant memory, honestly, I think I still feel as mad about it now. Like, whatever problems hackers have with these large companies,
I'm likely to agree with, so why are you punishing me, the person who wants to play a game? At number six, the video game industry's thankfully brief love affair with NFTs. Ah, NFTs, non-fungible tokens. Tokens that you cannot fung. It really seemed like the gaming industry was going to fall into an even deeper pit of mini-payments and microtransactions, but thankfully, this did
fail pretty spectacularly. Perhaps even as spectacularly
as the Xbox One reveal. So NFTs are about as
popular as an annoying dude wearing socks with sandals,
making a pineapple pizza and forcing you to eat it. Yeah, people have different
tastes and all that, but man, people get mad as hell when you say any of that crap. Same goes for NFTs. Like, we're talking about an industry where microtransactions, DLC, expansions, I mean, I'm not gonna say
that every single example of those things is bad, but over monetization is something that we've complained about
for well over a decade. So Square Enix and Ubisoft,
among others, decided, "Hey, how can we figure
out how to make that worse? Oh, I know, by making
supposedly unique items that you could, in theory, have anywhere in any digital world, because you own it." Literally zero of those things worked out, 'cause in order to have
an item that you bought in one game in another game, there has to be an asset
for it in the other game, so the idea of them simply
being unique, that's a big no. Then you would have to have
different publishers agree with each other that
purchases from one game would carry over, it's
really stupid, actually. Anybody who's familiar with business, not just from the
perspective of a consumer, but also from an implementation
perspective, it's dumb, but all these executives saw dollar signs, tried it out, and got
stomped on by everyone else. Thankfully. I mean, it
could have gone way worse. They could have succeeded and they didn't. For a minute, it really looked like they were gonna force all
this crap on us, though. At number five, the
great Nintendo delisting. So back in March, a ton of Nintendo gamers were frantically clicking the buy button, sweating profusely, desperate
to buy Nintendo Classics before they're gone forever because Nintendo shut down
the Wii U and 3DS eShops. So yeah, around 2,000
digital-only games went dark on March 27th. You had a Wii U and wanted to play any of their digital-only games? - No. - [Falcon] Thems is
gone. Same goes for 3DS. If you had any inkling to purchase a game using the eShop on either
of those platforms, yeah, that's a no, no more, it's done. That also meant Virtual
Console was just gone. So now the only retro games you can play on a Nintendo platform
are through Switch Online, and that's cool and all, but that distribution
model's completely different than the Virtual Console
and a ton of games that were only available through there are just gone as well. This is gonna be an ongoing problem too because a lot of these titles
may not appear somewhere. I think that this sucked so badly, just given there's no alternative for so much of this
content through Switch. Like, are they going to preserve
this video game history? We'll see. And at number four, now we're really getting
into some of the worst ones. Horse armor, the canary in the coal mine. Now, there's kind of a
misconception with people when they look back that this
is kind of like a harbinger, the first microtransaction,
but it actually wasn't. It was certainly the
biggest and most noticeable. In 2006, Bethesda offered Oblivion players a cosmetic upgrade for
their in-game horses, armor for just $2.50. Now, this sparked a ton of outrage. They saw it as a blatant attempt to profit off of what was literally nothing. Now, at the time, the
word microtransaction wasn't really widely adopted, and most gamers referred to it as bad DLC. Despite the fact it pissed
what seemed like everybody off, it was actually a pretty
big success in sales and proved the business model of profiting off of small cosmetic
purchases in big-budget games that already cost $60. This is pretty much
single-handedly credited for the widespread adoption
of microtransactions, particularly the dumb ones,
and its legacy lives on in the predatory monetization tactics used by game publishers today, which we love to refer to as horseshit. At number three, the 1993
United States Senate hearing on violent video games. So in 1993, the United States Committees on Governmental Affairs and the Judiciary held congressional hearings with spokespeople from
companies like Nintendo, Sega, Acclaim, Activision, et cetera, because of a moral panic
over the perceived impacts of violence in video games. - Oh, won't somebody please
think of the children? - [Falcon] People like
Joseph Lieberman, Herb Kohl, Hillary Clinton, were all highly critical of the quote, unquote,
"realistic depiction of violence in video games." Keeping in mind, this was in 1993. If you look back at Mortal Kombat, the crap that caused this,
to call that realistic, oh my God. Now, I think this whole thing's stupid. Research has shown there is no causal link between violent video games
and real world violence. And there's been a lot of research done, not just by people defending video games, but by people attacking video games. No one's found crap. That said, I don't
entirely hate the result, having a rating system for video games, even though, yes, the
SRB is certainly flawed, but no more will children
be corrupted by such games as Night Trap, which holy crap, did anybody even want to play Night Trap, an FMV game on the Sega CD? I mean it's, good that children
can't just walk into a store and buy something that's
not made for them, but man, I don't remember this fondly. At number two is the 2011 PSN hack. Way back in the spring of 2011, millions of gamers around the world found themselves cut off from
their favorite online service. Certainly it's just down
though, one might think, right? So all this happened because
of an external intrusion on PlayStation Network and Curiosity, which we're not even gonna
get into what that is, but personal details from
about 77 million accounts were compromised. So on the first day of
the outage, Sony said, "It might take up to two days for us to restore the services," and then they confessed the next day that they'd been hacked. They were pretty quiet so
people started speculating, and a few days later Sony
finally decided to say, "Hey, the personal details of
millions of people's stuff, it's out there," so usernames, email addresses,
birth dates, home addresses, PSN passwords, purchase
histories, security questions, and also, Sony didn't
rule out the possibility that credit card data had been stolen. It was a wake up call for
gamers and companies alike, reminding everybody that
it's super important to have good online security, and it took 23 days to get
everything going again. It did not inspire
confidence or trust in Sony, a dark brand that they dealt
with for quite a while. And finally, the video game crash of 1983. Essentially, just a large scale recession in the video game industry
where the market was saturated with crappy games and a ton of consoles that consumers really didn't understand or know anything about because
they were all so similar, yet so different. You couldn't play games
on different consoles, and the games kind of sucked anyways. Literally, the industry had
a drop in revenue of 97%. Essentially, it was a video
game bubble that popped because everyone and their mother was putting out crap
consoles and crap games, and it pretty much squeezed
out or made it difficult to find anything that was good, so people were just like, "Eh,
the hell with video games." And then the NES happened. It was fantastic. It
acknowledged all of the problems. Nintendo implemented the
Nintendo Licensing System, the Nintendo Seal of Quality, which actually miraculously
somehow worked. And games were all of, at
least, a baseline standard and people loved it. It was a terrible thing that, like, when you see 97% of the revenues
in an industry disappear, you usually expect that
industry to be over, and thankfully it wasn't, because, I mean, video games are what they are today. Awesome, despite all their flaws. There are a lot of flaws. But as I said at the very beginning, you have to see the bad to
really appreciate the good. That's all for today. Leave us a comment, let
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