4 hours of some of the worst video games ever made (MEGA COMPILATION)

hey kids I know I said what happened comps won't be a regular thing and they're not the last one was seven months ago but I realized that a small break right now would be good as I did put out five what happens back to back in October but also so I can take some time off to support my family during a hard time I hope you all understand bearing any unforeseen circumstances though there should be an episode of something on December 10th but I'm not sure what that'll be yet so for now enjoy this Mega Montage of the worst games I've ever covered on what happened and when I say the worst I mean it not divisive things like Street Fighter 5 or most Sonic games I mean that smelly bottom of the bottom of the barrel stuff so pinch your nose and grit your teeth and get ready to enjoy citation needed over four hours of the dregs of the video game industry foreign [Music] welcome to another magical mystical and dysfunctional episode of what happened the show where ah screw it with the pleasantries we have to talk about Zelda CDI now great I'll grab my stuff this whole story is a ghastly nightmare that would make even the most Insidious sleep paralysis demons blush with envy and for a variety of reasons we got shoestring budgets short turnaround times shoddy Hardware limited experience in the development of video games and of course Russia but before we get into the nitty and or gritty on how Nintendo frivolously loaned out one of their most treasured franchises which resulted in it being featured on this show we have to quickly discuss the dusty decaying husk that is the CDI system a piece of Hardware that I wish I could just stop acknowledging right now unlike say the jaguar or the game com which are charmingly bad well with their interesting ports and bizarre exclusive the CDI is just very bad it's a pitiful collection of circuit boards barely resembling anything that could possibly hope to entertain the human mind whether that be the most Discerning adult or children three to six how about a nice relaxing afternoon of murder and betrayal so as much as I'm against it the CDI will be referenced here approximately okay let's just do this Nintendo was entertaining several companies to help design and manufacture a CD based add-on for the mighty Super Nintendo with Sony and Philips as the Front Runners Nintendo then thought better of the whole idea at the last second when they saw the reception of the Sega CD and decided they would reclaim their moniker as the pull-out King ask any of my exes I'm parking I don't get anyone pregnant now these plans had been far along with Sony but decidedly less so with Phillips and by now I think we all know how things turned out with the former the initial deal with Phillips also fell apart thank God but they didn't come away empty-handed since Phillips were also making their own video game console at the same time oh no that's uh that's a strong word for it uh let me take that back uh since they were making their own fancy VCR that Nintendo didn't see as a threat so they decided to toss Phillips a bone or two a good portion of the information contained from here on out comes from an interview via retro Gamer Magazine with one Dale De Sharon who had led several projects on the CDI in its earlier days and was chiefly the man responsible for the deformed curios we are about to dissect which of course were Zelda the one of Gameloft on and Link the faces of evil according to Mr desharone Phillips didn't acquire the Zelda or Mario licenses from Nintendo but rather Nintendo let them choose up to five different franchises of whatever the hell they wanted to work on an unprecedented amount of free reign the CDI was not primarily designed as a games console per se but rather an educational or interactive media player which feels so gross just saying it with that in mind it means that even if the team assigned to this pointless Endeavor had tons of experience money and time the end result was probably always destined to appear on what happened di Sharon minced few words when speaking about the prowess or lack thereof of the glorified fancy VCR the CDI was dreadfully slow and severely limited if you look at the scrolling you'll see it only scroll was about 2.5 screens horizontally this was dictated by the video memory available it was just obviously not a game system and Phillips was actually very clear in telling us that they didn't believe the market for CDI was games so that's not good despite this Philips interactive media the game publishing arm of Phillips contacted Dale De Chiron and his new company animation magic to see if they wanted in on this momentous Milestone moment Dale and his team then proposed that they make an engine that could run multiple games thus getting more bang for their Buck which was a great idea as they would definitely need to get those bang bucks because most of the people at Philips weren't game people so we pitched ideas for two titles one star in link and one was Zelda the development budgets were not high they're around 600 000 dollars per game [Applause] coupled with that Philip had mandated that all titles had to make use of every single feature the fancy VCR had which were one high resolution Graphics which maxed out at a luxurious 600 by 400 to CD quality music citation needed and three video playback capabilities that last one though that was an absolute must the problem is that that combined 1.2 million to make two titles was a paltry sum even back then I mean by comparison the room had cost 6 million dollars to film so all of that money was going to be stretched thin to pay the entire team to help them you know live for the next 12 months plus so they had no money to pay animators that they didn't even have yes at the time no one at animation magic could animate at least on budget so Mr desharon would need to find creative but much more importantly Frugal Solutions so who did he turn to a mutual friend put me in touch with Igor rasboth the Berlin Wall was coming down and Igor wanted to return to Saint Petersburg to build a studio there that would provide a service to U.S companies I had seen numerous animated films coming out of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union so I thought well we could probably do animation over there so Igor found about six people who had experience with 2D animation and they all had a varying levels of skill why whatever do you mean [Music] now while the cut scenes of one of gamelon and faces of evil are certainly ripe for finger-pointing and eye gouging the rest of the team at animation magic struggled to create a competent side scroller on the CDI especially given their past experience since most of the fancy VCRs library was comprised of things like encyclopedias point-and-clicks and uh other the graphical artists working on both one of gamelon and faces of evil were not accustomed to the traditional methods of laying out levels in the early 90s instead of using a grid-based system and kind of mapping out the levels in a long string which was conducive to precisely placing objects pits and enemies they just made digital paintings this was where the team's experience lied making colorful artwork that while nice to look at was way more form than function although this had the nice added benefit of fitting into the Mandate that the graphics had to retain that crispy high resolution so the artist painted and the artwork was scanned in and that's your level of course building a game like this was not the best way to develop a side scroller where you needed to you know accurately hit things and be aware of level boundaries and such which is why you got [ __ ] like this oh come on you got to be kidding me music was also another problem that was both not well thought out and hampered by the CDI while the compositions are certainly Lively [Music] they are of course a far cry from literally every Zelda OST you can name if you have Zelda in your title you have to bring your A game when it comes to music as the franchise contains Melodies that are good enough to be played by a symphony orchestra which they are regardless the music was recorded with little idea of how it would be implemented into the game the composers simply recorded for however long they felt they needed now because of the slow CD drive that the CDI employed and how short most sub levels were by Design each stage would end far faster than the music which would then result in the song still playing and then restarting every time a new area was loaded [Music] foreign I mean I'm just saying maybe don't make an action game for an electronic box whose killer app was the flowers of Robert maplethorpe Maple Thorpe's flowers are equally sensual audio issues were not limited to just the music they also needed a lot of time in which to do so like most typical hand-drawn animation so because of the long lead time these cutscenes would need combined with poor communication and planning voice actors delivered their lines with certain accents and inflections at the time of recording with little clue as to what their characters actually looked or would behave like because they hadn't even been designed yet so that's why several EG all of the horrific mockeries of humanity you meet in both games have voices that don't quite match their appearance ought to do it works pretty good as for the quality of said voiceovers well voice speech and video games was barely a thing in 1993 and since their budget was tighter than Sheik's spandex we auditioned local American Federation of television and radio artists Union actors and then shows the voices from those auditions there's about 10 minutes of Animation in each title so there is a fair amount of audio to edit imagine just sitting blurry-eyed at a computer sweat just pouring from every orifice and having to edit [ __ ] like this I may be hideous but after a year of being frozen back to join me [Applause] in terms of how wand of gamalana and faces of evil play which is almost identically a lot of the design came down to animation magic being given carte blanche on almost everything but what about those rumors that Nintendo had absolutely no involvement when it came to the design objectionally the most important part well Mr desharon cleared that up yeah they didn't we came up with a design for Phillips there was quite a bit of creative freedom so Phillips had very little input for Nintendo we ran the design document and character sketches past them for approval they were mostly interested in the look of the link in Zelda characters but not much else given the problems with the side view perspective the game utilized obviously taken after the adventure of Link it's a bit curious as to why animation magic didn't opt for a top-down perspective considering the original 1986 Zelda and linked to the Past released just two years earlier employed to great effect well they didn't really have a choice I think Phillips would have never have approved that believing it looked old and wasn't making use of this CDI capabilities they would have just looked at it visually as opposed to gameplay that was what they were most concerned with does the CDI game look visually different from other systems games and are we making use of the graphics the possibility that top down might have been more fun wouldn't have affected them that just might be the most unsurprising surprising thing I've ever heard of because it's pretty clear that Phillips didn't really care about what was getting made hell they had permission to use franchises whose roster of level 1 enemies would have far more fans than their entire console ever would so ultimately they didn't really value the deal that they had fallen ass backwards into getting really recognizable characters on a non-inten and a system was something you'd almost never see again now let's just lowball some unexperienced team and a bunch of Russian Animaniacs into farting these things out you know that's good enough thus with all these constraints and issues to Sharon and his team had a rough time making both games as you've probably suspected by now it was a rough time making those games I would be going back and forth working with the programmers working to build the engine back to the animators going through the script and teaching them the process of how to get the animation done also I had hired more us-based artists to make the game artwork itself we're working on both titles simultaneously on the script on the design and the artwork everything at the same time we had maybe just a little over a year to produce them so it was pretty tight after all the trials and tribulations both titles released on October 10th 1993 and no someone really cared see the CDI failed to make any sort of dense um anywhere and fortunately for Nintendo both games came and went with little notice from the general gaming populace that is until almost 20 years later when an invention called the internet show new life on these bastard children spawned from a deal that I'm getting increasingly suspicious was brokered while Nintendo executive was drunk the entire accursed CDI X Nintendo lineup was being dredged up again with many people getting a glimpse of the horrific forms for the very first time this also includes Zelda's Adventure the third title that animation magic had nothing to do with this resulted in countless people lambasting every game I'll also Lane a nice stinky Foundation to many a YouTube poop video then you can help baby in the morning when asked by retro gamer for a reaction to all of these um opinions on both zeldas Mr der Sharon Shrugged we had been aware of criticism following the release of the games I can understand that people were disappointed I guess they made comments about the animation but also the gameplay and design given the time we had I thought we did a good job you know Nintendo makes fantastic games which are all well tuned in terms of gameplay and they have amazing game designers I would imagine that anything was going to fall short of that at the same time Phillips wanted more production values in terms of Music visuals and animation that's what they were pushing us to do you put effort into that and it doesn't go elsewhere it could have been better Phillips of course is still in business today but has since greatly distanced themselves from anything a pro coaching interactive entertainment since the CDI shocking I know Dale De Chiron no longer works in the industry today but his company animation magic actually survived for almost another decade that is until the befell Blizzard Entertainment teaming up for Warcraft Adventures lord of the Clans until that was mysteriously canceled which would be the actual death blow to the company now furiously searching for that silver lining in and around the Zelda CDI games launch period Nintendo was also farming out Mario in various unfun edutainment games which were similarly poorly received it's easy to see that because of these massive misfires the Nintendo took the experience to heart and for several years clutched these franchises close to their chest becoming incredibly choosy about who gets to work on what this then led to Capcom giving us some incredible Zelda titles as well as several American Studios delivering some all-time classics of their own hey so in a roundabout way you did it link you saved the day you link are the hero of corridai I guess that's worth a kiss huh huh I won thanks to c24u for nominating these horrible fronts to interactive media if you'd like to nominate the game movie or Etc of your choosing roll on over to the grassy fields of the flophouse VIP patreon to make that into a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] foreign once again to another extra special or should I say terrestrial episode of what happened the show that yep I'm doing E.T [Music] one of the most well-known stories slash myths slash Legends of the video game industry now I'm aware this Monumental misfire has been covered backwards and forwards for decades hell some huge nerdasaurus Rex even made a whole damn movie about it but it's now finally time to give this wrinkly weirdo the what happened treatment it's 1982 and Atari is at the literal height of their video game dominance owning some 80 of the market due to the success of their 2600 model and almost none due to their 5200 they acquired the license for et the Extraterrestrial in August of the same year as the movie proved to be another Spielberg Blockbuster when it opened earlier that summer Atari reportedly paid an almost unheard of sum of 20 to 25 million dollars for the rights to make a game adaptation so it only made sense that they would assign one of their star programmers Howard Scott warshaw for the job he was responsible for previous Platinum selling hits like yara's revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Steven Spielberg himself had specifically requested his Services as he had been impressed with the latter now you can say a lot about the esoteric nature of the Atari version of Raiders but it did the two things Atari valued most when adapting other media have at least some recognizable things from the film in this case Indy's hat and a snake and be completed on time when Atari upper management called warshaw they laid on the pressure nice and thick by saying that this was going to be the most important game they'll ever make unfortunately no one realized just how big of a hit E.T was going to be so many licensees were late to the party to capitalize on its success and Atari was very much one of them therefore they let warshaw in on the caveat the game had to be finished and ready to go in five weeks to allow for cart manufacturing times as well as give the marketing campaign a head start leading into Christmas for Atari the holiday shopping season was Paramount especially for a game aimed at children so this release date was Ironclad if warshaw was to accept he had to deliver now in the early 80s most games could take anywhere from 5 to 10 months to complete for example it took warshaw nine months to make Raiders of the Lost Ark and he had little over one month for et in the Netflix documentary high score Warsaw spoke about his thought process when considering the offer no one's ever done it and no one would think of doing it it's it's a stupid idea you know nobody would do it it's ridiculous so I said absolutely I can there was no hesitation and no doubt in my mind I could do this I'm not exactly sure what I was full of but whatever it was I was overflowing with it [Applause] the moment warshaw accepted this impossible task he was instructed by his bosses that he would then need to get on a plane meet with Steven Spielberg and present his design for the game he hadn't even started yet in two days warshaw knowing that the clock was already ticking designed something that could be completed in five weeks a series of screens players would navigate which could be randomized to present new challenges not dissimilar to what he did for Raiders but obviously way more basic and uh unforgiving 36 hours later he was in front of a Spielberg and had just finished explaining the concept the director was in deep thought for a moment or two before finally asking couldn't you do something more like Pac-Man flummoxed warshaw then explained his version would be true to the film it would be far more appropriate than doing a simple knockoff to which Steven said okay and signed off on the design the Act of the matter though was that warshaw was experienced enough to know that his design was the only thing that could be completed but such a rush schedule anything that needed to be meticulously handcrafted like The Mazes of Pac-Man or say Adventure were far too ambitious and time-consuming so what followed was an intense 35-day period where warshaw lived and breathed E.T virtually nothing else existed in my life other than the game I worked all the time I almost killed myself in my car because I was coding in my head instead of watching what I was doing I could be eating with people and in my head I'm still coding I even had a development system moved into my home so that wherever I am I'm never more than a minute from being able to get to a keyboard to start writing the code I need to put in programmers working from home for Atari was almost unheard of in the early 80s as the company was hesitant to allow workstations out of their sight less programmers go into business for themselves which is something we'll get to a bit later with the design clear and his deadline set it then took warshaw's dedication confidence or hubris call it what you want to Simply get the job done working almost every day non-stop until September 1st his labors were not done however as he still need to present the finished game to Spielberg to get the final seal of approval warshaw explained the game and its objective once more and nervously watched over the director's shoulder as he played most likely falling into pits countless times after a while he turned to warshaw an unreadable expression on his face and said I love it yeah you might think Steven would have been a bit picky or unsure of what had just been presented to him but for whatever reason he gave the all clear of course I'm biased I made the movie I mean this is the guy who said no one will ever cry over a seen in a video game so take his opinion with a truck full of salt with everything set to go the marketing machine started gearing up E.T was coming kid so hold on to your butts upon its December release day at least initially it made a huge Splash topping the sales charts at number three just behind the coleco version of Donkey Kong and Activision's Pitfall it's been estimated that et's launch sales numbers easily soared past 1 million copies which in most circumstances would be a blockbuster success but critical reception was not so favorable reviews at the time held nothing back calling it crude and frustrating and well below the expectations most people had for a game based on such a loved and cherished motion picture now let's not mince words if ET seemed like a confusing mess that felt really rushed well that's because it was and warshaw admitted outside of the concessions he had to make in order to get it done in time that the game had issues that were more aggravating than he had originally intended specifically the feeling of disorientation when transitioning to a new screen or area which could even occur randomly due to bugs when you are designing and coding you need to periodically sit back and play What You've Done thus far to try and experience it through fresh eyes but with only five weeks it was something he simply couldn't afford to do with that said there are plenty of games of the time that were just as confusing or even worse than E.T but because this was based on a very popular movie with Atari pushing it in everyone's face leading up to Christmas 82 it wound up disappointing pretty much everyone who played it the hype was just that real if the game had simply been called I don't know potato face and his glowing finger it wouldn't have received nearly the ire it wound up getting regardless the real villain of this tale is not so much the game but atari's overconfidence in it they had ordered and manufactured around 4 million copies in total and as the weeks went on the game dropped out of the top 10 very quickly just as quickly as carts were being returned for refunds Across the Nation while the game did continue to sell its drop-off was sudden and thus Atari was stuck with a mountain of unsold games [Applause] Midway through 1983 the gaming industry itself quickly tumbled into a downward spiral with E.T being used as a sort of scapegoat now how it's true that it probably didn't help the game's release just happened to coincide with a bunch of other far more potent factors I mentioned Activision earlier and I will mention them again the company was formed by a number of ex-atari programmers who felt mistreated and undervalued whereupon they all quit and started their own Atari with Blackjack and hooks shut the hell up their next step was copying atari's own cartridge format so they could release their own games thus becoming the first third-party developer Atari failed to block this process in court as a judge ruled that as long as a different game or product was in the cartridge shell Atari could not block its sail with the legal floodgates open the market was soaked in a deluge of Games published by no name companies You couldn't possibly name thus thousands of ET quality titles were stuffed into store shells disillusioning many of video game fan the market went from a 3.2 billion dollar industry in 1983 to a mere 100 million by 1985 which meant no company was doing well enough to keep their doors open the misses kept on coming however as Atari had been involved in a deal to produce an American version of a little Japanese console called the famicom as Nintendo themselves weren't sure how to adapt the machine for the West at the last possible minute Atari backed out of the deal as it had had enough of low performing machines and remodels in recent years so they felt it wasn't worth investing in another one leaving Nintendo to figure it out on their own and uh yeah figure it out they did by the end of the 80s Nintendo owned 90 percent of the Market becoming bigger than Atari ever was and thus we arrive at the last lingering Fringe of this story what did Atari do with the millions of unsold ET cartridges well they buried them in a New Mexico landfill thanks again to William down at the flophouse VIP patreon for nominating ET for this week's episode and if you know of any okay okay okay okay okay uh Norman the gaming historian would be fuming if I misreported this story for the 100th time no Atari did not dump millions of unsold copies of E.T in some type of embarrassment pit but they did get rid of a random stockpile of electronics and games from an old manufacturing plant they had in El Paso Texas when times were getting rough for the company they tightened their belts by moving their cart Productions over to Taiwan while their Texas plant would be converted to a service center that meant that they had a variety of spare are Parts games and accessories just taking up space so they decided to dump them now at the time Texas had zero regulations when it came to landfills meaning anyone could just root through the pile of old electronics at their Leisure but an Alamogordo New Mexico there were laws in place to stop such looting so Atari had the stockpile of electronics dumped there instead despite their best efforts to keep a lid on this locals still found out about this purge eventually making its way into local newspapers Atari then admitted some 35 years ago that yes they buried some unsold stock because they were moving their manufacturing plant to Asia nothing to see here folks were doing fine nothing embarrassing happening here at all and before you bring it up yes in 2014 the New Mexico landfill was excavated where they found plenty of games and accessories with only 10 percent of them being actually ET cartridges so this Mythic ancient Atari graveyard was both fact and fiction with its origin being exaggerated throughout the years Purple Monkey Dishwasher well we'll show him especially for that Purple Monkey Dishwasher remark as for Howard warshaw well he quit the video game industry soon after e.t's release and Atari went on to become even more Irrelevant in the decades to come so yes while the ET video game would have been better off you know not existing it wasn't this cursed harbinger of the video game apocalypse and wasn't even the only flop Atari was at the center of just a few months before they had nabbed the license for the film Atari upper management had rushed out a sloppy almost unplayable Port of Pac-Man which they also over manufactured to the tune of another 4 million units with the vast majority also going unsold so ET was not this unique one-time blunder but rather a tradition of nearsightedness and greed for the once dominant video game company alright for reals this time if you know of any other supposed video game destroying video games or movies let me know in the comments below over on my Twitter or phone home to the flophouse VIP patreon become a big boss nominate with you like me to cover in the future see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] hey there and welcome to another Omni eyeball searing face rubbing headache inducing episode of what happened in the show that was created to basically talk about Sonic the Hedgehog and I guess by that extension Jesus now you can't talk let alone think about the term video game disasters without having reserved a good chunk of your mind Palace specifically for the Blue Blur I mean there's Sonic 06 Secret Rings the Black Knight Sonic extreme the god the BioWare one your puny brain would get overloaded by visuals of creepy blue feet and Knuckles glitches so with that in mind we're revving to go speeding up on our little spin ball of pent-up energy to explode into the Fantastic Calamity that is Sega and big red buttons Sonic Boom rise of lyric A Story begins in the futuristic war zone known as 2009 two industry veterans teamed up to found big red button an up-and-coming new studio that did precisely neither of those things nothing was going up and certainly no one was never mind those two veterans were Bob Raphael and Jeff Lander who hailed from both naughty dog and Luxo flux respectively Bob had been with the nasty dogs for 13 years having worked as a director of art on the first four Crash Bandicoot Jack and Daxter titles as well as the first Uncharted Jeff on the other hand was an experienced programmer on the true crime series specifically on both the West and East Coast varieties East Coast bees go but more importantly than all that Mr Lander was instrumental in blessing planet Earth with the video game adaptation of Shrek 2. with these two seasoned hands you'd think the contracts would just be flying across their desks fast and hard but that wasn't the case for big red button maybe because it wasn't the best time to start up a new company as lots of developers were actually being shut down at the time but they went through a variety of pitches and game prototypes that never really enticed any Publishers however one company that was always looking for cheap solutions to making video games of course was Sega who are interested in rebooting Sonic with a more Western Focus sales of the then current crop of Sonic titles you know these winners weren't exactly smash heads in fact they showed a decline in profits overall and Sonic's reputation wasn't exactly soaring because of it Sonic was never good Sega felt that the entire IP needed an overhaul and thought that with Bob Rafael's experience at establishing fresh IPs over at misbehaving puppy he would be the one to give Sonic a brand new spin see it says it says spin right in the script here that was that was unintentional the working code name for this take on the franchise was Project Apollo an attempt to knock people in that the big Sonic reboot was in the works with a western developer because aside from some spin-offs and diversions was something that had never been attempted before if you recall this was going to be phase one of sega's big dumb plan to split the universe in Twain from then on out Sonic Boom would be the North American series while Sonic team would continue their um usual efforts what the heck is going on the Sonic franchise would then pass off between both brands with different Studios at the helm which was again Sega trying to crib note some other far more successful Publishers so big red buns First Step was delving deeper into the lore than ever before explaining Sonic's Origins as well as eggman's to really kick off this whole new universe on the right foot sega's official edict was to radically change parts of the Sonic formula which were moving to the right I guess with things like teamwork and Co-op along with placing a much greater focus on explore operation and skill based platforming the game would be roughly divided between 80 exploration versus 20 speed with a lot of those being vehicle based big red button would spend more than a year fleshing out the world storyline and gameplay systems before eventually presenting their ideas to Sega of Japan for approval this would be in the form of a vertical slice a playable but brief section of a level that showed off all the main gameplay mechanics once approved they then start building the rest of the game off of that blueprint along with any feedback and changes from Sega which wouldn't you know it would be a metric [ __ ] ton this of course would include stuff that contradicted the other stuff that Sega wanted in the first place that's so Sega but we'll get to that stinky bridge when we cross it now another important thing that was always changing was what this Sonic game was going to be called as two names in particular were being tossed around one being Sonic origin since the game was exploring that and the second was Sonic Synergy which made sense due to all the co-op Shenanigans in fact Co-op wasn't just the throwaway mode or gimmick but rather became one of the game's core features as big red button was pushing for four player functionality and an online component to boot it all sounded pretty ambitious but fortunately Sega had asked big red bun to Target Next Generation systems which obviously meant the PC PS4 and Xbox One in terms of engines Sonic would use the one that while unconventional could boast pretty visuals well suited for the Lush New World big red button was designing cry engine 3 while not as common or familiar to most game studios was still considered an impressive bit of tech at the time during this phase of development things were going smoothly but has any stalwart what happened fans should know was Sega about you should never be too comfortable lesta that of gooey [ __ ] be Unleashed upon your naive unsuspecting head once Sega and Sonic Team then headed up by newly promoted Takeshi Azuka shown the vertical slice they started to ask for thousands of changes they felt what big red bun presented was far to remove from what the franchise stood for You know despite that uh being the whole point of the project the game was too slow they were no longer sure about those character designs and they wanted more speed sections they also asked for the ability to swim underwater to be removed so that Sonic and friends would instantly die as soon as they touched the deadly substance known as H2O you know like in the old Sonic games I mean you know like in the old Sonic 3D games there are even some changes that were a bit weird like initially the character of Cliff this uh thing right here started off as an inventor providing gadgets and the like to Sonic and Co like a lot of the other NPCs in the world Sega requested some alterations and for Cliff it was to change his occupation as an inventor why well this was due to an ironclad rule in the Sonic Bible which stated that only tails and Eggman can be inventors which I assure you I'm not making up finally there was the real kicker the storyline you know what most of the game revolved around that had to be changed too because apparently Sonic Team wanted to try their hand at the Hedgehog's Origins down the line so they were uncomfortable with letting a western developer tackle it first despite this being the whole separate Universe thing okay so anyway the Epic tale involving Sonic and his initial friendship and eventual falling out with Eggman all of it had to be redone ever wonder why in the finished version of Sonic Boom there's statues depicting ancient echidnas and hedgehogs and [ __ ] but nobody really notices or says anything about it that's why all of that world building went to waste because despite some of the levels and scenery hinting at a grander tale it was all scrapped for a thrilling narrative about Sonic beating being a villain yo bro them some fresh ideas so with the origin story all thrown out what were they gonna replace it with well fortunately Sega had just the thing oh no they had struck another completely deal with a French Animation Studio to produce a brand new computer animated cartoon which will be done sonic boom boom so be aiming Eastern Market Sega failed to keep brand continuity Sonic Synergy would need to adopt this new world's aesthetic and tone and obviously the name as well now while all of this was surely an RKO from out of nowhere to pull on big red button it fortunately wasn't a deal breaker as changing storyline and character art wouldn't be really devastating to the project that's because what seg was about to announce next would definitely be devastating to the project game companies always ruin their beloved franchises not long after the the game shifted to Sonic Boom Sega informed big red button that it was now going to be a Wii U exclusive and no you can't stop this you know the Wii U one of Nintendo's biggest failures Sega decided to enter an exclusivity deal with them delivering three new Sonic games including boom onto a console that didn't support cryengine 3. yeah that makes sense big red button as you can imagine we're in panic mode what's more this deal with Nintendo had a timeline the game needed to be out in 2014 which left the studio slightly less than a year to make all this work and it really didn't work okay well obviously it did in the end kinda the game is playable but what did it cost so obviously to make all of this happen big red button need to start scaling everything back and removing features and while I wasn't able to cut everyone I wanted to I I have cut a lot of you four player co-op was removed the same goes for any online features more elaborate team up attacks were also taken out and whole sections of additional story and dialogue were hastily sliced from The Narrative some of those included instances of Sonic talking to Lyric or vice versa where they'd insinuate they were familiar with each other despite them not being actually familiar with each other who are you yeah Amy congratulates a completely different cut character during an action stage despite the fact that Knuckles is the only other guy on screen poor Knuckles there was a penultimate plane level where Tails gave Chase to Lyric there was also going to be some ciao collecting functionality there is even going to be game pad gimmicks where you'd use the touchscreen to control platforms and hoodles of other stuff some of that stuff was entire cut sections of the world itself as they initially only existed to support four player sections like water skiing as seen in this trailer oh right that's the trailer yeah this is a whole other mess of bubbling Hedgehog poop remember this remember how despite it looking different than most Sonic games still look pretty cool nice and shiny lots of animations and effects and tons of four player action well as long as Sega added this vague disclaimer they could technically show you anything they wanted even if it was running on a high-end piecing workstations which you know it was none of this was Wii U footage as it couldn't be because this trailer was cut days maybe weeks after Sega told big red bun to start toiling in the barren and lonely Wii U Minds so all this lies some lies some lies there oh that's a big lie right there and almost makes you think that during the colonial Marines debacle that Sega learned a few magic tricks from one Randy Pitchford King of the charlatans thus entered a soul crushing almost year-long marathon of crunch to get all of this running on this it was a tall order as every single thing big red button had designed animated and optimized was all intended for machines that greatly overpowered the Wii U now not only did porting down to it prove to be a massive pain in the ass due to all the cut content it was a logistical problem in the sense that cryengine 3 didn't support the Wii U architecture at all there apparently were some early attempts at getting the engine up and running for a theoretical Port of Crisis 3 but EA and crytek quickly abandoned that plan once they realized that might actually result in them you know supporting the Wii U because of this a whole lot of basic things were a whole lot of never figured out like how you need to allocate GPU power to stream onto the GamePad big red button had to somehow navigate through all of these issues and eventually contacted crytek for help they had no other test cases or finished games to Tinker with to guide them as no one had attempted what they needed to do so it's a miracle that got it to happen at all obviously to very very very mixed results but the game boots and God damn it that's something crytek eventually helped finagle Sonic Boom to run on a special version of the engine that no other game has used since now aside from all that a typical thing that most developers try to plan for is that when they're deep into production on a game to start prototyping or designing a follow-up with a smaller team like a sequel or DLC just something this is so that when the priority game is wrapping up they can retain most of their staff and immediately start building the next thing when everyone's free unfortunately for big red button since the deadline was so tight and they needed all hands on deck no other follow-up projects were in the pipe thus in the final months leading to Sonic boom's release they had to let go of 50 people to cut costs leaving less than 20 working at the studio Sonic Boom released on November 11 2014 and remains one of the worst selling games in the series wait wait oh uh I no stand corrected Sega took the time to come flatter and declare that Sonic Boom was indeed the worst selling Sonic game of all time like what what type of publisher goes out of their way to give additional information that shows how badly they [ __ ] it up that's that's so Sega what's more is that the blame couldn't even be directly shifted onto the Wii U as Sonic Lost World had performed far better the previous year now while the game was certainly looking shaky and franchise fans had problems with all the designs the very idea of Sonic Boom itself was muddled and confusing especially to Casual fans get it not at all was this based on the cartoon or was the cartoon based on the game where does the 3DS version fit in wait is this replacing the Japanese games or not even if development had gone smoothly the handling of the split universe was just a really bad idea from its very Inception the poor sales aside the critical and fan backlash of Sonic Boom was far far worse than a slight dip in sega's profits for that quarter Bob Rafael stated in an interview with polygon in 2015 we knew that historically Sonic games have been treated very poorly by the press and we knew there was going to be some of that but I was kind of taken aback by just the kind of hate that was being poured out it was very disheartening you know you work your ass off for three years you crunch like mad you go through hell and back to try to make a ship date and I've never experienced like hate mail in the past and I'm getting people telling me I ruined their childhood alright sorry about that you know I did the best I could a former producer at San of America one Stephen Frost had a far more business-like view on Sonic Boom in Focus tests we heard all the time people were sick of speed Sonic was too fast they wanted to Slow Down Speed was shelled because we were under the impression people didn't want it speed is always a Sonic thing and we didn't focus on that look dude I don't know who you've got to participate in these Focus tests but are you sure you're not confusing them with no one regardless he continues the biggest mistake in boom was adding too many features to it it was too much to ask for any development team I was tasked with creating experience that appeals to an audience which doesn't play Sonic if I could do it again I would remove features and speed would be the main focus from the start oh okay I guess solo Sonic games I don't know how long that can last there isn't enough variety to sustain it the future of Sonic games needs to be Co-op as it worked really well in Sonic Boom community and online play that sustains it in general you need to do multiplayer and add online multiplayer aspects that will sustain and keep the franchise alive will it though so with that idiocy still wafting in the air what happened to Sonic Boom well the cartoon show produced over 100 episodes but it's still unclear what their third season will ever come out despite the show gaining popularity with its clever writing and fourth wall breaking humor let's act out my Sonic fan fiction I'll pick something family friendly [Music] sanzaru who developed shattered Crystal and Fire and Ice did far better and achieving a balance between the old and the new but then again they didn't need to Port unreal 4 onto the goddamn 3DS did they they went on to several more projects like helping out on the recent Spyro remaster as for big red button well after the critical and Commercial failure of Rise of lyric they closed their doors in May of uh never wait no the this okay this Camp no wait big red button or they're still in business today no no I could just okay whatever they seemingly have transitioned to developing for both mobile and VR devices let's see uh they worked on a John Wick game as well as their own IP The Arc Slinger which seems to have been a big success uh good on them so with that I think we can definitively say that the sonic boom experiment is indeed over and while it was a good idea on paper yeah not really wasn't even a good idea on paper that's that's stupid of me in the meantime shout your suggestions in the comments below or Light Speed Dash on over to the flophouse VIP patreon to officially vote on our next topic see you next time and thanks for watching just look at that sound like the Hedgehog guy whatever happened to him is he still a thing [Music] it's time to talk about Drake and then I didn't address okay so about every decade or so there's a piece of media that transcends itself they transcend the normal critical eye whose only job is to judge something based on its abject quality sometimes there's media that transcends reality itself Drake of the 99 dragons is one such piece of media released in November 2003 Drake went unopposed in the video game industry with not much Fireball competition I mean unless you count things like you know Grand Theft Auto 3 Prince of Persia the sands of time Beyond good and evil Simpsons Hit and Run Ratchet and Clank Going commence Silent Hill 3 Mario Kart Double Dash Final Fantasy X Duke Manhunt Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and Max Payne too but you know aside from that yeah it was open season for Drake in all seriousness maybe due to this clearly Sublime year in gaming that the sullen-faced expressionless black suited assassin never reached the heights P shouldn't have but as the old saying goes I'd rather something be a zero than a five and Drake of the 99 dragons is very much a zero therefore to this day this very cursed game is still talked about in muffled Whispers or or like soundproofed keyboards from all across the internet some 17 years later after its Infamous debut it's somewhat of a mysterious artifact within the industry to be sure but there was never a whole lot known about it or its developer idle effects for years but information has recently come to light that can hopefully answer all the questions you may have things like what it huh and why so let's start off with what we know the cold hard facts idle effects was Heavy emphasis on the was a Swedish development Studio that put out a staggering five games in two years the first being um ghast which looks like this yum let me know in the comments if you've ever played whatever this is which was Then followed up by the one bright spot in their catalog the surprisingly solid horror-based first-person shooter Nosferatu the wrath of Malachi which uh actually literally released weeks before Drake did and uh that's going to be important later now majesco is a publisher most of you should know well some of you I'm sure a select few are passionately familiar with their name if you've seen these box Arts before then you've seen majesco's logo and if you've seen this box art before you should know that they love to get involved with huge embarrassing disasters good job not much dribbling in fact Advent Rising might even be intrinsically linked to Drake in a tenuous way the scope and by and large the budget of this sci-fi flop was ever ballooning so majesco was quick to green light and release a bunch of product to hopefully fund this Rising Advent its forthcoming sequels and it's splendiferous one million dollar cash prize in the two years leading to its release majesco published some 39 titles with Drake just being one of them now before we dive in or spastically Leap Forward while waving our arms all around did you know that idle FX also had another game they developed and had released that same year making it three in total yes this was the well-known Nostalgia inducing platforming gem that has been exhaustively covered on such channels as ant dude and some call me Johnny loopholes at uh I was nervous about that yeah if you're already a small developer and you somehow still squirt out three games in one single year it's probably safe to assume at least one of them got the short end of the programming stick guess which one that was now there's some unverified reports that Drake of the 99 dragons had a development time of six months as per their contract with majeska which would explain a lot at the same time though if you think about it this doesn't really make sense at all because it's poorly designed optimized tested and everything Drake is six months still seems awfully short to put a full third person shooter together in 2003 on two different skus [Music] this is where one Andrew bado comes in a Plucky tester who worked at majesco's New Jersey office he has in the subsequent years opened up about his time working at the company which includes having to test Drake of the 99 dragons Mike for for a job for like four months straight in an interview with bad game Hall of Fame he disputes dispels and confirms the legends that have surrounded Drake for years including that Infamous six-month Dev time having spent seven years as a QA tester myself a lot of his account Rings true with my own experiences the information about the game being made in six months is false I started at majesco in June 2003 five months before the game's release and it was already in beta so I'd estimate the total Dev time to be around 18 months it seems like there might have been a language barrier however between the Swedish Idol effects Dev team and the majesco QA in New Jersey because no matter how many times we submit a bug report nothing ever got fixed this actually jives with the timeline of the game's marketing as well because in March of 2003 majesco began showing a game simply called Drake which looked about the same as the final product did if we then apply simple math that's one three six that's seven months in between when the game was first shown to Media Outlets versus when it was on store shelves now in terms of the bug vetting process only the most serious and obvious issues that the testing team ran into got any attention from idle FX as is safe to assume that the resources were stretched thin since you know they were working on three different games at the same time and all knowing that you can imagine that suggestion bugs or d-class issues basically a QA tester finding that a particular aspect of the game couldn't prove were incredibly ignored a lot of attention was directed towards suggesting Simple Solutions to improve level design and signposting and possible ways to balance the game a bit but the further along we went the fewer suggestions there were as we knew they would most likely be rejected or ignored in the end we had to focus on Drake's more glaring technical issues and abandon any hope of improving Aesthetics and balancing so it's at this time when you must be thinking why is this happening who's keeping this going why is Jake even being made well for some reason good old memorable Drake was actually being positioned to have a media empire built around him him this guy this this is a character uh built to last so this is how it really feels to me the intent was that when Drake came out and knocked the collective socks off the entire gaming industry a comic book would then be launched a toy line and possibly even a cartoon following that while it's unknown exactly where this rather insane notion came from who chose him you did it's simple to imagine that since Drake leaned heavily on Max Payne as an influence Swedish Idol FX thought they could duplicate neighboring Finnish developer remedies success which if you look at them side by side is pretty overt Andrew battle confirmed that this enthusiasm for spinning Drake off into different mediums was something that a majesco producer was pushing and pushing hard talking about how once it came out Drake would be the next big thing throughout his Misadventures working on it Andrew also came to realize that idle effects were incredibly protective and proud of their new blockbuster franchise in the making which might have no definitely contributed to their stubbornness to listen to suggestions now gameplay and Bug testing decide how could a property that has cut scenes like this nothing can stop me now ever hope to translate to Comics or cartoons well just as the programming design or animation was maligned so too was Drake's narrative and voice acting which according to Andrew battle were never really improved not much at all as far as I remember the cutscenes were there from the very start even before the levels all connected so we in QA assumed they were placeholders then came the day when we were supposed to get all final cut scenes we gathered around our leads machine waiting to see how they looked and they were all the same but of nicer compression quality it's starting to become increasingly clear that despite them working on multiple projects and they're being lots of potential merchandising money on the table idle effects were increasingly ignorant of Drake's lack of quality and general polish there seemed to be this perplexing overwhelming sense of positivity about the game's chances when it hit the market this is very much an Emperor's New Clothes Style scenario because one quick look at the credits of Drake reveals something very interesting the game was mostly the brainchild of one person oh Lord I gotta say this guy's name Stefan junk fist is listed as the game's co-director and a main designer but not only that he worked on it as an artist as well and not only even more than that was the game Soul writer yeah while there certainly was a full team that worked on the games the fun here could be considered the Tommy was so of Drake of the 99 dragons so when you're focused on creating your work of art and not slapping together some Mickey Mouse [ __ ] you might forget to implement certain basic tenets of game design one of said things is a basic checkpoint system because in Drake there is none you have one shot to complete each level within a certain time limit but fortunately most levels can be completed in only a couple of minutes but less fortunately some latter levels are a lot longer if you die for any reason and believe me there's lots of reasons you'll need to start all the way back at the beginning of said mission that might be okay for a game in the 8 or 16 bit era but remember this is 2003. there's also a variety of gameplay features and moves the player can perform in Drake that they will most likely never perform in Drake much like in certain fps's there is an overpowered state that Drake can achieve if he gets more Health than the maximum limit when he achieves this he can then perform the game's most powerful move unleash the dragon which decimates all enemies on screen as well as makes short work of most bosses however getting in any situation where you have an overflow of health is nigh impossible in Drake as there is a constant barrage a smaller atmosphire coming from all angles this is another example of idle FX not bothering with any sort of balancing whatsoever these features were implemented yes but not tuned correctly to benefit the player at regular intervals this same mistake also makes the final boss of the game a three-headed cell shaded monstrosity incredibly hard to overcome wonky hitboxes being able to almost One-Shot Drake with little warning and also be an incredibly drawn out make this entire encounter to put it lightly 100 pureed it makes you question why you even came this far in the first place a ludicrous unbalanced final boss must be one of the clearest indicators of either a rush production schedule simple ignorance or in this case a combination of both the back of the Box touts 25 exciting missions but as I'm sure most people won't know because they most likely never saw me on the first couple of levels is that Drake and his 99 dragons is incredibly brief clocking in at around the three hour mark there is also absolutely no incentive for the player to ever pick up the controller again as there's no Boss Rush multiplayer mode challenge mode cheat skins or even a hentai CG Shrine gallery to unlock once the game is over now with all this knowledge knowledge in our brains when Drake's slovenly slow-mo jumped onto store shells it received reviews on the lower end of the scale drag through the mud it was pegged as the worst game of the year and possibly of the generation nothing can stop me now shut up then game spots Alex Navarro for example claimed it was the second worst game of that year lagging just behind big rigs over the road racing which to be fair is absolutely Fair many other outlets shared similar sentiments and coupled with that glut of amazing titles released in 2003 helped highlight the literal thousands of shortcomings that Drake had this then combined with paltry sales numbers that you know are unknown to the general public unless you count VG charts as numbers which of course I don't but Jessica's big gamble certainly did not spin off into Comics toys or anything really it got a PC version the following March which is to its credit greatly improved over the Xbox original there were plans to Port the game to the PS2 but that was canceled because I I mean of course it was idle FX were either closed down or absorbed into another Swedish company shortly after their next and last release FBI hostage rescue follow me follow me follow me majesco lived on after Drake and Advent Rising surprisingly all the way until 2016 where they finally announced they had seized all video game publishing until the following year where they seemingly started pack up again they have since settled into a nice pattern refusing to re-release Double Dragon Neon on Modern systems please politely at them on Twitter about that as for Drake and his 99 dragons while in 2018 suddenly for no discernible reason it got an updated re-release on Steam that like outlined before is far more polished than the Xbox original and it's like seven dollars if you are morbidly curious Andrew battle for his part went on to games of his own being a lead on the recently released Mystic Bell a Charming platformer which was published by Way Forward a few years ago proving that at least someone walked away from those 99 dragons unscathed therefore it's only fitting that it's with the words of Andrew the guy in the trenches that we'll leave on Drake of the 99 dragons was a spectacular train wreck from start to finish we kept on waiting for that magic moment when everything starts coming together but it never arrived meanwhile the idol FX guys were confident in their product as appeared to be the marketing I remember wondering could it be that perhaps I was wrong and the game was actually okay maybe maybe I was just too close to it too familiar with his flaws to see it for the Masterpiece it was nope Drake was trash all along so thus closes this chapter on all our lives this chapter of learning what the [ __ ] damn happened to this ungodly unfinished abomination of absurdity if you know of any other forms of media video gamer movie that should be hoisted onto our stage let me know in the comments below or leap in shooting guns of Kimbo at the flophouse VIP patreon to paint a Target on your own personal nomination see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] hey welcome back to what happened so glad you came crawling back to learn more about some of the most infamous pop culture catastrophes across a broad spectrum of media but they're all mostly about EA Activision in Bethesda speaking of Bethesda due to the big bossiness of flophouse VIP member Josh Silvestri today we'll be cussing cutting and shooting through one of Todd Howard's biggest mistakes now I I know that that's incredibly hard to narrow down but this particular foible culminated in Bethesda publishing 2009's Rogue Warrior one of the sweariest crappiest worstiest reviewed games in the entire Seventh Generation alright so back in 2006 with a gleam in their eye and a Rosy Glow to their cheek Plucky young Bethesda softworks tickled pink with the recent release of their small Indie title Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion started publishing bigger and bigger titles around the same time one of these was going to be Rogue Warrior black razor an ambitious tactical FPS featuring four-player local co-op 24 player online competitive play and a bevy of other interesting modes and features all coming from an experienced FPS team zombie Studios makers of the spec ops Series so um I want to stick you like a pig it looks like the douchebag conventions in town drop dead [ __ ] you [ __ ] amateur that's not what we got so what happened well just like Richard demo dick marcinko's career much of the story is classified ah yes demo dick I bet that caught your eye Mr marcinko is the founder of SEAL Team Six and performed real life Black Ops missions across the world throughout the 80s when he retired and depending on who you ask framed he started pending a series of novels under the title of Rogue Warrior which while based on his real life experiences would tend to exaggerate and dramatize just a tad these novels actually got quite popular during the 90s and early 2000s many of them going on to be best sellers so it was only logical for them to expand into video games why because Bam Bam and you shoot bad guys in video games anyway with the prospect of developing a series of best-selling military novels into an interactive medium odds were that Bethesda reckon this might become their own Rainbow Six or Splinter Cell you know the extended Clancy verse so with dollar signs in their eyes they tap the zombie Studios to develop Rogue Warrior black razor and along with their ambitious plans for Co-Op and online competitive modes also had one big Ace up their sleeve another unique feature that sounded neat back then and even now to this day whilst in competitive online play you could set an option it would generate various tiles for specific parts of the map which each team could then choose from typically being in the layout of their spawn point a more neutral Central Tile of the map could then be voted upon by both teams this would theoretically lead to over 200 map variants that's really cool but it sounds like an absolute nightmare to balance and Implement properly in an online environment which spoilers it super was black razor was initially announced in 2006 and was pegged for release the following year but would see no further updates in this original form the screenshots you are now seeing were the only media ever released for it so in April of 2009 Bethesda suddenly announced that Rogue Warrior was back with a new Focus developer and name dropping the super cool black Razer subtitle in exchange for nothing it's just called Rogue Warrior now also the new company had switched hands to was Rebellion developments the biggest most independent most British studio in the world they were primarily known for two things making licensed games fast and cheap and having one of the most uneven libraries in terms of quality filled with dizzy and high is terrifying lows and creamy middles Alien vs Predator yay The Mummy moo Rogue Trooper not Warrior yay never dead Brew it goes on and on and on like this I've never seen a developer so consistent with its inconsistency anyway there's one aspect of their development style that Bethesda found the most attractive which was their commitment of course to leveraging their tools and end just kidding it was because they're cheap and fast this relaunch of the product was only announced in April but it actually released by the end of that year in November zombie couldn't have been on the project for all that long because the game needed to be canceled and then moved to Rebellion with enough time to finish the whole thing what's more is that black razor was going to use Unreal Engine engine 3 but Rebellion used their proprietary Asura engine instead which they had been using since 1999. enter Pete's swamp ass Heinz bethesda's senior vice president of marketing who explained slash not explained what the hell happened suffice it to say we were not happy with the direction of what that project was we felt it needed a change in scope and a change in focus and we felt that this was the focus that it needed that the sort of squad-based tactical in a sense I I guess it was turning into a bit of a Navy Seals game and was less of a dick marcinko game which is an odd thing to say considering he was the founder of a Navy SEAL Team anyway along with the announcement of the game going from a co-op tactical shooter to a single player-only action movie sort of thing there was one more surprise fresh off his Oscar win for the wrestler that well-known video game fan Mickey Rourke would be lending his um yeah vocal talents to the game voicing dick marcinko himself now much like the world's best acting robot David Duchovny Rourke if you put him in the right role can nail it but doing voice-overs is a very different Beast you're more isolated you don't have sets or costumes to work off of and you're almost always alone so it's a vastly different discipline to excel in now because of this some might say that old Mickey wasn't really the best choice for this role moving on Pete Hines had a lot to say about this new hire and when asked by Shack news Point Blank this meant the game was now taking a more Duke Nukem style approach he replied with this I think the comparison is fair and that Duke Nukem is one of the few Shooters you can point to where it's focused around that guy as opposed to I don't remember the name of the guy that I played in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare it was it was freaking awesome but I don't remember who it was the point of that game wasn't about being those guys it was a great story but it wasn't focused on here's this person here's what it's like to be that person so we felt this was just more like here's this cool guy here's what he's going through and here's what his personality is like okay so what type of personality does this cool guy have Pete the great leader must have a tiny dick son of a [ __ ] send me the bill [ __ ] fan [ __ ] tastic anyway Mr Heinz can Lube Up This Disaster all he wants it's not gonna make it any more pleasant while there certainly could have been developmental problems with zombies version all those online modes being harder to implement than they originally thought it's easy to believe that maybe Bethesda wanted to Pivot away from all that ambition as the generation wore on in the interim after black razor was first announced series like Gears of War and Uncharted were becoming popular due to their bombastic movie-like characters so maybe instead of pushing stuff like four player co-op and 200 Maps magically generating for like 24 people they instead opted for maybe the lowest common denominator and I present to you the lowest common denominator it's a goat [ __ ] Admiral you're intel was [ __ ] even with all of that it's true that Rogue Warriors initial appeal revolved around multiplayer and team-based skirmishes so with very little time rebellions slapped together what might be the most slapped together Bare Bones multiplayer mode you'd ever see in 2009. oh geez you had more match options and freaking GoldenEye than this the map generator of course is M.I.A 24 players was reduced to eight and the co-op is super gone it's there's there's just nothing in fact dick big dick mercenko's two teammates are killed in the very first cut scene so oh it's going to be a solo Mission also the game can be finished in two hours despite being a full priced release that's so Bethesda as far as stupid gimmicks goes Irish is the best [ __ ] one I have ever seen so when Rogue Warrior dick slapped the very busy month of November 2009 it was expectedly ripped apart by critics now while the level layouts AI mission objectives story and core gameplay mechanics were classic 7th generation dishwater design the over the top third person kill moves and convey layerabout of expletives certainly gave the game a bit more entertainment value than you know zero it was lambasted across the board from pretty much every publication you can think of but more often than not you'd always find a certain paragraph or at least sentence that would read like The Following courtesy of Jeff gerstman from Giant Bomb there is something about the game's dialogue it's read by Mickey Rourke who mutters all his lines in a way that sounds closer to sleepy than badass specifically it's the content of the dialogue that stands out Rogue Warrior might be the filthiest most curse-filled game to ever make its way onto console when you step in the shoes of dick marcinko you're stepping in a heaping pile of [ __ ] shits really and [ __ ] and [ __ ] even if you're accustomed to the rough stuff the way it's used in Rogue Warrior is good at making the game a bit more laughable than it would be otherwise without the over-the-top language Rogue Warrior wouldn't have any discernible characteristics at all so you know there's that one other thing of note were the sloppy cover mechanics and the constant switching of first and third person which never felt especially smooth Pete Hines once again confuses and befuddles us with his answer for a while there we toyed with it being first and third person and so we finally said figure out what you're going to do don't try and be everything so he said it's going to be first person but we are going to use the cover mechanics and knife kills so in those situations you'll be in third person so don't try to be everything but also be in both third and first person yeah that makes sense okay okay okay okay now what did marcinco think about all of this well when asked Bethesda maintained that the game's script sluggish and Bloated with profanities was personally approved by the Rogue Warrior himself it was delighted with the casting of Mickey Rourke as well what about all the violence well apparently when showed various knife kill animations marcinco simply laughed and clapped and I guess when you look like this well I'll believe that easily at the end of the day all the swearing and violence in the world couldn't stop Rogue Warrior from a staggeringly low 28 average Metascore only a few points above Drake and the 99 dragons Christ six this was and is a permanent stain on bethesda's record by a country mild sorry a goddamn [ __ ] [ __ ] country [ __ ] mile it Remains the worst review title they ever published and most likely always will be okay so while we're on the subject of all the reviews and the general populaces you know opinion on Rogue Warrior during that same interview with Shaq news when asked about Rogue Warriors prospects and expected critical reception Pete Jean splicer Heinz stated but you know every game that people buy doesn't have to be the single greatest experience of 2009 there's something to be said for it it's just a fun personality driven shooter that's got these ridiculously brutal kill moves and it's very profane and colorful and it's got funny moments and it's got well paced action and some unexpected twists and all of those things and hey I played it I had fun I I laughed some well said Pete well said after the release of Dick Warrior Rebellion developments shut down three months later except they super didn't since they are a very large studio multiple projects always coming down the pipe they were able to walk away from the whole debacle relatively intact and recently released the kind of unpolished but nevertheless fun and schlocky zombie army 4. as for dick marcinko well he never returned to the world of video games after Rogue Warriors release shocking right now and penned his last novel Rogue Warrior curse of the Infidel okay in 2014. he is now 79 years old and still looks like this if you ever meet him in person you should probably not tell them that Rogue Warrior sucked and with that if you know of any other fantastic failures neither the video game or movie Industries let me know in the comments below or parachute in the flophouse VIP patreon to officially nominate a subject of your choosing see you next time and thanks for watching you call me [ __ ] breath [ __ ] [ __ ] Ninja I'm gonna bring it to him I'm gonna show them what time it is [Music] spot to Bring the Noise ah you morons will love this I hope you [ __ ] like fireworks welcome to another episode of what happened the world's greatest detective show that well I I mean we're pretty up there no well I'm just saying that it's solid I mean anyway we have a wild one locked and loaded today folks this confusing tale of dual development added and then canceled console ports delays miscommunication broken promises and dead parents I mean yeah dead parents so strap on your utility belt and grab whatever bat branded items you have on hand it's time to find out what happened to Batman dark tomorrow one of if not possibly the worst Batman game ever made between 1997 and 2005 cinematic adaptations of the cape Crusaders exploits suddenly stopped coming out with little to no reason as to why [Music] to take up the slack DC Comics made sure to sign off on as many Batman games as humanly possible in that same 8-year time frame almost 10 different titles were released on various platforms mostly revolving around the diniverse one of these games was Batman beyond return of the Joker a monotonous button Masher which released on both the PS1 and N64 with neither of them being very good at all it was published by Ubisoft during their Wilder days when they put out games that weren't just you know this a phenomena which you can learn about in this video here now Batman Beyond was actually developed by chemco Japan best known for publishing not developing that was Gremlin Graphics the Top Gear series then what was something they did develop why Dai Katana ports and these shockingly prolific Bugs Bunny crazy castle games of course so it's pretty evident that kemco was kind of all over the place now the interesting thing about this era of video games and particularly licensed video games is that it was very much a free-for-all anybody could license Batman for anything even if someone else had the rights to him so if you're making games based on the cartoons like Ubisoft was that wouldn't stop chemco from putting bats into other games as long as it was based on a different version of the character so that's exactly what they did in 2001 a big shiny press release went out announcing chemco were publishing and developing a brand new ambitious Batman game subtitled Dark tomorrow and it was going to be an exclusive for the almighty gamercube the original intent was for a fully open world Gotham where Batman could get behind the wheel of the Batmobile the Batwing the batboat or the bat Segway and fight it out with various criminals from his Rogues Gallery okay so I have successfully fulfilled the requirement of using the term rogue's Gallery in a Batman video the story of dark tomorrow was handled by Scott Peterson fresh off his run on Batman Gotham adventures and who then moved up into the Batman liaison office for DC at that time basically whenever a company would want to use the character for video games bubble bath or contraceptives Scott would often need to oversee it now in terms of the nitty-gritty the programming and design and whatnot well that's a bit of a mystery that we're going to clear up as there has been some misinformation out there a studio by the name of hot gen often gets credited as the main Studio which really is inaccurate they were a late addition to the project and were something more of a support studio for chemco who were indeed the ones behind the programming and design of dark tomorrow hot gen were based in the UK and if you haven't heard of them what's wrong with you they're behind some of the biggest licenses of the day Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Indiana Jones and even Star Wars for Game Boy handheld systems of course honestly for them to have to suddenly step up and assist in a sprawling Batman console game was a big big change but they had to start somewhere the main thing that they were hired to do was support the GameCube code over to the Xbox wait what this is because in March of 2002 despite being initially announced as a GameCube exclusive chemco then walked that back by adding both Xbox and PS2 versions into the mix which I'm sure made certain Cube Warriors very happy the game's final release date was also announced December 2002 mark your calendar calendar then dark tomorrow's coming now the reasoning behind this change is not confirmed but it's assumed that the strong sales base that the PS2 had already built plus the early success of the Xbox made kemco feel that adding more skus was the best way for the game to see success as they viewed the license as their big ticket into Western markets now that's a bit weird but going back on previous exclusive announcements has not unfounded in the video game industry just as Capcom yeah re4 jokes people but you know what's even weirder Batman dark tomorrow was directed by one of the creators of Final Fantasy yes Kenji tarata the writer of fantasies one two and three uh these ones bounced between various companies in the 1990s most notably he worked on the Sega CD classic dark wizard God this box artist just burned into my and for some reason I didn't even know the second CD before finally arriving at chemco come the turn of the century so yeah that is a bit weird now even though Scott Peterson is credited as the main writer tarata also has a story credit but it's not exactly clear what the extent of his involvement truly was as of the Airing of this video Mr terada has yet to return my emails but do you know who did return my emails well that would be Dave vout who worked on the game during his time at hot gen and who can certainly dispel some of the gloomy clouds behind dark tomorrow where do I start I mean no disrespect to the team or the management by the way there are very nice people and very respectful however chemco had a producer and he built a team spread across the world way before it became common to do so there was a team in La London as well as us Germany and Japan multiple locations music was being recorded in London in downtime by the Royal Philharmonic so the game had great cut scenes and production value but no gameplay basically I think Yuki was making a movie and seeing his IMDb it makes sense the basic things like the in-game camera just hadn't been addressed ah so Yuki takafumi this was his first video game producing role and it seemingly was his last video game producing roll and yeah if you take a quick look at his IMDb it's stuffed to the gills with various TV and movie credits so it's pretty clear whereas aspirations actually laid you know [Music] as stated before hot Jen's main role here was to Port Batman dark tomorrow over to the Xbox and in the sixth generation that process usually started when the main version in this case the GameCube was in beta or at least Alpha Dave told me that when they were hired dark tomorrow was barely even that kemco was struggling with a lot of aspects of the game and that's probably due to the fact that they realized they simply didn't have the time or experience to make a fully open world Batman adventure with multiple Vehicles a reality it's most likely they started scaling everything back and mixing and matching various pieces of the game into a giant gotham-sized jigsaw puzzle this was the version that hot gen was presented with after they had signed on to the project the rooftops became a clunky platforming section the open streets of Gotham turned into one of the biggest most confusing areas of the game then there's the sewers Arkham all of it was repurposed into their own separate levels now while this is certainly a messy way of doing things it was absolutely the right call because if chemco did try to Brute Force the original open world design they'd still be developing it today or more likely it would have been canceled altogether under the hood or a cowl I I should say there were even more problems buried deep within the code and it's here we're all let Mr vout deliver another doozy I was taken straight to the chemco offices and walked into a meeting odd thing with the culture there was that everyone had to buy into an idea so each idea took more than an hour to get everyone to agree to this turned into me acting as a gameplay designer to get the GameCube version finished so we could then start the Xbox version meanwhile our team was investigating the game code which was done in Japanese which didn't help but they soon discovered that all the AI in the game was actually running in a gba emulator it turned out the dark tomorrow team had been the GBA team and as the culture was to not let people go they had been moved on to GameCube and for some reason it made sense to them to make a gba emulator and build the core game in that I suspect maybe they had started a gba version and that's what they had been moved from so that explains probably why much of dark tomorrow plays like this [Music] so uh obviously there was a disconnect between kemco and DC and along with the rush production schedule it all led to one of if not the game's most infamous moment there are two possible endings players can earn in dark man tomorrow bat one bad and one just slightly less bad all it takes is for a player to miss an easily missable button in the final area and then they are locked out of getting the best ending the problem was that you were given absolutely zero indication or hint that this was even a thing the lack of any sort of text message or dialogue letting you know how important this button is wasn't implemented in time before the game's goal Master went out for the GameCube and Xbox or you know they just forgot it all together wait wait oh hold on wait uh wait yeah there it is what happened to the PS2 version well by the time hot gen was hired and no longer even existed with chemco having dropped it all together at some point in 2002. the only thing we can assume here is that since the GameCube and Xbox were pretty similar in terms of power and such it would be then the fastest easiest thing to just focus on those two consoles rather than continue to struggle with the PS double Ballin and even if they did want to push it the development teams were already stretched pretty thin as it was since neither company was particularly large in terms of Manpower thus on a cold dreary night in Gotham the PS2 Port left the theater a little bit early and was met with a sudden and violent end in the alleys of Crime Alley it's clear that kemco was out of their depth here and to cement that we need to swing back around with Scott Peterson who detailed a particular instance of culture Clash on the comics on console's podcast he recalled that early on in the game's life a physical meeting took place between kemco and DC with a translator to hash out the game kemco started outlining their ideas for a particular moment that would occur when Batman sneaks into Arkham Asylum to distract the guards Batman whips out a Boombox and starts playing salsa music and and the guards get distracted so distracted by the dancing that he's able to sneak past them so did we have some idea that there was perhaps a bit of a train wreck on the way I think it's safe to say we knew pretty early on that there wasn't a complete and total simpatico Vulcan mine meld going on and a complete total train wreck is what followed after a delay from December 2002 to March 2003 most likely due to the fact that the game just really actually needed the extra time dark tomorrow lurched onto the GameCube and Xbox with a wet dank bat fart aside from a comic book promotion with DC the game didn't really have much of a marketing campaign mostly because according to Dave vout Camco had burned through most of their money on the actual development this isn't surprising what would the CG cut scenes the Philharmonic Orchestra multiple Studios it all amounted to a costly misfire for the company so without the luxury of a robust marketing strategy they would just have to rely on Word of Mouth which oh reviews for dark tomorrow were pretty Savage and were spread fairly equally across critics and most anyone with a pulse and a head I guess in fact if you look it up bats is only a few narrow points about Superman 64's review average so it's definitely the low point point for Bruce Wayne well except for maybe yeah then just a few short years after this debacle chemco's U.S branch was completely shut down to save costs right after Chicago enforcer and Rogue Ops failed to generate much of well anything in the sales charts their main Japanese Branch not to be outdone was also forced to drastically pivot this pivoting resulted in them abandoning console gaming just cold turkey and completely transitioned to Japanese only mobile games nowadays they routinely pump out several of these and a deluge of DLC every single month like clockwork with titles such as alfadia Genesis Crystal ortha and of course ask the vine it's actually kind of crazy that only two short years later EA and eurocom were able to capitalize on the dark Knight's rebounding cinematic popular Clarity with their adaptation of Batman Begins before some other mildly successful Batman games came out later on I I don't really remember what they were so if you think about it from a different perspective kemco was way way ahead of their time with dark tomorrow what with using tons of gadgets a mature storyline and Diving deep into the bowels of Arkham Asylum but wait no it's actually the reverse of that they weren't ahead of the now they just messed up what happened to hot Jen you ask well they lingered on until about 2014 amazingly with their only post Batman game of note being Star Wars republic Squadron which if you don't remember you'll be forgiven because it released exclusively on this thing make no mistake dark tomorrow was a beautiful disaster a developer publisher who had aspirations of greatness were given one of the most mainstream globally recognized characters of all time but were ill-equipped deliver on their Vision even with help and wound up delivering one of the worst most infamous comic book video games in history as for a friend Dave vout well he's doing just fine at Deep Silver Dam Buster so good on him and it's with this final thought of his that we'll leave on hot Jen were desperate to get on with the port so there was a lot of pressure on me to do what I could with very little time and then move on so I did and it broke my heart to leave it like that we got the game finished eventually no one is proud of it but it got finished and that was harder than it looked but why do we fall Bruce so do we could look to pick ourselves up if you know of any other horrendously horrible superhero hack jobs let me know in the comments below or over on my Twitter if you want to directly nominate a subject of your choosing then back grapple over to the flophouse VIP patreon and become a big boss to put forward what will be tackling next thanks for watching stay tuned until next week same what happened Time same what happened Channel [Music] look up in the sky it's a bird it's a plane it's a cliche Superman reference no it's a new episode of what happened the show that dives deep into some of the entertainment Industries most deliriously damaging debacles alright so real talk comic book and comic book characters have had a rough history within the Phantom Zone of video games Batman Beyond everything with a fantastic for his name on it that one Hulk game Spider-Man revenge of the Sinister Six spawn Eternal Iron Man EXO Mana War in heavy metal you get the point however the last son of Krypton stands on top of them all with the distinction of being the only major hero without even a single great game to their credit yeah there's been one or two titles that were kind of maybe okay but unlike his contemporaries Bruce Peter Logan or Bruce Clark Kent never really broke through that barrier of bad or mediocre let's say badiocre quality games now the story of the most infamous of these attempts at video game Dumb has a unique cast of characters there's a of course DC Comics the company that publishes The Adventures of the Man of Steel Warner Brothers who came into acquisition of DC in around 1989 and routinely attempts to spin off their Heroes into other media and last but not least is Titus a French company that first cut their teeth in the world of 8 and 16 bittage they had kicked off the fifth generation in you could call it Style with things like virtual chess 64 roadsters and automobiley Lamborghini in their earlier days they had also worked with such licensed IPS as Dick Tracy and The Blues Brothers and the founder of Titus one Eric Khan saw a similar opportunity in late 1996. Warner Brothers had seen massive success with the Bruce Tim helmed Batman series and wanted the same treatment for Superman his cartoon started later that same year and was part of a big push across a variety of mediums to hopefully make people forget about well yeah all of all of this Eric Khan felt if they could score the License To The Man of Steel it would potentially be the biggest game Titus would ever work on certainly in terms of character marketability I had heard from her LA office that Warner Brothers Was preparing a new animated TV series around Superman so I contacted WB Licensing in order to obtain the video game rights they asked me three times if I was serious about making the game no one else was interested enough in Superman to do a video game about him at that time faster than a speeding bullet both Titus and the Warner Brothers licensing team quickly struck up a strong business relationship as the device a three-pronged plan for soups this would kick off with a Game Boy title followed up by an N64 iteration which would be Superman's big 3D debut and finally Khloe goes out with a PlayStation version Eric Khan envisioned a fully open world game taking place within a square mile Metropolis where Superman would have free reign and flying around attacking enemies saving citizens and just being Superman instead cal-el found himself banging into walls humping the ground flying through Rings picking up cars flying through Rings flying through Rings having his vision obscured by the thick soup known as Kryptonite fog all contained within one of the most infamously bad video games of all time say the line so what happened as mentioned the Game Boy release came to Market first in early 1997 and while it was certainly inoffensive it like the majority of third-party titles released on Nintendo's handheld went largely unnoticed especially since the original GB model was being phased out also this is as good a time as any to clarify Superman on the N64 is not called Superman 64 and it never was in no place within the game itself or the instruction manual does it contain the number 64 how the [ __ ] box the Box doesn't even have a normal logo it's just Clark ripping up a shirt daring you to look at the big S on his chest in my world it means I hope that being said I'm still gonna call it Superman 64. you can't stop me now things started to go awry between Warner Brothers and Titus pretty early on because while Game Boy title is considered an afterthought the console version had a higher Stakes attached to it the Warner licensing team was let go only a few weeks after our deal was Inked the new people in charge hated us and our project they believe the major company like EA Games would have paid more for the license and created a better title thus started a years-long campaign of Warner Brothers doing everything they could to hamper And Delay titus's work since this new licensing team felt the French company was not an appropriate developer to handle their Marquee character as I suppose they lacked the experience or notoriety whatever you want to call it WB said about altering the game to their specifications Eric Khan explains in every way they try to stop its development they asked us to change it from an action adventure to a Sim city-like game where Superman would be like the mayor of metropolis that was is honestly pathetic when Titus fought against this mandate and insisted to remain an action title they noticed that wb's interference and ire started to escalate Not only was communication between both companies already complicated as titus's Paris Studio was nine hours ahead of WB in California the frequency and communication was also kept deliberately slow when both companies would finally get to discuss the game and its structure WB would challenge just about every decision Titus would make with one of the major sticking points being the idea of destructible elements within Metropolis that seems a little backwards for Superman doesn't it he's Superman destroying [ __ ] is what he's good at regardless Warner Brothers was opposed to Superman laying a finger on just about everything we developed the 3D world to have significant destructible aspects like walls and Floors that could tear away when struck but they were totally against that arguing that Superman could not act as a bad person boy that escalated quickly I mean that really got out of hand fast this edict incredibly also spilled over into attacking enemies as well as Warner Brothers was apparently concerned that punching NPCs would be out of character for the Man of Steel to alleviate this and the issue of metropolis based Mayhem Titus proposed that the game take place in a virtual Recreation of Superman's iconic City so all that nasty fighting and explosions would be confined within the digiverse this idea would be solidified with Lex Luthor kidnapping Terry Hatcher and that guy that got shot in the opening of Batman v Superman in this virtual prison with soups having to rescue each one working with WB was described as agonizing according to Eric Khan with the game having to go under an oppressive microscope it took us months to get every single character approved they also argued against any decision we made in the game under the pretext that Superman would never do that for example example we had to prove that Superman could go underwater because they had doubts it would be acceptable in terms of Legacy we had tons of documentation and had to go through it all in order to tell them something like in the October 1957 issue on page whatever you totally see Superman underwater because of all these production delays Titus couldn't really work on say the Metallo boss fight if they didn't even have Metallo approved yet this of course had a staggered effect on the entire project which left very little time to actually optimize the game to run on the N64 in the first place this was especially detrimental since it was titus's first 3D action game while it's true that virtual chess 64 predated Superman in terms of scope and ambition it was the company's most complicated foray into 3D ever they needed the time to work out the Kinks and the gameplay issues not make sure that Lois's pink power suit was up to WB standards having to restructure their Vision to fit all these demands Eric Khan admits that the rest of the game suffered for it we lost so much time answering Warner Brothers and DC's concerns and weird ideas with more time to focus on the game's development and its playability instead of the surrounding circus we could have improved the controls and the collision and have made a better game in the end one of the major things that the team struggled to deal with was getting the N64 to display the open environment with decent performance even though it was released in 1999 the later half of the system's life a stinky green fog was employed to mask the short draw distance which was present pretty much everywhere just a year prior games like Turok 2 and Rogue Squadron were able to produce great visuals on the hardware and increase the draw distances which was something Titus neither had the time nor experience to solve they knew the problem was so in your face that in early press interviews before the virtual Metropolis changes were implemented claim that the green Hue division of screen weather effect was Kryptonite fog which Lex Luthor released in order to weaken the pesky man of super this was then retcon with the final retail version which really didn't acknowledge what the green fog even was yeah I guess a wizard did it nevertheless Titus forged on bowing to pretty much all of Warner Brothers machinations which resulted in delivering the game six months later than the original targeted release date now this was 1999 and online websites were not yet the dominating percentage of game coverage so despite all of the things working against it Superman 64 went on to be a sales success cracking the NDP top 10 in its debut month and eventually selling over half a million copies in total sales were big so we didn't lose any money on Nintendo 64 or Game Boy games but Warner Brothers blocked the PSX version from coming out and that was a heartbreaker it was 90 completed and we had a half million units in back order claims Mr Khan right the PlayStation version even without x-ray vision Titus could see they wouldn't get that Port done in a timely manner thus they contracted out one of their latest Acquisitions Blue Sky software developers of vectorman to tackle said Port fortunately since Titus had already gone through the gauntlet of weird and creepy Warner Brothers guidelines and restrictions Bluesky were able to navigate them in record time and reportedly got the game to an almost finished State before the plug was unceremoniously pulled due to the six-month delay again the N64 version of the Thor this accelerated the time frame in which titus's Superman license was valid until now despite its selling and in case you thought I stuttered 500 000 copies Warner Brothers opted not to extend the working relationship with Titus this effectively canceled the PSX version which by all accounts was shaping up to be a massive Improvement and without the project to sustain them blue sky software closed the very next year Eric Khan believed this to be an act of sabotage I think they're trying to stall us and we had heard that WB were even preparing to pay out a huge litigation settlement because they forced us to kill that PlayStation version but we never wound up actually suing them while certainly Superman the 64th was knee capped by a meddling partner the fifth generation of consoles was notoriously problematic for superheroes in general aside from the Capcom fighting games and never saw Spider-Man most couldn't really be done Justice with the polygonal power of the PlayStation and 64 or Sega Saturn technology just wasn't there 16-bit Hardware could render the powers and worlds of superheroes in an illustrative and arcade-like way but early 3D was just ill-equipped to properly represent super speed and vulnerability or just being edgy so even if WB had kept their smelly dicks out of the project there's uh more than good chance that Superman wouldn't have snagged any Game of the Year Awards in 1999 anyhow with that said I'm gonna have to level with y'all after having done all this research on Superman as well as capturing footage off my own cartridge I gotta say as a game if you thought I was gonna say something positive well then you're probably running for office on planet wrong it's only gotten worse with age I literally can't think of anything positive to say about this cursed piece of software if you ever meet anyone that says Ah Superman 64 wasn't that bad have them arrested now this is traditionally the point in the video where I tell you that Titus went out of business following Superman's release but due to that half million units in sales they're able to Soldier on for a few more kind of shaky years they went on to publish a number of enjoyable Arena fighters from the makers of biofreaks sapphire entertainment until the release of Robocop for the Xbox and PC in 2003 at that point it had been nearly 15 years since the last RoboCop movie hit theaters so I'm not exactly sure what they were on when they signed that hot property maybe nuke today Eric Khan no longer works in the gaming industry but instead at turvo a company that I can't really ascertain what they do he had previously found a job working at interplay during their short-lived and fruitless Revival in the mid-auts but seemed just as happy to move on to something else despite everything he seemingly doesn't begrudge the game that caused so much aggravation for himself and his Studio some two decades ago I coded designed or produced over 100 games in my life so Superman is just one of that 100 that being said it is in my top 10 in terms of sales and it's probably also the one that people still talk about almost 20 years later as for Warner Brothers as they moved on from being a simple licenser to full-fledged publisher working their employees to the Bone and ruining games with tons of microtransactions and predatory DLC practices oh and they also eventually got their wish because they brokered a deal with themselves and Electronic Arts in 2008 to finally make that fantastic Superman game loved and remembered by all continuing the great tradition of the character wow so if you know of any other incredible spectacular or uncanny video game slash movie Foster Klux smash your way into the flophouse VIP patreon or use your heat vision on the comments below to etch your nominations into what we'll tackle next see you next time metropolisians and thanks for watching welcome back to another episode of what happened the show that's everyone's worst nightmare and really in the realm of movie games there are few nightmares as Vivid as 2014's Rambo the video game just as licensed titles were going out of style on consoles John Rambo burst onto the Xbox 360 PS3 and PC with guns ablazing and quickly demonstrated just why licensed games were losing ground with game development more complicated and expensive than ever before the short turnaround time and restrictions of adapting a known property would inevitably cause some clashes this was uh certainly the case with today's subject and the inexperienced Studios who are tasked with a mission that they were never actually expected to complete so tighten your headband and grab your exploding arrows it's time to find out what happened to Rambo the video game did you first blood not me First Blood Part 3 Rambo 4 I mean John Rambo I mean Rambo 2008 was a surprise success when it splattered into theaters and saw Sylvester Stallone's career experience a small Resurgence with its high box office body count to coincide with this studio Canal the owner of the first three Rambo films had licensed the arcade video game rights to Sega who tapped Takashi Oda the director of The House of the Dead series to helm an intense 3D rail shooter that took you through the pivotal moments of First Blood Part 2 and Rambo 3. a few years later the Home console rights would be licensed to uk-based Reef entertainment with a formal announcement in 2011. Reef was a mid-tier publisher in the European market and had their logos slapped on the most random assortment of titles you can think of I'm talking about stuff like Dad the Wii version of Rogue Trooper real heroes firefighter and most importantly Captain Morgan and the golden Turtle Carlo and me ain't never sailed with a woman before as you can see nabbing the Rambo IP was perceived as a big get for them the late Peter resin CEO of reef entertainment at the time had this to say I'm a big fan of Sylvester Stallone movies and when we had the opportunity to secure the video game rights from Studio Canal for the Rambo franchise we had to grab it with both hands with the success of the most recent Rambo film and international appetite for action movies with Expendables 2 scheduled for release next summer we felt now is a good time to do something special with this license this enthusiasm was shared by Reef commercial director Craig Lewis who is a little bit more candid as to why this deal came about we have big Ambitions to reef and the Rambo IP is the first step in establishing us as a worldwide player in the press release they stated that the target release date was later in 2012 which made it seem like things were well underway and going smoothly but of course you're watching what happened taeyeon a small polish Studio was chosen as the developer and much like Reef were a uh Underdog Studio they put out a lot and I mean a lot of titles but the one that's really important to us today is heavy fire Special Operations originally released for the Wii in 2010 This Was Then followed up by the incredibly similar game Heavy fire black arms which is followed up by the even more similar heavy fire Afghanistan all within a tight 16-month period unless you're headless you can probably tell that these are all interchangeable shooting galleries made very fast and priced appropriately now when Reef announced that they had acquired the Rambo license they played it a bit close to the chest about what it was even going to be in a late 2011 interview with movie Mavericks Craig Lewis was asked at this point is there any idea what type of game you will be making I.E first person shooter third person shooter Etc he would answer we will have a full press release on this very Point all I can say at the moment is of course it will be a shooter with lots of guns explosions and everything that is Rambo more specific information on the game will be released on the build up to Christmas coming off of a hot streak of unsuccessful heavy arms games it's no surprise that Rambo would end up piggybacking on the rail shooter expertise I was able to confirm privately with a source close to the project that despite the koi answer to the aforementioned question the game was always planned to be on Rails which you shot on but despite their experience in this genre and despite being worked on for close to three years Rambo would end up shipping with a feature bear three-hour campaign the same Source I spoke to share that the game's extended development time was due to a Confluence of problems including management slash marking issues and an overly ambitious scope after a brief 2012 trailer that recycled clips from the older films a gameplay reveal was finally shown in 2013 which many complained was somewhat disingenuous while there are plenty of clips that show raw gameplay it was mostly all in-game cutscenes that third person qte segments and zoomed in footage of the action these were cut very quickly and deliberately and I would argue it was done in such a way to hide the on-rails nature of the gameplay around the same time Reef confirmed that both Sylvester Stallone and Colonel trotman Richard Crenna would be providing voice-overs for the game which was kind of curious as krenna passed away back in 2003 a reef spokesperson later clarified our goal is to produce the finest Rambo video game ever made to do that we are including dialogue special effects and music from the movies Studio Canal the owners of the Rambo films searched their extensive archives and track down audio reels containing the original voice recording tapes for First Blood First Blood Part 2 and Rambo 3. these tapes provided us with the pristine vocal performances of Stallone and Crenna that we have included in the game uh your honor I object to the usage of the word pristine [Music] I'm not sure whether the audio tapes were poorly preserved or whether taeyeon were not allowed to tamper with them but the quality was certainly not optimal so while they could use the recordings of the two principal actors that wasn't 100 True when it came to the rest of the cast of the films new audio recordings for random NPCs frequently play alongside the low Fidelity original ones making for ajarin and inconsistent auditory experience get your paws over your head and turn around son this boy's wriggling like a damn earthworm once the Gameplay trailer finally hit Rambo's release date was narrowed down to Winter 2013 but then in October Reef would send word that the game's deployment would instead shift to early 2014 placing it directly into the post-launch death zone of the Xbox One and PS4 now as far as I can find Reef never made an actual statement as to why the game was getting delayed not even the stock we want to deliver the most polished Rambo experience we can at launch type thing so why the sudden change well having some experience in QA a last minute delay of just two to three months in that era usually meant a pre-certification issue like something to do with how the game saves and handles data or other technical requirements fixing such an issue can be complicated and once a fix is found and implemented a new build of the whole game needs to be tested and then resubmitted well well a big muscle bound nerd now since reef is a UK outfit Rambo infiltrated Europe on February 21st and only hit North America two months later on April 29th this staggered release plan was in hindsight probably not the best idea as it caused a surge of rough looking gameplay to float onto YouTube as well as European gaming Outlets getting their overwhelmingly negative reviews out well ahead of the North American launch it also didn't help that there were already grumblings from fans about the game being an on-rail shooter but when you add poor cover systems Twitchy and inaccurate controls countless bugs brutal difficulty and a very short campaign to the mix then Rambo's chances of success drastic go down but I'm a genetic freak and I'm not normal by the time the game was out on shelves the world over had already built up quite the bad reputation when reviewers and consumers alike agree on a worse Game of the Year Contender as early as April you know you're gonna be in for a rough one Reef's big gamble wasn't panning out which was all the more crushing when you look back at earlier interviews where they discuss plans to make even more Rambo games if this one was a hit oh they certainly were aiming higher though as a free campaign add-on was already in development this was the baker team DLC which added new story content and also folded in general improvements since they were sorely needed months passed and then years and eventually re stopped talking about the DLC altogether then two years later in 2016 the baker team DLC suddenly released on Steam and PS3 in a Kotaku article Reef entertainment spokesperson Jazz preet marwaha detailed why the DLC was so late to the extremely lonely Rambo party Reef were aware that the game wasn't received very well and while they and taeon were committed to fixing some of those launch issues lots of technical headaches prevented the DLC from being integrated in a timely manner well as you can imagine we never plan to release the DLC two years after the release of the main game hence the decision for a free update DLC to the game incorporating a new and original Mini campaign focusing on a prequel to The Rambo story given that this was our first time releasing a game update together with the dev team this was a very time consuming process with a high learning curve especially since we had to do this while also working on our other project so it became a very stop start process Rambo had apparently not been built with DLC in mind so they had to create new functionality for that in addition to the DLC which would require not only getting the DLC through platform holder regulations but also new builds of the base game itself for each of the available regions they were still trying to work through problems on the 360 version and with no clear timeline as to when that would be finished we decided we cannot wait any longer to release the other two versions there was nothing for us to lose by releasing the DLC we didn't see any reason to hold back ultimately the 360 Baker team DLC would never be released earlier in that same interview Jess preet would earnestly admit we were a little naive the team had clearly been a bit in over their heads they were used to smaller digital only games and this was a whole new layer of added complexity so the baker team DLC released for the cool price of zero dollars and they really didn't need to do this the game sold poorly was reviewed worse but yet they still wanted to offer up a freebie for all the morbidly curious fans out there didn't make the game that much better not really but it's the thought that counts Jess preet also mentioned another upcoming project and honestly it's one of the more fascinating things about this story all the way back in 2013 Reef announced they and taeyeon had also secured the Terminator license and were planning to make a game that take advantage of the upcoming 2015 disaster Terminator Genesis Genesis originally this project was called Terminators the game but after its own incredibly long development would release as Terminator resistance in 2019 one of the most underrated fps's of the last few years seriously I've made multiple videos of playing this game it's really fun and made with reverence for the source material but since my FPS opinion means nothing it also comes civi 11 approved they could have made a better Terminator game but all things considered this is a solid C plus like a seven seven and a half not only have taeyeon supported resistance with a bunch of cool post launch content and a free next-gen upgrade path they also recently announced an FPS based on RoboCop subtitled Rogue City and if it winds up being even half as good as resistance as for good old Johnny R well while he hasn't gotten another Standalone game since 2014 and most likely never will he's still been very busy with various appearances throughout the digiverse he was the final guest fighter in mk11 aftermath did a tour in Call of Duty and was endlessly referenced but did not actually appear in a recent bizarre bit of content for Far Cry 6. so at the very least the legendary war vets career did not end on a sour note unless you count last blood in which case it did it's clear both reef and taeyeon learned a lot working on Rambo which at the time was the biggest most complicated game either company had ever worked on and despite an extremely public clashing over an extremely bad game both came out the other end better for it it just goes to show that sometimes even when things are looking Grim you can't just give in and assume it's all over because nothing is up you know of any other sloppy Shooters rail or otherwise let me know in the comments below over on my Twitter or sneak into the jungles of the flophouse VIP patreon become a big boss to nominate what I take on in the future see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] welcome to another episode of what happened the show where if I've learned anything at all is that remakes and remasters foreign always the simple cut and dry deal most make them out to be now don't get me wrong there's incredible companies like blue point night dive and panic buttons which have been doing amazing work for years but for every MGS HD Collection or Doom 64 there's a GTA Definitive Edition Warcraft 3 or our subject today [Music] 13 was a 2003 video game adaptation of the Belgium comic book sorry I mean Bon De cenae of the same name it followed the clandestine Adventures of an Amnesia riddled protagonist voiced by one of the greatest acting robots of all time David Duchovny Jones finally I feel like I've spent three months inside of tin can 13 was developed by a team at Ubisoft Paris and while not a blockbuster success its unique visual Style mix of stealth and action plus an intriguing plot was enough to make it a cult favorite during the sixth generation of consoles but we're not talking about the original version of course but instead the absolutely woeful 2020 remastered slash the Remake that wound up being one of the worst rated games of that year though the second worst in fact I want them all to burn can you hear me even number one and even more in fact I don't think this is even the first time I've mentioned this specific game on this show now when did I play Magic a studio or currently working on a remaster of ubisoft's spy based FPS 13. oh so what happened to the 13 remake not interested first things first Ubisoft was not involved with this whole mess which I guess is a good thing as they are a bit busy with being extremely slow and trying to fix their work culture as well as mitigating backlash from their nft scams I'm fully committed to leading the challenge at Ubisoft [Music] therefore the companies we will be discussing microids and play Magic will be getting more than their fair share of our hot studio lights microids another French publisher had worked out a deal with Ubisoft in which the publishing rights to the original 13 game were transferred over to them they just needed a studio that could bring it to Modern machines play Magic an independent Malta bass Studio was then chosen by microids for the assignment whereupon problems arose almost immediately I've fallen into my own trap Giuseppe krugliano the CEO of play Magic was as we'll see quite good at talking a big game I want to be distracted by 500 things in an extensive article over at fanbite.com Link in the description crucliano is described as a hustler sweet talking various clients into handing him projects even if his Studio was ill-equipped to take them on one such project was a VR version of the game Arctica 1 and the reason why play Magic were so ill-equipped is because their Workforce largely consisted of a lot of Junior designers and interns now what's worse than lacking an appropriate amount of staff well that would be lacking an appropriate amount of staff with any experience in VR but Giuseppe must have thought it was all gonna work out in the end I'll hide under some coats and hope that somehow everything will work out one former employee of playmagic stated it was always the same situation working with inexperienced people those that would join with a little bit more experience were very frustrated because of the fact that he crugliano would make unrealistic promises to Publishers we were just line to clients that was the reality the studios struggled with this project for a while crunching almost every day to make each Milestone which they often missed for those uninitiated usually when a developer misses a milestone they don't get paid as per most standard contracts in the fan byte article many former staff cited that these missed Milestones were the result of Giuseppe failing to delegate tasks and micromanaging everything about the company which would often slow things down way down missing these deadlines would then lead to low morale because typically people like getting paid so that they could make their rent rent we were working late at night every day including weekends I remember at one time we were working until two in the morning at the office trying to fix issues you hear this a lot in game development that wasn't the biggest issue though the issue was Giuseppe was manipulating people into doing that every day without any real planning the way he was tricking people into working more was by not paying them on time overall the sentiment was that play Magic did not bother with pre-production or forward planning they would just accept projects without really considering if they should accept those projects eventually the client behind Arctica 1 canceled the contract frustrated with its lack of progress which resulted in even more lost wages but don't worry play Magic staffers Uncle Giuseppe has the next game all lined up 13 was the Studio's highest profile release at that time and apparently still is to make up for the loss of Arctica Giuseppe's plan was to get the cell-shaded sleeper hit out the door as quickly as possible to turn a profit there's just a monstrous plant fortunately there was a plan put in place to accomplish this make it a simple remaster up the resolution clean the textures smooth out the frame rate and then finally ship it Giuseppe wanted this done in three months and felt that by using Unreal based plugins to update the graphics it was a reasonable goal ah the tried and true Grove Street Method what could go wrong let's find out unlike GTA the problem wasn't that technical hurdles in updating old code with 2020 Tech but rather the fact that this approach wasn't going to work at all the only direct source files microids had available from the 2003-13 release were pngs of certain UI elements and the original dialogue recordings those have been preserved in pristine quality and of course featured the voices of fox Mulder Adam West Nobody messes with Adam we and the real Superstar the queen of the Rough Riders herself the always incredible Eve tighten up your panties we're going super size as for the original source code well it sadly had not been preserved which was typical of the time as the game was nearly 20 years old 13 had also been built on a super outdated version of Unreal 2 so there wasn't much that could apparently be done or play Magic simply couldn't do it so what did they do well they remade the whole game from scratch with a bunch of inexperienced interns on the day I recruited you I didn't ask for your resume but the main issue wasn't even the lack of experience but the lack of numbers 13 always had the issue of too much work needing to be done but not enough staff to actually do it a lot of people left after the VR project and we started 13 with just a small number of people we did more pre-production that time with 13 but it was pretty fast pre-production at the start Giuseppe wanted us to find ways to get the original assets from the game we couldn't do it the engine was too old so the project transformed from a remaster to a remake as the contract wasn't set in stone so that three-month estimate ballooned into a year or more and with everything shifting to a remake made completely in unity well that was one of the primary reasons why the finished game feels so off and just about every respect now because this is what happened I'm obligated to inform you that it's right about here this critical juncture in 13's development is when Giuseppe accepted another contract you this was the fabled Disney project I mentioned earlier but former staff members have since clarified that the client wasn't Disney at all but rather Aspire entertainment perhaps their involvement with recent Kotor remasters and remakes had mixed them up with Disney somehow where it simply was another case of Purple Monkey Dishwasher well we'll show him especially for that Purple Monkey Dishwasher remarks anyway the game in question was a remaster of Stubbs the Zombie and as to why Giuseppe thought taking this on was a good idea I have no [ __ ] clue anyway to further make this mistake a reality additional staff members on 13 were pulled away to work on stubs which of course slowed down progo to the point where code must have started on writing itself date check it's now April 2019 and play Magic and microids decided to release a teaser trailer to formally announce 13 with a release date set for later that year which many staff members sighted has a massive mistake the game wasn't even close to being done and every programmer or artist on it scoffed at the idea of it somehow getting done in six months that's not enough time but for whatever reason at either microids or Giuseppe's insistence the November 2019 release date was set in stone until it wasn't the game was officially delayed that August and was given a full 12-month delay to November 2020. okay now with such a huge extension surely things would get back on track foreign doesn't do anything for you does it so it is an indisputable fact that the life cycles of many games were heavily disrupted once the pandemic began and it wasn't any different over at play Magic as the very few employees they did have had to convert to working from home which only meant even slower progress it wasn't long before Aspire started getting concerned about stubs and started getting into disagreements with play Magic about its lack of progress and overall quality so try to act surprised when I now tell you that eventually the contract much like its Undead hero fell apart Aspire canceled it nobody got paid and the HD a fine of stubs was then moved to an internal team within Aspire who just did it themselves with another project canceled even more people decided to pack it in and find work in other Studios as many took issue with Giuseppe's managerial style it was always the typical conversation of we are a family here I'm so proud of our family and my Hustlers there was a time where people were leaving and Giuseppe was like they're quitters you guys are the real Hustlers I trust you there was always like a dangling carrot in front of everyone always constantly like after we reach this point we will update salaries and everyone will be getting a raise or after this everything is going to be okay then we'd reach that point and the goal post would be moved as you can imagine all these negative aspects resulted in the game that was eventually released with all the Blood Sweat and sacrifices not amounting to much the game's distinctive art style saw a lot of tweaks ditching the Timeless cell shaded art style with something that many thought looked like a bottom shelf fortnite the physics and melee weapons felt wrong the stealth mechanics would often not work and that's not to mention the oodles and oodles of bugs I mean look at this [ __ ] right here trying to to play it yeah sure while the core game and art style had its own issues bugs were in fact one of if not the biggest problem the whole thing just needed months more work but with a whole year delay why was the game so unpolished well the reason for this is as someone who did seven years of QA this really hurts to say play Magic did not have their own QA team so programmers were responsible for finding and fixing most bugs I just that's how the company was run thankfully microids at least realized that doubling the work for all programmers for no reason was indeed not a good idea so in the last few months leading into release they provided a few QA Specialists to help squash bugs that's good however several full-time staff members at play Magic brought up concerns that this simply wasn't enough and given the state of the game at lunch huh don't lose them it simply wasn't enough that's bad there was almost zero marketing 413 when it hit the Xbox One PS4 PC and the switch oh wait no no not the switch despite being announced that version apparently never came out with no status update from microids or play Magic even though it's now more than a year later their website still claims it's coming soon so get your pre-orders in that's bad can I go now anyway critics absolutely Savage the other versions and despite a number of patches meant to address the Myriad of issues the damage had already been done furthermore to try and save face microwaves and play Magic even released a joint apology for the game Sorry State first and foremost we would like to offer our most sincere apologies for the game's technical issues in its present State 13 does not meet our quality standards and we fully understand players frustrations the pen endemic has impacted the game's production on many levels we hoped we would be able to provide a day one patch fixing all the issues but the development of this update is taking more time than expected finally know that we are working on a detailed roadmap highlighting the upcoming free additions to the game content like new levels weapons skins and modes for the local multiplayer we are aiming to please all the 13 fans and will work relentlessly to achieve our goal yeah they weren't that Relentless because that last promise never even happened more than a year later 13 still hasn't gotten any free content or DLC there were four major patches and that's pretty much it things didn't get much better for play Magic following This Disaster in the fan bite article Giuseppe claims that the company now runs much smoother and the Futures looking bright somehow although their website and all social media accounts have gone dark since 2020. this has to be one of the ugliest stories we've ever covered here on what happened and it sucks that a game with a small but passionate fanbase as 13 had to go through this whole mess but what's far worse was all the stress incurred by the employees they were asked to complete a mission without the proper tools experience or leadership that they needed if you know of any other mismanaged misfires let me know in the comments below over on my Twitter or stealthily sneak into the floppage VIP patreon and become a big boss and nominate what all take on in the future see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] and let that set the tone now today's subject is pretty Infamous so while I assume most of you know what it is for all you big rig virgins out there here's a quick refresher driving around in [ __ ] trucks and that's pretty much it said trucks first hit the road on November 20th 2003 for PCs via Walmart who had exclusive distribution rights because the world is awful see around this time the horrible conglomerate was a great choice to Hawk your shovelware because you'd almost always make your money back preying on kids would point to an eye-catching game box at the checkout line that is of course if you made your game nice and cheap and as we'll see big rigs over the road racing was made nice and cheap well maybe not the nice part now let's take a look at that box shall we as you can see it's not objectively bad maybe a tad generic but there's a certain air of excitement going on there's trucks the the font is readable so nothing too egregious here therefore judging this game based on its cover it looks like an inoffensive racing title but like a skinwalker it uses this facade to fool the feeble minds of others now if you were to put the disc in your computer you know in 2003 you'd be presented with this a selection of Ford trucks or cars and five tracks except that two of those tracks are pretty much identical and one just straight up crashes the game you'll then find within seconds of playing that everything I guess with the exception of the ground lacks Collision which in turn lets you go ape [ __ ] throughout every course the Virgil to your Dante the other big rig who appears in every level remains unmoving on the starting line which results in this racing game no longer being a racing game because there's literally no racing going on also there's the music which is to say no music and that goes for the sound effects too there's the sound of your engine and that's it which to me means no sound effects at all now I remind you this was a boxed finished game that was sold in stores so I think I say for all of us what happened okay if we were to consult the back of the box for big rigs over the road racing we would see the following from the desert to the plains you'll be hauling loads and trying to stay one step ahead of the law as you climb into your big rig for Non-Stop driving action Race Across America and deliver your load to its destination before the competition so keep the tank full and your pedal to the metal as you rack up points and own the road foreign Clues more insight into how this game became a thing uh if we were to let our eyes Rove over the rest of the Box we can see that the publisher was game Mill which is a milk toast company that I'd be mildly surprised if any of you are familiar with now the developer of these big rigs was Stellar Stone a studio of uh confusing origin that I'd be really surprised if any of you have heard of I mean how could you not with such memorable hits as ultimate Civil War battles Robert E Lee vs Ulysses S Greg Xbox trophy hunt not to be confused with Big Buck Hunter total pinball 25 night race club supercharged and of course the classic fast-paced arcade taxi racer taxi racer or as it's more commonly known as toxic Bells hollom now I set a company of confusing origin and that's because while originally based in California Stellar Stone would primarily Farm out a lot of their work or all of it it's a bit unclear since they no longer exist to a much smaller office in the Ukraine they did this to keep development costs low so it's this team who were the real truckers hauling all the loads now one name that pops up a few times in the admittably very light credits list is Sergey titov the alleged producer and lead programmer for the big rigs Sergey is a bit of a controversial character something we'll touch upon later but he's relevant in this story because in September of 2008 a big rigs fan site no you're not having a stroke I said big rigs fan site yourwinner.com conducted an interview with Sergey who may or may not have shed some light into the development of one of the worst games ever made he confirmed that big rigs was developed in the Ukraine as the average production costs would have been between three to five times higher if Stellar Stone had contracted a studio based in North America or elsewhere in Europe now the quote-unquote engine the game ran under was called eternity which was a custom bit of quote unquote technology that Sergey himself had designed the reason why he's credited as a producer and lead programmer for big rigs is for this reason he had licensed out the engine to stuller Stone in exchange for in his words a large chunk of the company which is I I don't know about that looking at Stellar Stone's back catalog I don't see someone going oh yeah I want a little sip of that gravy boat you know anyway Sergey then claimed he had nothing to do with the actual creation of all this over-the-road racing despite the credits prominently displaying his name and stated in that same interview that he lacked any power to stop big rigs from being released now while that's obviously not something that can be easily confirmed one of his other claims certainly is big rigs used to be something very different and at a time was probably going to be better or at least you know approaching an alpha State originally the plan at some point was for a full-fledged racing title that offered a multitude of cars tracks and uh Collision detection but according to Sergey game Mill publishing decided to cut the project in half and to make two completely separate games out of it so all the load carrying and truck driving would be relegated to Big Rigs whereas all the hot super cars and I guess bouncing asses would be found in midnight race club supercharged while there's no official reasoning for this change Sergey speculated that it was to make more money as they could charge double the amount with two skus versus one while some of his other claims seem a bit iffy I'm inclined to agree here but you don't have to take his word for it because you can just look at the game code big rigs contains lots of shared files between both titles and even has the title screen from Midnight Racing under Club Mega charge I already forgot its name in its source files and not only that you can see all types of [ __ ] up unused data which includes character models trucks with actual trailers and some great Billboards like choose your freedom you re-special and finally for the winners whoa we're getting a little spicy here folks wrapping up with that Sergey interview he revealed that he had offered to send any players unhappy with their purchase of big rigs a free title from the Activision value catalog I.E other shitty games that was dependent of course if said grumpy Gamers had sent him their copy with receipt and registration card and apparently 20 people took him up on that so at least that's something but I don't actually know if that's something even Sergey admits that the game was like not done at all but uh someone at game Mill or Stellar Stone were aware of that because there was an online patch kinda which brought the game up to version 1.0 which is messed up really to say that a fully boxed and released retail game somehow wasn't 1.0 whatever this new version instituted two main changes one the Rival trucker now seems to have some form of AI as they actually start navigating the track now but before they complete the race they always stop short of crossing the finish line so no matter what you do you're always winner is something I would be saying to you if they didn't also change the game's best feature that's a massive downgrade if I've ever seen one and that's it that's all the additional work that was ever officially done on big rig so it's really really really clear that either game Mill or Stellar stone or both couldn't have given less of a [ __ ] when it came to Quality or offering anything approaching a Finnish title they made sure it had Graphics that a vehicle could be controlled kinda and then they shipped it assuming the average Walmart Shopper would never really notice now when all those loads were hauled into those same Walmarts in most likelihood the big rig stink lines would have gone unsniffed relegated to the Dustbin of history with naria soul aware of it but really it was Alex Navarro's classic video review which cemented the game in most people's minds and is probably responsible for the type of cult following it has since amassed God speed you absolute Legend [Music] now we're not quite done yet as for the afternoon race boys Ultra Combo it released just two months later in January of 2004 and while not as Infamous as its big rig brother wasn't a whole lot better Ultra Civil War Fighter 2 Robert E Lee crossed Ulysses S Grant was actually Stellar Stone's final release as they shortly thereafter and when I say shortly I meet immediately filed for bankruptcy as for game Mill well unlike stellarstone they are very much still publishing games today mostly well exclusively licensed ones such as Cartoon Network battle Crashers Cobra Kai The Karate Kid saga continues Frozen Olaf's Quest Nickelodeon car racers Nickelodeon cart Racers 2 Zombieland double tap and GI Joe operation nobody played it now we need to loop back around to Sergey one final time because we're not done with him yet while some of his claims regarding big rigs seem fairly reasonable what he's done in the sub subsequent years is for lack of a better term a bit sus he briefly joined Riot games in 2009 but then struck out on his own with numerous Zombie Survival titles that had interchangeable names War Incorporated Battle Zone infestation Survivor stories infestation day one outbreak New Dawn but none were more uh famous than War Z the original name for infestation that at one point reportedly had 25 million active players yet thousands and thousands of negative reviews for being a cheaply made bordering on copyright infringement DayZ ripoff and he's still making those exact same types of things in 2020 so those claims he had made where he said he had nothing to do with the baffling decisions cut corners and sloppy programming of over-the-road racing one thing you can safely say is that big rigs is one of those legendary Thai titles that while having almost no positive aspects at all its negatives are still so stunning it's designed so flawed and it's code so unfinished that the fascination the greater gaming industry has with it still endures some 17 years later and damn it for that we salute you you big glorious [ __ ] rigs if you know of any other flaming car wrecks deserving of being on our stage shout them out in the comments below drive all night over to my official Twitter or Park your load down at the Flop House VIP patreon and become a big boss nominate the subject of a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching they ask you how you are you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine but you just can't get into it because they would never understand [Music] foreign [Music] what's what's that smell the embarrassing stink of another cataclysmic video game disaster ripe for ridicule and laughter Oh no no no a story of a piece of entertainment so mishandled mismanaged and misguided that it leaves a permanent dark stain of dread and shame never likely to wash off nope not even that on today's episode of what happened we're not talking about a video game a piece of media or even something worth talking about we are talking about ride to Hell retribution it has taken a long long time to hoist this fetid rotting corpse up on our stage in Chains and shackles for your amusement but as the old song goes what better place than here and what better time than now our Twisted tale begins of course and the Forgotten gray Misty valleys of 2008. just to put you in the proper mindset what was on the store's shelves at the time well titles like Grand Theft Auto 4 Fallout 3 Gears of War 2 and on top of them all Silent Hill Homecoming the bigger Publishers and developers were fast coming to grips with AAA HD gaming and some serious Blockbusters were starting to blockbust enter Deep Silver a germany-based publisher who also wanted their piece of the lucrative HD Pi but wasn't having much dollar success releasing such games as stalker the Risen series and other weird Euro Jank that's not going to get you Global success though and they wanted to release a hit especially in North America they teamed up with similar Underdog developer you could Technics who specialized in decade AIDS of obscure Commodore 64 and Amiga games no one's ever heard of the england-based developers first major release most may remember is the a memorable 007 racing which I can barely bring myself to think about even now speaking of racing though that's the only genre you could Technic seemingly got a handle on as the bulk of their work included such Mega hits as big mother truckers Street Racing Syndicate a Cartoon Network thing the fat The Fast and the Furious Pimp My Ride Hot Wheels beat That and finally big mother truckers too remember we live in a world where we never got Silent Hills but we got a sequel to big mother truckers I'm sorry anyway Deep Silver saw uconnect's back catalog and said hmm I'll have a bit of that and immediately got them to work on making some generic biker game most likely trying to fill the road rash shaped void in our hearts that EA refuses to fill the game was simply called ride to hell and there's not much to say about it the first how should I put it concept trailer dropped in late 2008. you know what also dropped in late 2008 a tiny independent TV show called Sons of Anarchy this was important as it most likely changed a lot of the design of right to help moving forward as it had a 2009 release date planned but it would hilariously Miss by a good four years and become derided as one of the worst video games ever released ever but I believe we're getting a little ahead of ourselves so what happened well when red to hell was first announced the entire scope of the project The Design Story Mission structure just everything was vastly different than what oozed out of Yuka technics's ass years later originally it was planned to be a vast open world game racing and exploring the different highways and desert towns of California sort of like GTA but with a much greater focus on vehicular combat you would supposedly have both Gunn and melee moves on and off your bike and there'd be miles and miles of virtual Turf to explore this would be the most ambitious thing yucatechnics had ever and would ever attempt so it's not surprising it fell through for a variety of reasons which we'll now go into Deep Silver was struggling to find their place in the market and the failure of one of their other high-profile titles Cursed Mountain affected the production schedule of right to hell and when I say affected I'm mean almost goddamn killed it this is mainly due to another arm of the publisher Deep Silver Vienna who is Deep Silver Vienna well they were deep silver but based in Vienna while they had a confusing name they actually helped develop some games with curse Mound being the last one they worked on in collaboration with another company when the horror title failed to find any Commercial Success on the Wii and PC in August of 2009 Deep Silver headquarters in Germany disbanded the team altogether problem was they had been helping Yuka Technics in developing ride to hell at the same time which is already complicated enough as it is but you know screw it let's make it even more complicated from then on out for years uconnects plugged away at the game trying to breathe life into this hideous creature it had wrought albeit with the slash budget and less hands to handle all the scalpels and organs that were flopping onto the floor everything had to be changed revised and cut and of course the first thing to go was the entire open world concept it would just be too demanding to get everything to run well under those conditions so it turned into a level based Affair that had driving sections to bridge the gap between levels Combat on motorcycles was also heavily modified and now just amounted to a bunch of qtes and of course a lot of the story content and voice acting which had already been recorded years ago had to also be redone to keep in line with the new design this is the part where you beg for your life you understand what's more is that Sons of Anarchy was almost finished airing by this point in the time right to hell was announced between when it was released six seasons of SOA had come and gone and it proved to be immensely popular during its run when the game was re-unved in February of 2013 a lot had obviously changed even though Vienna folded Deep Silver were still supporting the game and were committed to releasing it but were now bolstered by the popularity of Sons of Anarchy this was painfully obvious as the concept art marketing visuals all leaned heavily on the specific biker iconography the show had prominently featured in fact Deep Silver for some reasons started to see even more potential with the brand instead of like zero and rather than adopt a smart sorto wait and see approach they rushed full on into a stupid let's put all our eggs in one basket approach Not only was right to hell now subtitled retribution reintroduced Deep Silver announced a right to Hell's spin-off blazing your way to PSN and Xbox 360 arcade comes right to Hell Route 666 a motorcycle focused downloadable title that was being developed by black forest games man that's that's so crazy announcing a spin-off before your main entry in the series is even released is is there anyone else as dumb as that but what's even crazier is of course announcing a second spin-off game yes proving that God is truly dead and we are all dancing on his corpse Deep Silver announced ride to Hell beat down which was going to be a brawling action game released exclusively from mobile platforms There is almost zero information for this game other than the logo and at some point in time it may or may not have existed there was never a release date or even developer attached to the product and I think we are all better off for that June of 2013 then rolled around and right to Hell retribution released for the 360 PS3 and windows to very little Fanfare this was a game that few people heard of and even fewer cared about however very quickly the name of right to hell was soon on everyone's lips usually in the context of oh this is so bad why is this happening and please stop this is physically hurting me and featured very heavily on multiple lists of top 10 worst games released of that year and maybe even ever for those that don't know it did take place during the 1960s and in California so that much was retained it focused on Jack Black's character from Brutal Legend as he returns to his old stomping grounds after a few tours in the military he and his kid brother run a foul a bunch of evil bikers fancy that and the kid Brothers quickly killed off for reasons I can't remember and didn't bother to research further the slash budget diminished Workforce and not having a support team guiding their hand you could Technics were maybe not held in check maybe left to their own devices too much and maybe simply just needed to ship a product quality be damned it's of course then resulted in all the cut Corners Rush cut scenes Bland gameplay and Oodles of unfixed bugs so you wouldn't be shocked to see the catastrophically low 19 point average on Metacritic and 15 on game rankings and remains at the very least one of the worst reviewed titles of the entire generation a choice bit of critique comes from egm where they stated other games may have offered less content for more money or come up shorter in specific individual areas but I don't think there's ever been a game that does so many things so universally poorly the average score they graced it with was a 0.5 so that closes the book on ride no no no hold up because we're we're not done yet you look like [ __ ] Jake with all this um not great press about the game Deep Silver then canceled the [ __ ] out of both right to Hell Route 666 and ride to Hell beat down and whoever was developing Beatdown is assumed to be closed or never existed at all wait what about you Technics you scream with your clenched fist in the air well weirdly enough and a first for what happened they are seemingly not dead I think the last title they have credited to their name is NASCAR 15 which was released in 2015 for the 360 and PS3 which is weird concerning both the PS4 and Xbox One had been out for almost two years at that point your guess is as good as mine their website is still active and while they have been firing scores of people for the last two years their doors do seem to be currently open so I guess that's something nah it's it's actually not as for deep silver they have trendsmogrified themselves into THQ Nordic and have made some great moves since ride to hell like attaining both the Darksiders and Saints Row franchise and Publishing battle Chasers Night War they also published Mighty number nine and were the ones that made the anime fans on Prom Night trailers like an anime fan on prom night so yeah it's a mixed bag right the hell certainly made an impact in the game industry when it released and while it wasn't for anything even approaching positive it still made a Mark if you'd like to scream and point at particularly ghastly gaming garbage fire you can certainly do so by writing a comment in the thing or sending a prompt and professional email to matte muscles gmail.com thanks for watching I guess hello and welcome to another explosively depressing episode of what happened the show where we crack open the powder kegs of fiery failure that have left shock waves all over the bomb puns cause blobber man ever since we opened up our stage there's been a constant hum a buzz if you will to cover one of the earliest most spectacular faux pas in the HD generation of gaming Bomberman act 0 or 0 hour I I confuse the two sometimes anyway I've said it before so I'll say it again the seventh generation was rough y'all dog rough because breaking through those skyrocketing budgets and unreal threes poor texture loading and coming out the other side as a success was a fairly rare occurrence hudsonsoft made a name for themselves to the 80s and 90s where franchises like Adventure Island Bonk bloody Roar and on top of them all my lawn's secret Castle so they weren't the best equipped to compete with the Gloppy gray Shooters of the HD era and their Premier character Bomberman was the illest equipped of all now let's take a closer look at this man of bombs this bomber man adorable little expressive eyes bright colorful costume he's just so very and of course he wields weapons of mass destruction that cause pillars of fiery death that chase people down hallways gee I wonder which of these aspects will make it into the Xbox 360. hey kids do you know bomber man yeah shut the [ __ ] up this is bobberman Extreme are you prepared for his ACT zero no good then get ready for body horror techno organic cyber infusion big fat anime titties no local multiplayer all the things you love about Bomberman so tell your folks buy me zero out act zero or go to hell yeah oh that's not good for my voice so yeah for HD consoles Hudson soft try they they tried something different with Bomberman now if history is any indicator and it most of the time is whenever a new generation kicks off the first genre that blows up the hardest is what other companies will try to emulate for the next few years for example Grand Theft Auto 3 spawned many similar open world sandboxes therefore Gears of War spawned many Gears of War [Music] Japanese Publishers were already trying to adjust the fluctuating tastes of the West even at the tail end of the PS2 and Xbox's life you'd start to see cheap attempts to cash in on violent more darker Affair stuff like konami's Nano breaker Capcom shadow of Rome or Beatdown or namco's Urban Reign so the seeds were being planted nice and early in addition with Xbox Live and online multiplayer's burgeoning popularity Hudson also felt it best to get on that train as well and hey they chose to do so with their Flagship franchise which is something that should have never happened but why did this all happen well an article via the cartel that no longer exists online but was archived written by one John Lee paints a picture on why is it gotta be like this Hudson felt this overwill only need to please its shareholders so games like Bomberman x0 came to be before the US division of Hudson was fully established the remaining creative mines and Hudson wanted to update Bomberman to cater to westerners the company believed that the US was an opportunity to grow again unfortunately the game was developed in a vacuum and it was based on what the Japanese thought Western taste in gaming were without the original bomb man Creator on board to protect the brand and without input from U.S operations which at the time didn't have any real developers on board yet Bomberman was thrust into a post-apocalyptic world that was dark and Sinister now for him to fit in this horrific post-apocalyptic World Bomberman needed to go through some changes from this little guy into a far more generic Bland armored killing synthoid that wouldn't be out of place on any PC accelerator card from like 1998. some people have theorized that Hudson may have taken inspiration from the original Bomberman design feature it on the NES box art but like yeah who does that who in the right mind would willingly Implement a terrible version of their Marquee character into a brand regardless it seems the original Bomberman was indeed a source of inspiration because in a Japanese interview upon the game's reveal a very reasonable question was posed to lead game designer koichi takashita the Bomberman Series so far featured cartoony characters but this time it's presented in realistic 3D options like cell shading could have been a new way of expressing personality so why did you go for realistic 3D characters the new world and design was in order from our producer right at the start while man's image has been skewed towards younger audiences the past few years this time we dropped the comical appearance and decided to build fresh off the origin of Bomberman the story was already there and the original game on the famicom in the manual described a story set in a cramped under underground dwelling where they aim to escape to the surface we looked at that and asked the question what if it were realistic so it became Bomberman act zero it wasn't going to be a guide in the story or a what if tale it's another take on the source material that's terrible anyway not content with only just having a muscular badass robo-cyborg Synthroid Hudson realized that American Gamers like other things like bazongas as was the style at the time thus they also took pink bomber this gal right here and Todd McFarland her into Oblivion making sure to place emphasis on certain specific areas these same areas of course got special attention in game as well now that's all fine and good but why reboot it at all acts zero what does that even mean in regards to Bomberman is there any meaning behind the title of act zero to us zero means a brand new beginning and a fresh start in fact early in development it was called Bomberman begins but because a movie about a certain bat themed character came out that title couldn't be used act 0 better invoked the image we wanted from begins anyway okay sure whatever dude now this all seems really ill-advised doesn't it well John graner a former boss at Hudson USA tried his best to explain why this happened to planet Earth I think this was a case where Hudson and we cautioned against it we said don't call it Bomberman you might piss people off they didn't quite get that and said we want to make Bomberman new you know people don't love that new they want new features or something like that but not a new character their point was to make a game that looked new but also maintain the features and sensibilities of Bomberman that is a logical plan a logical approach to putting out good products over a period of time but they changed the character and world too much there were good things in axero that everybody ignored because they were so pissed about the character um you're not wrong about that last point now if you want to make a game with a dark edgy theme with violent overtones and even a bit of titillation that's fine create a brand new franchise that offers those things but if you take a character series that's been established for years decades even and decide to do the same thing well when is that ever worked ha [Music] oh right never fans did not take this new Direction well but it's easy to assume that a percentage of players that enjoyed the Bomberman of old would be able to ignore the ugly reskin and still enjoy that same tried and true gameplay those people would be wrong one of the key things of playing classic Bomberman is situational awareness being able to see the entire screen and make split-second decisions about bomb placement and enemy positions ax0 decided for some reason to shift the camera angle to be far lower limiting that field of vision once again that Japanese interview seems to question this really bad design Choice when people hear Bomberman they think of the bird's eye view perspective why have you adopted the new fpb mode the classic Bomberman gameplay is still intact that part of the game has been completed and it is terrific there are people who wanted to see the this new action from the bomber man's point of view we built the fpb mode to satiate that desire there was some trial and error before reaching its current state like testing on a first-person shooter style of camera however we still respected that the traditional gameplay was about scanning the battlefield and thinking things through it's different but it's still the same traditional game of Bomberman so I think we've done a good job no you didn't okay we we need to unpack this fpb stands for first person battle but it's not first person at all but rather a weird third person behind the back sort of thing it simultaneously shows less of the battlefield than the original games but it's also not as interesting or novel than if it were actually in first person so this literally pleases nobody and was one of the main complaints fans and reviewers lobbied against act zero it also had a life bar and a Bomberman game they even knew this was all a big mistake because fpb is its own separate mode as the standard mode takes place from a more traditional perspective why this just wasn't a toggle in the options is anyone's guess now that's just how the action is presented the camera angle it's framed in so what could be worse than that well remember all those great memories you had I'm playing two four or even eight player bomb men with friends well forget all that because for the reasons that can only be a tribute to two I guess the focus on Xbox Live all forms of local multiplayer were axed not only did this indeed piss off much of the fan base as it might be the first Mainline Bomberman title since the NES original with no local multiplayer it also ensured that the game would be pretty much useless in the future as yeah no one has logged on to the servers in years except for maybe stop skeletons from fighting good thing she's got those ropes attached to your chest hold hold them puppies up now we've saved the best or worst for last one of the most fundamental of fundamentals that act zero lacked was complete absence of any sort of say feature no Auto Sales manual saves and before you say passwords there wasn't any passwords so you better clear those 99 levels on one single life because if you don't you start the whole thing over from the beginning I hope you don't mess up on like level 98 I'm surprised the game didn't try to make passwords edgy somehow like bio codes or bomb memories which lets you save the tortured mutated thoughts of your bomber man or whatever regardless this completed the triumvirate a massive gameplay issues that blew up this attempt at trying to reboot the franchise so with all these problems as well as the aesthetic choices that fans didn't really appreciate it might come as no surprise that Barman x0 is one of the lowest rated titles of the generation and was a sales disaster for Hudson soft John Lee in his article stated Bomberman act zero was a low point for the company sales for the series dropped to a low about 20 000 units from a high of more than a million copies per game during its peak in the 90s well that's only because the haters and the tractors spread their baby lies about act zero and weren't real Gamers according to a blog post on Hudson sauce now defunct official website I'm here to tell you the Thunderman x0 is actually pretty damn cool if you think I'm talking out of my ass check out my Xbox Live gamer card I'm actually playing the game and enjoying it forget the haters out there and all the Lemmings who jumped on the bashing bandwagon this is the first Bomberman game that tracks players stats on a worldwide level it's all you smack talkers out there it's time to put your money where your mouth is you get scored for every kill so for those of you with the realest skills can boast while people like me giggle when we accidentally win but if you're still a hater then go play your Bomberman PSP and go play with your Hello Kitty toys too this I command if you'd like to know more about ax0 want to check out some snazzy wallpapers hit up our official game page now thank God okay modern red is is fine nowadays there are more traditional titles that came out after so it didn't even kill the series there if you know of any other really bad or stupid game I can't even finish um just give a post comment in the comments below or go to the patreon and check that out go play with your Hello Kitty toys are you serious [Music] hello and welcome to another positively fantastic episode of what happened the show where what are we doing today boobsy what oh Bubsy right right wait who yeah I don't I don't know him right right okay yes yes Bubsy yeah uh which game are we doing though all right then the show where we exhaustively research and break down some of the gaming Industries filthiest little failures and there's no failure filthier then Bubsy 3D our story starts in 1984 where two co-founders of Activision these guys broke a way to start a new similarly named company in Accolade who is both a publisher and developer and not amazing at either yeah there was a turken thrown in there universal Soldier for the Genesis but they didn't really have a quotation marks hit until the original Bubsy game which was cleverly subtitled clawed Encounters of the Third Kind and and just look at this guy man wherever did they get the idea for such a fresh character an anthropomorphic mammalian mascot with two Despair and flaunts his naked form right in your face except for one article of clothing team I guess we'll never know oh come on you know I'm your hero Bubsy is credited as being the brainchild of one Michael Berlin who is the main designer for the game which went into production for the Genesis in late 1991. an SNES version was then also penciled in with the port to primarily be handled by one solid state software Bubsy was then released in 1993 and um was a platformer you you can certainly say that about it now reviews for it at the time were on the better end of the spectrum But ultimately the little fur ball was but one face among dozens of a high school yearbook lineup of rip-offs and clones regardless this first title in the series proved to be a hit for Accolade who around this time badly needed one the logical thing then of course was to fart out a sequel the very next year thus the plainly titled Bubsy 2 was released on both consoles as well as adding a Game Boy version to the max you know in case you needed your slavering Bubsy addiction satiated while on the road and uh Taco Bell even flirted with producing an animated TV series for the no pants wearing cat but then just as quickly regain their senses always looking at the downside later the same year that same 1994 there was another Bubsy game this time of the fractured furry suit tails of whatever for the Jaguar which is at least on brand as you had a bobcat make its way onto a Jaguar if they could have made another sequel in atari's ill-fated Panther and the links then assertive Trifecta for this stupid idea I just made up would be complete handled by a magitek this time Bubsy Jaguar like most Jaguar games wasn't much better or more advanced than anything available on 16-bit systems and was seen as a critical and Commercial failure in fact Bubsy 2 wasn't even a toe Bean on the Paw of the franchise as it also performed poorly compared to that first outing the publishing arm of Accolade then turned to Michael Berlin once again to write the the ship the ship of Bubsy to get the series back on track God this feels so weird to say as Michael hadn't actually touched the series since Claude Encounters of the Third the name of this new company was eidetic and seemed like they would be the perfect Studio to Shepherd the venerated prestigious Bubsy franchise the problem however was that 32-bit systems were starting to come out with 3D seemingly looking like the next big thing which for a lot of developers wasn't the easiest transition eidetic was based in Bend Oregon and started as a very small team less than 10 which is something that needed to change when they accepted the task of bringing Bubsy screaming incline into 3D [Music] they started by hiring anyone that they could which usually meant young programmers or artists straight out of school and devoid of any real experience Bubsy was only scheduled for the PlayStation initially which was just starting to blow up at the time now while that was exciting this was to be the team's first fully 3D game on brand new hardware and the IP they were working on was a mascot platformer which presented a problem no such thing really existed yet leaving them little to work off of Richard Hamm a young hire at the time had Grim memories during this exploratory period working on Bubsy 3D we knew we weren't doing well the writing was on the wall and it wasn't very polite I knew the game was far from perfect but I took pride in doing the best I could every step of the way my perspective on making games was still being formed back then but it was still my dream job one of the most fundamental problems for eidetic was marrying the the PlayStation's unsubtle and rather stiff d-pad to full 3d navigation something that it wasn't really designed for it's the reason why other developers found unique solutions for character control or designing around these limitations whether they be tomb raiding or box breaking this ambition to be fully 3D was such a core problem in terms of how Bubsy played but it wasn't something eidetic could scrap and just redo all over again especially when had Accolade breathing down their neck the publisher wasn't exactly posting record high quarters around this time as the last few Bubsy games failed to perform as well as most of accolade's recent output God Ackley aside from Bubsy I know I've seen their logo somewhere else before [ __ ] [Music] since there wasn't really a good template in which to model a 3D platform around yet the team looked towards an unlikely source of inspiration that they really shouldn't have taken as a source of inspiration there really wasn't such a thing as a 3D platformer all we had for inspiration was another PlayStation game called jumping flash jumping flash had very small levels and it was in first person with doom style controls that have been well received so we decided to try and build on it let's go third person let's have bigger levels let's bring in stuff from the other Bubsy games let's make it really high resolution we had a higher resolution than anything on the PlayStation at the time and we suffered hugely from making that decision we went for high res as opposed to lots of textures because no one else was doing it and that's why the game had a stark look major portions of it are untextured because all the memory was being committed to that resolution uh okay all right um uh let's think about this you if you have all your memory doing one thing supporting the stupid high resolution for example then how much do you think is left over for everything else that's right nothing well this certainly goes towards explaining the untextured look of Bubsy 3D it also explains the lack of everything else there's so few things in this thing like in general enemies objects weapons you know video game stuff yes there are Atomic symbols to collect which is basically what you spend most of the game doing and to be fair collecting some type of currency or power up or logo is what most Platformers are all about however when your PlayStation game looks like the protagonist was sucked into a super FX chip game it doesn't really matter if the Bare Essentials like running into an object equals collecting it is any type of great accomplishment opt-in for some weird high resolution mode simply because no one else was is a testament to eidetics and experience that was the biggest hurdle yeah the memory we couldn't build what we wanted to build we couldn't draw what we wanted to draw on our development kit Bubsy ran fine all the crazy colors and checkered walls looked great together on the PlayStation retail kit it was impossible there was no way our engine could support it so we had to bring in the fog then bring in more fog it just destroyed the sensation now among all these fundamental problems with the gameplay and performance work began piling up for eidetic from other sources Accolade then ordered a port for the Sega Saturn which the team then needed to allocate time to which if you know anything about the Saturn would be a Monumental task in and of itself the console was not built to handle 3D very much well at all and unlike say the PSX which was already struggling to get Bubsy to work in the first place it wasn't exactly the most encouraging start Accolade also asked for them to start prototyping for another Bubsy 3D sequel on top of that and on top of that they were also in pre-production on a completely different game altogether account concept called jumper no this is another jumper and isn't even really the jumper I just made this joke for jumper was to center around a post-apocalyptic future in which Humanity have been overtaken by a massive robotic presence with the player being able to project their minds into the bodies of various enemies so yeah not that jumper but this jumper or even this this game was going to use bubsy's barely functioning engine so with that many irons in the fire a few things eventually had to give Accolade then told us to put jumper on the shelf and to focus on Bubsy but they probably should have told us to do that a whole lot sooner that whole time was just insane I don't think I'd call it hubris I'd just call it ignorance now even with that burden temporarily lifted one thing that was still slowing down progress on Bubsy was having to develop it for two platforms that couldn't have been any more polar opposite and and how they handled Graphics there's a reason why a lot of multi-platform gains in the fifth generation had special custom Saturn versions that ran on completely different engines or were at the very least released months or sometimes years after their PlayStation counterparts Saturn was just an altogether different Beast so unique Solutions needed to be found to get things to properly run on it it was only at the 11th Hour where Accolade gave in and decided to cancel the Saturn version as the months of slamming heads into keyboards yielded no Real Results this is where work on Bubsy 3D finally started to progress in Earnest during this last period of development one thing the team fooled around with which would later be a handy takeaway was bubsy's unique two-player mode essentially the first player controlled the horrible Bobcat on their own while the second player can shoot the atom pickups from a fixed perspective sort of like a sniper well it seemed odd at the time it would be something that eidetic would come back to for a future project now even without all these time wasters and progression blockers Bubsy needed more time to smooth out its very rough very brightly colored polygonal edges the thought of our next adventure already has me tingling with excitement Accolade refused all requests for a delay in its release as they needed a big Marquee title to take advantage of the burgeoning 3D Boom so yes they actually wound up shipping what you see here this is the finished game now an important thing to also note is that 1996 was a slapper of a year and absolutely the wrong one to have shipped Bubsy 3D in maybe if it had started as some obscure 32x or Jaguar release the year prior people wouldn't have noticed it as much and therefore not be the subject of ridicule that it is today what dumb fax artem facts and bubsy's November 96 release date squarely put it in the public eye as it had to follow up two other notable entries in the platforming genre you uh might have heard of them so uh Hey gamer Gamers from 1996 let me let me put a hypothetical out to you which of these would you rather play and let me alter this just a bit if I may uh we're gonna use some different footage here but the effect is essentially the same now which of these electronic pieces of entertainment look worthy of your sixty dollars think carefully now joking aside hindsight is 20 20 but if Accolade had given the team a few months more it could have been possible for them to work out enough Kinks and Bubsy to make it more playable or at the very least less embarrassing however at the end of the day eidetic had to take their licks and oh the licking did come Richard Hammer calls the moon in the studio as you know uh not super positive it was dark after Bubsy it hurt getting those worst game of all time remarks accolade let us go we were on our own there were layoffs and the game almost killed eidetic but we were a small team so that helped there was a lot of gallows humor we focused on the little successes in the meantime we were out there talking to every publisher who had opened their door promising we had learned our lesson we had that prototype of the Bubsy sequel where we'd tuned the controls on the PlayStation d-pad to mimic as best we could the movement of Mario 64 and it looked great so this is where the story kind of takes an unexpected turn despite making one of if not the most critically panned game on the PlayStation Sony decided to give eidetic a chance and set them to work on a stealth Action game which had been pitched by a producer at 989 Studios that stealth Action game turned out to be siphon filter this is where those lessons that the team learned on Bubsy specifically that two-player Mini-Game came into play and while not on the same level as something like metal gear solid the first game in the series was a critical smash with eidetic going on to four more sequels they were then bought up by Sony and were officially renamed Sony Bend creating two Uncharted handheld spin-offs on some forgotten handheld before returning to consoles with 2019's days gone wow so unlike a lot of developers you've come across during what happened I did it were indeed very close to disaster but were able to pull away from the threat of closure using their mistakes to inform their future and to make better smarter games overall Richard Hamm however didn't see much of his former Studio's success as he moved on to a creative director position at Splash damage in 2008 where he worked on a particular first-person shooter that shall we say pushed him over the brink and into retirement from the world of video game development his parting words on the topic of Bubsy 3D are also fairly high in sodium we did the best we could and we tried to carry through decisions that had already been made maybe the rest of the team wants to just forget it and never bring it up again but I'm still proud of Bubsy 3D I never stopped being proud of it at the time the young kids in their 20s writing reviews for magazines didn't have any idea what it took to make games to them their responses were Justified to us it was [ __ ] and Bubsy 3D deserved better today things are even more Cutthroat so personally I'm out I'm done with that [ __ ] okay Contra geez now honestly that final quote is a lot to unpack when you realize it's coming from one of the creative heads on brink a what happened episode that yes doesn't really exist I teased it but certainly will get its time on our stage soon enough as for Bubsy himself nothing really he died with that first 3D entry and let us never speak of him again ah Fine Chinese company billionsoft purchased the Accolade name for some reason and the rights to Bubsy for some reason and released a terrible game in 2017 courtesy of black forest games then released another terrible game earlier this year you know when there's so many well-loved characters heroes and franchises floating around alone and unused in the universe of video games it just makes you think how they all deserve a second shot far far more than Bubsy the [ __ ] bobcat so if you're aware of any other fuming festivals of farty failure within the Realms of movies games or Etc Screech it up in the comments below or claw your way over to the flophouse VIP patreon to officially cast your vote on our next topic see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] it's another episode of what happened and it was only a matter of time before 2k's yearly grapple-based glitch fest made its way into our ring to rightly get food by the many many fans who are familiar with WWE products go grab a beer put on your 600 shirt and yank Mr soccer on because we're going to rewind a few Jesus decades to properly tell the story of one of if not the biggest gaming disaster of 2019 WWE 2K 20. [Applause] thank you It's 1999 the state of wrestling video games is very very different I.E better there's things like choice there's no micro transactions loot boxes or rustlers locked behind 150 Dollar pay walls it was the Golden Age The Attitude Era of wrestling games it literally was you see competition is good for business you had the Aki engine for both WWF and WCW there were acclaims attempts at making ECW a thing EA even made a sudden but very brief run-in and at the very bottom there was Nitro and Thunder by Inland Productions three all you suckers out there you want to play the game there was one more other Outsider who went on to become the big dog however and that was yukes who emphasized fast arcade action and Stellar presentation which gave rise to the smackdown series on the PlayStation one and for a time it was good until it wasn't when THQ eventually fell into what we'll call the troubles 2K Games and picked up the WWE license because of course they did fans had hoped a new publisher would be the shot in the arm the series needed and [Music] see yeah it didn't it didn't quite turn out that way in 2019 however things started to take a turn or swerve if you will in May Uke's senior vice president hiromi ferrata made a rare announcement about the company's future specifically on their wrestling titles ferrata revealed they would be making a completely separate game from their WWE products and stated why they felt the need to do this having no competitor isn't healthy at all when we had competitors in the wrestling space we were determined not to lose and that was a good motivator for creating something great we are trying to launch a new wrestling game of course we will retain the WWE team but we are also aware that our creators are beginning to lose sight of their passion and confidence and becoming focused only on completing assigned tasks that's not the direction ux wants to go in so in order to compensate we're going to start a new wrestling project less than three months later 2K would then announced that ux would no longer be helming this year's game which was only two months away from launch despite ferrata claiming they'll be maintaining that WWE team so what the hell happened well Justin Leeper the director writer of The Road to WrestleMania mode in SmackDown 09 10 and 11 in a YouTube video dropped some drama bombs stating that problems with ux went further back than most my realize Mr Leeper stated that THQ in their later years were apparently trying to transition away from ux and attempted to find somebody else to pull on the sweaty WWE jocks you can see some evidence of this with THQ San Diego's All-Stars as well as various other projects that were green lit But ultimately canceled nothing really worked out in the end all stars failed to sell and there were very few Studios with any experience in the genre available this was all exasperated by WWE demanding a yearly schedule for their games as they constantly need new product to boost their bottom line [Music] that song the sukes just stayed where they were with tensions slowly mounting between themselves WWE and THQ with that in mind juke's attitude towards the WWE grind was pretty clear in the rest of ferrata's statement right now looking at the market demands players are expecting something new every time we release a game and we feel like we haven't achieved what we really wanted to do for example many cases we're still using old assets so we're not able to do some things in the way that we intended therefore in a statement from 2K in August as we've continued to invest in the WWE 2K franchise we've seen the visual concepts team display incredible passion talent and commitment to the future of the series we thank you for their years of partnership and are excited to see what the visual concepts team brings to the franchise moving forward 2K also put out a brief promotional trailer for the upcoming version of the game that would provide a glimpse into the future of what you can expect from visual concepts vision for the WWE 2K series which of course is a statement that has aged poorly this is what's going to give us confidence recognition success everything we've ever wanted your earth science notebook is going to do all that no Uke's getting buried and booked into the ground the visual concepts in a super very not enviable position they were low on Time Manpower and experience and had to slap the game together with just a few months notice I mean sure they had been involved with the games for the last few years but even with that it couldn't have been a smooth transition Justin Leeper Put It Best in his video on how taking over a project like this with just a few months left is super messed up let's say you had an apartment for 20 years living in that same apartment and your landlord comes you and says you got to leave this apartment but leave all your stuff there and you okay you you leave and he immediately brings somebody else in and says now you have to live in this apartment make it work and the new tenant is going well I don't know where where's where's the key I don't know where how to unlock this door uh what light switch does what and that is what has happened with the two WWE game series and the problem is that 2K wants you to pay the rent so I think by now we have a better understanding why [ __ ] gotta be this way which way do I mean well [Music] so yeah let's just Swanton bomb right into it because of the shift of Developmental responsibilities and release dates that absolutely cannot change it's pretty clear that everyone involved with WWE 2k20 knew they'd be shipping an unfinished rushed buggy mess just about everything had and still has some sort of issue be it the Creator wrestler game stability missing modes and features hair physics animations Ai and just whatever the hell this is oh God footage of the game was delayed until just a few weeks before a launch and we can see why like most big companies that have a shoddy product they're still willing to sell keeping footage out of the public eye until the last possible second his attack took in which not to lose those precious precious pre-orders which is a whole other thing we're not going to get into no I'm not doing it absolutely not doing what the thing with pre-orders is that the deluxe edition would get you access to the game a few days in advance wait you didn't think I meant 2K 20. no I meant 2k19 and and 2k18 as well 2k20 did not offer any option for anyone to play it any early to hopefully squash any inkling that something was amiss but these are WWE fans their natural state is assuming something is or will be a mess I'm gonna take that marker bring it to your grandmother's nursing home and cross out parts of her chart so when the nurse goes to give her turn down service she won't know to flip her over that's right I want to give your grandmother bed sores regardless just this one deviation in the yearly plan should have been enough of a red flag to let players know that this was gonna be a rough year you realize what you get to me entrances are also an early indicator of the quality of what you should be expecting and things kicked off for rather kicked down with whoever this is supposed to be this looks like the Madame tussos version of The Rock I'm I'm sorry that's harsh Madame too so you do incredible work regardless it's just staggering how the like the fifth WWE game on this generation of Hardware could wind up looking like this Al here's Dwayne and Mummy Returns look there's no difference who modeled this what was their name it doesn't matter what's your name is what's more damning about all of this is that entrances are put together with the strictest of guidelines and scrutiny as WWE needs to sign off and approve of every single one every single year and I guess this was acceptable wow what else did you get when you pre-ordered why the fiend of course when the WWE's few bright spots but unlike say the last few years which locked desirable Superstars behind pre-order tactics the theme was not available at launch oh no you had you had to wait for the Are You Afraid of the Dark DLC pack to drop first before you could access him this was handled differently than previous years where you got the new hot wrestler as soon as you booted up the game and that DLC hasn't even dropped yet wait what it has oh okay sure if you didn't pre-order the game then you'd have to Pony up another 15 for the Goosebumps pack as it is the only way to play with the fiend and his inhumanoids wait wait wait wait okay it gets better if you bought the 130 dollar collector's edition you'd snag a Nifty plaque signed by either Ray Ray Kurt Angle or Adam Edge Copeland and well I mean you would if you weren't of the dozens of fans who took to Twitter to complain their plaques were missing said autographs one such fan contacted Edge and said WWE and 2K were ignoring his complaints and asked that the former Rated R Superstar would be able to help in one of the few classy moves of this story Edge replied lame seems like it happened to a few other people too somebody dropped the ball I'm filming a movie right now but when I get home I'll get a PO Box everyone who didn't get one signed I'll follow you on here give you the address and you can send it to me to sign after this interaction 2K of course then decided to address all this with the same statement they had been issuing to any of the thousands of complaints people had please go to www.2kgames.2k help me and fill out a support ticket so we can get started on helping you if you're familiar with any major publisher like Bethesda EA or Ubisoft you'll be equally familiar with the futile process that is support tickets next up are the numerous and just really weird changes and omissions found within 2k20 such as the new control scheme it was apparently streamlined for new players here is that new control scheme and as it turns out many players and reviewers felt this to be clunkier than last year's title as it really didn't stream or align anything at all players were just getting used to the last control layout so why mess with it now apparently the only reason this was done was that 2K felt there needed to be some fundamental but surface level changes to signal in this uxlist era you know even if it made things worse create a belt is also missing this year for no particular reason and 2K promised it would be patched in later and of course as of the time of this writing it is not let's keep going the moment you hit on the EULA screen upon booting up 2k20 you know all that stuff you are now locked to that game via some type of digital blood ritual and you can now no longer go back to WWE 2k19 to upload any custom images in any form this occurs even if you get the game refunded and removed 2K 20 from your library on Steam the only way around this is to make a new account and buy the title a second time this is presumably one of the ways 2K politely nudges players to stick with the new game and not go back to last year's Edition this all culminated to a fever pitch when fixed WWE 2k20 started trending worldwide on Twitter one of the few times the WWE would not want their brand to be seen so publicly all social media accounts for the game especially their Twitter were assaulted by thousands of comments demanding answers or at least some type of statement Hall of Fame 2K Games now on the field pleading with the crowd for for some kind of Sanity oh in a barrage of pretzels now knocking unconscious wow this is uh this is a black day from wrestling video games where was create a belt how come custom entrances were crashing and soft lock in the game when are the patches coming so on and so forth well the launch day came and went without a peep from 2K and instead they used their Twitter to promote an online tournament with every subsequent tweet getting hammered by the angry mob we were just embarrassed in front of the entire school and currently 672 people on the internet answers finally came after four days of Silence where 2K said in a plainly worded statement we are listening closely to the feedback that's been shared regarding WWE 2k20 and aware of the concerns some players are reporting we're working hard to investigate these concerns and address them as necessary we expect to have an initial patch ready in the next two weeks with others to follow stay tuned to WWE game social media channels for more I intentionally skipped something in this story however saving it for the main event prior to launch 2K had made it known that its latest WWE title would arrive with something most fans expected a massive day one patch that never came now odds are that when 2K and visual concepts got together to take a good hard honest look at the enormity of the work that was left to do and things to fix it's safe to assume they decided to roll everything into an even massive ear patch and to release it later hence their earlier statement so they canceled the day one patch and turned it into the day 14 patch what's more is that nothing much has seemingly changed and the following very vague notes 2K lists improvements across the board but players are still reporting many of these things are very not fixed at all and in some cases or even worse what's the matter with you what's the matter with you custom entrances and custom Arenas are still causing crashes the physics are still very WWE 2K 20 ish create a belt is still not there and the game's visuals have not been improved but tables have been added to single matches so you know yay if you're one of the dudlies oh my God okay here's the thing it's not impossible for games to turn themselves around after a series of huge embarrassing your balls are being exposed on stream mistakes but unlike no man's sky or Final Fantasy 14 products that are built to engage the player for years sports games especially in this generation are often some of the most disposable entertainment in the gaming industry with that Year's entry often invalidating the last so 2K 20 is going to be abandoned faster than say I don't know kofi's match against Brock nf5 by Lester here's the cover they got a new champion and with the less than Stellar feedback on the most recent patch things are not off to a good start in rebuilding the trust with fans now this is just crazy and and I'm not a big CEO man but I think now would be a good time to offer your fan base some apology DLC maybe make the fiend free for everyone to smooth things over is is that all right can you afford that 2K I think you can because make no mistake unless they manage to turn this around which they are not on track to do this might damage the brand for years at least and forever at the most Also let's not forget the poor some [ __ ] at visual concepts then most likely been getting visits from the captain for the last six months or more and will probably be doing so for a good while longer all because Vince and the WWE top brass refuse to give video games the time they need to be video games as for Uke's they've made no statement so far regarding wrestling projects since the summer and while they've been busy with other titles like the latest Earth Defense Force it's unclear when they'll be returning to the ring but let's hope that when they do the game they'll make will be elite all right so if you're aware of any other ginormous gobbly gookers of gaming disaster punch it up in the comments below or drop kick your way over to the smackdown hotel or the Flop House VIP patreon to officially vote on what we've taken to the squared Circle next see you next time jabronis and thanks for watching [Music] thank you so let's rewind the clock and take a look back at one of these schlockiest sleaziest game disasters ever your [ __ ] you guy game you [ __ ] you guy game almost a year ago we called you out on the very first episode of wahhapa and now's your moment to be strung up and quartered in front of our ravenous slovering audience now it is time to talk about you the guy game but for context video games are not easy to make they generally take more time planning and foresight than most other mediums and the sheer amount of possibilities to mess it all up are numerous and very very scary such is the case for today's episode which focuses of course on the slimy sleazeball Garbo fire that is the guy game this bad version of You Don't Know Jack but with boobies was published by the Gathering Developers and produced by top heavy Studios the guy game released on the PS2 Xbox and windows in 2004 and whoa whoa whoa whoa no this sorted story doesn't really start here no because the story of top heavy Studio starts with Nintendo and of all things Metroid Jeff spangenberg was a former employee of perennial Flop House favorite Acclaim who got hoofed out in 1998 after a string of successful titles most notably the Turok franchise and less notably Vex he then founded retro game studios in Austin Texas and rapidly started poaching Talent from in a very salty move a claim and other notable developers like valve ritual and LucasArts Nintendo were looking for a strong American Studio to spearhead development on their upcoming GameCube and thus retro put 4 more games into development a little much a little ambitious considering they only had one dolphin development kit but you know I'm sure it'll work out those titles were an RPG known as Raven blade a monster truck racer a football title and an action game that featured several female protagonists Jeff spangenberg for his part did little to nothing except for purchasing expensive cars crashing them into strip clubs and sometimes showing up to work safe knowing Nintendo was heavily invested in his company and that he could do no wrong he was wrong he got a rude awakening when Nintendo of Japan execs including Shigeru Miyamoto made a visit to Retro and pretty much hated everything that they were working on the football monster truck and Raven blade games were all canceled but they saw a modicum of potential with their action game Prototype Miyamoto was playing with the idea of a first-person Metroid game already at this stage so everyone is redirected onto said action game which would become Metroid Prime but Matt you shout with frost spilling from your open mouth get to the titties don't don't worry we're making our way there throughout all those Peaks and valleys now along with all those cancellations Nintendo started to realize that Jeff spangenberg was becoming a liability his Fastlane lifestyle was constantly clashing with the company's squeaky clean image and while it seems a bit harsh to get rid of employee just because they like to party when it was revealed that jump and Jeff was running an eki softcore porn site using the computers at retro Nintendo kind of hated that see Jeff would regularly invite local strippers over to his mansion and dubbed the collection of picks and videos as sinful summer and open the website for it for some reason now if Nintendo catches win that you are using machines but with their money and on their time to upload your sex capades you should probably start dusting off your resume the big end then offered to buy out Jeff's stake in retro games since he was the founder in exchange for him leaving and even through low ball offer Adam putting him in a kind of compromising position either make a bit of money now or make zero Jeff took the bit of money so the man that shepherded the Turok franchise and started the company that would make Metroid goddamn Prime was now free to do whatever he wanted the world was his oyster and he still had enough Capital to start a whole new Venture so what would be more logical than to just make a cheap FMV game about drunk college girls showing their boobie boobies during spring break yeah that makes sense that game would quickly find itself at the center of a controversy get banned from stores and ultimately lead everyone down a path of absolute destruction so what happened well we already established that Mr spangenberg enjoyed a certain how shall we save lifestyle he then thought that instead of making moronic video games that only children enjoy why not make something that he himself was interested in thus the guy game was born within the mostly vacuous Halls of his mind Palace to do all this he founded a new company this time the cleverly named top heavy Studios and set to work on something that would surely catch fire in the lewd and crude mid-auts girls and their boobs the guy game was essentially an FMV game show printed onto PS2 and Xbox discs starring absolute buffoon Matt Sadler whom some of you might know from the guy game he asks a series of questions to various girls who are all in different states of inebriation whilst on spring break and if they get it wrong and you'd think that they will get it wrong you vote for the wrong answer then they lose and then they have to flash their chestal region I think if you think they'll get it wrong and the girl answers correctly then no chess beefers for you my friend man this thing is is so 2004 it should have just been released when of a double pack was strapped in with BMX triple X and like a crazy town CD Now Not only was top heavy Studios founded by Jess spangenberg who was also a producer and designer on the guy game and probably stayed up all night for weeks thinking up really Innovative clever things like the chubby meter in fact he was actually really proud of the Innovation on display here okay this is an actual quote that you can find in the official press release from the man himself I feel Innovation is incredibly important in the video game industry with the guy game we set out to do something completely different than what had been done before we feel that guys will be extremely pleased with the final result that's real that that really happened now in 2004 despite the general popularity of things like uh the scary movie franchise and Jackass the guy game was met with a lot of disdain and upturned noses from the gaming press and other Watchdog groups with the game industry taking renewed Flack for violence and sexual content the whole Jack Thompson Arc of the game industry mango was in full swing at this point it was just really bad timing in general for such a product as the guy game to exist but still top heavy let it exist cute sexy with a great smile to reveal my Rippling chest and a light coat of further Cascades down to my groin with a hefty flirt hey dick how's that romance novel coming along their publisher the Gathering of developers was a unique beast and that was actually sort of a governing body comprised of a variety of developers who United to release their games under their own terms whose members were no joke ritual entertainment epic games 3D Realms terminal reality and Edge of reality while that list is impressive in and of itself God would wound up publishing such Classics as their Blair Witch Trilogy Oni and Kiss Psycho Circus and in around this time frame they were bought by take two now the guy game was pitched as something to bust out at parties and was trying to be an envelope pushing piece of software but what other games did it have to contend with when it released in August of 2004 just a few titles like Pikmin 2 Burnout 3 takedown Beautiful Joe WWE Day of Reckoning and doom 3. so this game for guys didn't have that much of a chance for commercial success going in so it's prospects were even worse going out it also didn't help it was missing a skew thus leaving money on the table due to the lack of a game conversion but you might as well chalk that up to just spangenberg being a petulant child over his former employer Nintendo he took great pleasure into headhunting people out from under a claim once they had fired him so you shouldn't and wouldn't put it past him so critically how did the guy game do not well it was shredded in reviews The Many citing just poor cheap game design in general featuring somewhat confusing gameplay despite the fact it's a simple trivia title Bland unfun minigames and of course there are many who regard the crew nature on funny writing and little replay value as massive negatives so everything was going pretty terribly but fortunately for top heavy things were going to get worse four months after the guy game slimed its way into store shelves one of the girls who appeared in said Guy game sued the Gathering of developers take two top heavy Microsoft and Sony as she claimed she was not informed in the manner in which the footage shot of her would be used because at the time of recording she was 17 years old this would technically make the guy game the pedophilia game by U.S law she wanted the piece of software taken off of store shelves and a judge made that official by Banning and sail North America top heavy took this in stride proudly declaring on their website the rumors are true the most controversial video game ever created the guy game is no longer available now this girl has a quiet Fury that will not be ignored openly hostile and Grievous interviews she is no darling of the press you have to remember you can't keep a grow sleeves balled down and from what we know of him already just spangenberg was kind of a sleazeball what the man is telling me what to do no sir I must ensure that my love of drunken debauchery will last forevermore not content with just that cheeky marketing headline on the website top heavy then repackaged the game as a DVD with extra content footage bonus materials and even more girls and were present in the original version of course with one important admission this DVD was called the guy game game over but at this point it was about as much a game as uh browsing a DVD menu you just watch all the fmbs that they already shot and that's it 19.99 Folks by now be the shame of your family wait there's more the special package offer at 39.99 will net you the game a hat and a shirt with the guy game logo on it that's a bad deal is there anyone in the world that owns this shirt if you own this shirt out yourself in the comments below or send me a picture of yourself wearing the shirt or I even just the hat at Magna muscles gmail.com I could use a good laugh now one positive aspect of this entire mess is because of the ban on the title the guy game has become somewhat of a rarity for collectors and Weirdos the world over what's more the controversy and lawsuit at least afforded it One Shining Moment of infamy before it was committed to the Dustbin of History undaunted however top heavy Studios started working on their next big project bankruptcy yes it was the only game the studio ever worked on and the DVD release of it was the last thing that they were ever associated with the Gathering developers also quickly disbanded not long after the release and while most of the individual developers refined the publishing arm of the group was absorbed into take two effectively erasing them from the timeline as for take two they're doing okay Retro Studios were gone to make some of the best revivals of Nintendo's IPS ever with three incredible Metroid games under the belt two fantastic Donkey Kongs and how they even got to help out on a Mario Kart title so yeah they they did just fine Under New Management now what about Jeff spangenberg well he's actually doing very well not existing right now no one knows what he's doing in fact or even if he's still alive 5. we try to track down any sort of career history following the release of the guy game but came up zilch his name is credited in the night dive remastered the original Turok but I think that's just because he was on the original staff when he worked at Iguana entertainment so he has seemingly disappeared off the face of the map um and we didn't want to get too stalkery but I think we can safely assume he no longer works in the game industry in any meaningful capacity still though a bit of an anti-climax in lieu of all the ruffled feathers scandals crash Ferraris firings and hirings and bankruptcies but maybe it's more appropriate that way a whimper rather than a bang or in this case a spurt so wherever you are Jeff what happens salutes you for having terrible business practices classless game design but nonetheless entertaining failures so that about wraps up the guy game a much requested title for all your derision and laughter see you next time and thanks for watching so hey you know those particular shooter franchises that had interesting development stories and I'm talking the all-time classics here Quake Halo no one lives forever well we're gonna be talking about one of those today so wait what um we we don't have that script finished okay well let's just talk about postal instead gee I hope nobody is taping this postal started as a 1997 isometric shooter released exclusively on the PC because of course it did it was violent edgy over the top and 90s as all hell it was developed by Tucson Arizona's Running With Scissors and published by ripcord games record games there's no way a company like that is still in business and yeah no they're not then in 2003 it was followed up by postal 2 which ran on the Glorious Unreal 2 engine and also happened to become a first person shooter in the process as was the style at the time now since ripcord closed postal 2 obviously needed a new publisher so those duties passed on to whiptail interactive who responsible for such high-class entertainment as blade and sword Gangland and of course psycho toxic postal 2 is a bit more of a lighthearted game but was still just as violent depraved and relished in its um sense of humor it also presented the player a lot of choices in the gross things that they could do as it featured an open world mission design that was pretty unique for an FPS in 2003 while it was whiptail interactive's fastest selling title which wasn't really saying much it wasn't long before they also also exited the game publishing business sometime in the mid-2000s maybe around here they decided to transition to video poker Services which is very extremely appropriately on brand now while postal 2 managed to squeak out some financial success and was a big hit with fans it wasn't without its share of controversy you gotta be [ __ ] kidding which is usually the goal of running with Scissors anyway it was banned in New Zealand and Germany and was denied classification in Australia greatly limiting its exposure so obviously those crazy arizonians needed to seek out a third publisher if they wanted to make another sequel especially since whiptail kind of screwed them over and ghosted right after the first print was sent to stores the ocean deep lore and complex character arcs of postal needed to continue don't crowd there's plenty for everyone and to do so riding with scissors wouldn't wind up on The Frigid doorstep of Mother Russia [Music] everywhere I think I'll turn over to a bit of an expert someone that has plunged the shitty depths of the franchise all the way down to its very core he's the Sultan of sewers the warlord of Wang and the pope of postal City 11. okay I've had it up to here with this [ __ ] I don't know who you are mcfuckle face or where the hell you came from but Gordon Ramsay is my intellectual property I give John Carmack obscure sometimes terrifying monikers and I'm the de facto biggest channel in the world that covers postal games that's my sacred cow and I'll be damned if I share a piece of that sweet meat postal 3 sucks get over it and you still haven't hate me thanks sivi anyway enter akella sometimes referred to as the Russian equivalent of Electronic Arts that just wow just just picture that for a moment close your eyes and just yeah they were made up of five different in-house development teams which will be important later a publishing arm as well as a localization department and at at the very bottom was the QA team it was then 2006 where postal 3 was formally announced and was uh very different to the product that most postalites postmen are familiar with today running on valve Source engine it featured vastly different Graphics weapons features and all the crude humor fans had come to expect all scheduled to release sometime in 2008. Not only was it going to Grace its old piss stained stomping grounds on the PC akella had big plans for the franchise in general with PS3 and 360 versions also in the cards if you say so Running With Scissors would be handling the design and the writing with akella taking the reins of the programming and modeling now why did this marvelous team up happen in the first place well akella had done a great job publishing player games in the series throughout Russia up to that point so it seemed like a mutually beneficial deal and development was reportedly going smoothly until it wasn't I don't feel so good [Music] something happened that no one could have predicted something that kind of sort of managed to destroy the whole thing is where I stopped checking it last time September 2008 oh no oh no oh no Smithers why didn't you tell me about this market crash yes the 2008 financial crisis which hit Russia just as hard as it hit any other Nation akello were then forced into a series of layoffs to make ends meet these developers all working at trash Master Studios what is with all these names were separated into five core teams as stated earlier the first to be cut was The A Team the ones who had been working on postal 3 from the start and had provided all the promising builds up to that point why would you start the cuts with your a team I feel like [ __ ] I guess they were making the most rubles but we really can't be sure this of course would result in postal 3 getting its first delay as the B team was less experienced and smaller overall and there wasn't really much that anyone could do about that the original intent was for the game to continue the open World Mission structure established by postal II but with a less experienced team at Helm they couldn't really get the source engine to support a streaming design natively and thus that entire aspect needed to be cut instead opting for a more linear level-based Affair the B Team struggled until 2009 where development just kind of stopped for a few months or like almost a year and then the B team was just fired this was due to the fact that akella was continually bleeding money or some other type of bodily fluid the longer the game wasn't releasing hmm all out of cash seeing the disaster unfolding in front of their eyes RWS begged akella to stop beating the dead horse and to Simply Mercy cancel it akella however due to all the bleeding had sunk way too much money into it by this point to not attempt to recoup their investment thus the C team was put on the case but unfortunately they weren't on it long because a they were tired B they were fired or a seat they were fired I didn't expect that thus it was up to the lowly D team how discouraging is it to be called the D team at your own company to try and polish the game as best they could which would turn out to be not a lot at all the PS3 and 360 versions were long since canceled I knew it but akello were now desperate to squirt out some type of product to save the company due to a bunch of messed up [ __ ] said [ __ ] was that several lawsuits were being lobbied against akella totaling 200 million Rubles or 6 million us thus they really needed postal 3 to make fast money now if they were to survive all the legal salvos that were being hurled at them give me some money the D team were furiously lining up patches to smooth out the experience because there was an outside chance some players might find it to be a tad buggy of course because this is what happened none of these patches actually were released akella fired the D team before they were done and apparently they were never even paid uh dasvidania the game released for the PC in early November of 2011. in Russia and only saw a worldwide release on December 21st everywhere else and fans were understandably upset with the end product which tends to happen when you can't even get it to boot how convenient for their part Running With Scissors tried their best to calm the tumult promising that the game come hell or high water would eventually be fixed that is of course if akello was willing to play ball which they weren't negotiations to release the source code fell apart with the Russian EA being so incredibly EA about it as they flatly refused this as you'd expect drove a wedge between both companies causing Running With Scissors to Simply disavow the entire game taking it down from their own website also and this might be shocking but the Press didn't much care for it either now let's be honest with ourselves even if the postal 3 plane didn't crash land with a sloshy fecal powered explosion and everything went really smoothly with its development it was never going to be a game of the year Contender that being said it would have at least been reviewed far more positively because this staggeringly low 24 Metacritic average makes it the worst gang we've ever covered here at what happened but wait wait no sorry Drake's got you beat by two whole points congratulate no way it's actually right to Hell God damn you [ __ ] Legend you anyway it's pretty clear that running with Scissors was as disappointed with the third postal game as any hardcore fan was as this text now welcomes you on the official page for the game postal 3 is a third person shooter in which you all right I'm going to level with you don't buy postal 3. seriously you'd regret it hell you'd regret playing it for free it's a borderline broken boring frustrating unfinished mess and there was nothing we could do to stop it you're a responsible adult we hope so I'm sure you're capable of making your own purchasing decisions I just want you to consider all the above before you make the leap of regret into paying real hard earned money for this title we don't own the game we can't support it and we don't get anything from its sale so if you decide to risk the purchase you're on your own in an effort to try and Salvage something from all this running with Scissors actually went back and updated postal to when it's expansion Called Paradise Lost whose main purpose was to sandbag the entirety of postal 3 chalking it up as some coma induced Beaver dream officially making it non-official the expansion could also be seen as an apology a small thank you to those who stuck it out through the rough years of 2011 to 2015. this went a long way to contributing to the healing process as Paradise Lost was warmly received from fans of the series rough times were still in store for akella though who due to the obvious commercial failure postal 3 were pushed to the very edge of bankruptcy but narrowly avoided it by selling its unsold stock of games as Bank collateral if you can believe it while still technically existing the best type of existing they have ceased all operations that involve publishing or developing video games and I think that's for the best now in the subsequent years the official source code for the game still hasn't been released to the public with only the SDK or software development kit having leaked that is however not enough for the game to truly be fixed writing with scissors did reveal that they may have gotten their hands on the source code but it's all written in Russian which would make it nigh impossible for most fans to finagle it into something playable Mike J the chief bidet officer at running with Scissors has advised any fans that are still holding on to postal 3 to Simply Let It Go which is pretty good advice I'd say stop clinging to the past and maybe embrace the future instead I feel better already I think the story can best be summed up by CEO Vince dessie some deals work some don't P3 failed for many reasons worst of all we lost control of the project and that was the beginning of the [ __ ] Fest historically we had a great relationship with akella our Russian publisher and for the record the folks there were good people and I consider them my friends regardless of the Fiasco again it is testimony to postal fans around the world who have shown their loyal support Beyond All Odds and hurdles that allows us to keep on going and keep going they did postal 4 no regerts is currently on Steam Early Access in its janky Alpha State and getting progressively less janky with every new update while it still needs a few more QA passes and obviously more content I myself had a good time with it when I played it a few months back also you can't go wrong with John [ __ ] St John as the new voice of the postal dude figures so in one of those rare cases that I'm always happy to cover the franchise in question is still going strong people still have jobs well I I mean not a Keller but and while the postal series is certainly not everyone's cup of p i mean t it's still admirable that such a Grassroots studio with a Never Say Die attitude despite all the odds never died I can relate bro if you know of any other games movies or consoles that deserve their time to sweat it out underneath the Hot Hot Lights of the what happened stage post them up in the comments below or drive your Segway over to the flophouse VIP patreon to nominate the subject for a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching have a nice day [Laughter] hey kids want to know what caused the rise or fall of the robots and no one no okay well I'm gonna tell you anyway as per my content creating protocols so yeah this one is usually in the conversation when you're talking about all time Duds and certainly if you're staying 90s specific because it seems in just about every comic Wizard or Gaming magazine you saw an ad for Rise of the robots featuring this under designed underwhelming lifeless blue guy just standing there and his default pose look at him just a black void of Charisma it doesn't hold a candle compared to Super Robot Chad astar I'm assar a robot I can put my arm back on you can't so play safe like it or not though this image takes up a distinct and shadowy corner of your mind Palace if you owned a 90s video game system it also might be one of the earliest examples of over hype 18 and under delivering I can think of in the industry a tradition which still continues to this very day so grab your motherboards and I don't even want to do this without [ __ ] it we're just doing rise of the robots let's go in a 1993 issue of edge the magazine proudly declared that these Graphics these were to die for which is something that is aged about as good as you know this was rise of the robots a brand new fighting game to take on the likes of the street fighters and the Mortal Kombats that were so popular with the kids I mean it was 1993 overall which is cited by many as being the very apex of the fighting game boom and everyone wanted a bite of that Rising Taco Rising taku the company busy bolting and Welding these robots together was the UK Studio Mirage Technologies who in addition to publishing games from some smaller teams also developed them as well kinda their only real pre-robots game I can find any solid info on is ashes of Empire I want to say info I mean I know its name and here's its box art the core team within Mirage on Rise the robots however was a mere 5 strong and was being led by ex-fit map brother employee Sean Griffis who had sufficient experience with game design but that wasn't something that could be said about the rest of the crew the coders and background artists on the project had zero commercial game experience themselves which when combined with a massively over hyped marketing campaign can and has led to the what happened episode you are currently watching now don't get me wrong graphically the game in 1993 was really impressive using autodesk's 3D Studio software to produce a clean slick image which while different from the Silicon Graphics workstations that rare was then using was still largely the same in principle the game impressed enough that Time Warner Interactive who were all about throwing money at things to sort of force their way into the game industry immediately came a calling absolute entertainment held the rights to the original formats the game was being targeted for namely the Amiga and IBM PCS plans then escalated to try and make robots Mortal Kombat big and thus it was set to spin off at the comics toys novels and even a feature film if you can believe it oh God I really I really want this to have happened like just give it to me I want it and release the Lucas kind of Dragon Ball Evolution while you're at it of course the best way to make it big at this time was to release on consoles the hottest consoles like the Philips CDI the Panasonic 3DO and the mighty Game Gear yes this is where things get a tad messy because three different Publishers were now in talks all wanting their own fancy 3D modeled robots they decided to split up the rights per region and per system as was the style at the time a claim scooped up the SNES Port while Time Warner and absolute fought over the rest why did the Jaguar get left out by the way it was made to play Garbage like this just just put it up there with Fight For Life Ultra Vortec and Kasumi ninja all of which I own all told the robots would rise on eight different formats which was something usually reserved for big Surefire Arcade Hits uh proven successes that were then being brought over to the Home Market here though with the fervor stirred up by the stunning Graphics it very much seemed like all the Publishers involved assumed they would just skip to the smash success part compounding all of this was the fact that neither Sean Griffis or anyone on his team had ever even worked on a fighting game before which was kind of a big deal if you were boasting how you were going to Dethrone Capcom we're going to be using robots that fight and act unusually with a very high level of artificial intelligence that has never been seen before we'll definitely have won over on Street Fighter 2. hey there buddy congratulations on the oof metal with the increased budget an exposure from all these Publishers other things started to fall into place for the team before it all started to fall apart while working they had become infatuated with former Queen guitarist Brian May's solo album back to the light and wanted him to record The Game's full soundtrack like they really wanted this to happen because the rise of the robots box art proudly declares this now let's not mince words Queen one of the greatest bands in history but what was the thought process behind this if you were like a 13 year old snot-faced kid in the 90s who wanted to play a dumb robot fighting game like I was did you also go oh man they got Brian made too [ __ ] yeah like the rest of the game's development this didn't really work out in the end though Mr May did in fact record a full soundtrack but disputes with his record label caused delays in the deal and held the work back long enough that it simply couldn't be included by shipping time now I know what you're screaming well what's his name still doing on the box the name that's super close to the robot making little baby kid Matt think that the robot itself was called Brian May well that's because the game's title screen track has about a five second guitar snippet from one of Brian's songs off his original album so like many things rise of the robots it was all filled with lies everything is lies whatever [Music] all of this was being bankrolled by a multi-million dollar marking campaign that sought to really push this blue dork right in your face despite the fact that the game was always going to be humble and basic even by mid-90s standards in single player mode you only had control of Brian May I would then take on a whopping six other Fighters and that's it in two-player mode you can control any of the characters and perform their two special moves and that's it this is because the team were working so feverishly on the graphics and porting to so many other formats that left very little time to work on anything else the AI was certainly trying to be a selling point though as it was one of the few new gameplay features that the game was touting while it was marketed as some neural net processor a learning computer it actually meant that the game would just read your inputs and then react to them in a very binary way if you spam the special move like this awesome one here it simply wouldn't work against the AI more than two or three times leading to a restrictive fighting system where it just punishes everything you do except for jump kicks this was however made even worse because the fighting system itself in general was so incredibly stripped down no super moves real combos otgs juggles it just wound up feeling very stiff and rudimentary almost as if the team had no idea what they were doing and with them being stretched so thin with all the console ports rise of the robots then suffered a long delay as a result while originally scheduled for February of 1994 and instead had to be shifted to November of that same year the reason for this to continue to perfect the graphics and enhance the gameplay as much as possible so the months pushed on with the hype Train full steam ahead all the while more complex and flashy looking fighting games were entering the ring mirage's fellow Brits at rare released Killer Instinct for arcades in the meantime making it the first CGI rendered fighting game not to mention there was also X-Men Children of the atom Tekken King of the fighters and dark stalkers no matter how you sliced it all of these games were already far beyond what Mirage was doing in terms of gameplay things started to get a bit dire when previews hit print magazines which will certainly be an enthusiastic couldn't really comment on how these robots handled as no one was allowed to actually play it Mirage staffers and PR would talk it up cite all the impressive man hours that are committing to the visuals and AI but no one was allowed to go Hands-On not even journalists invited to the studio this was a bit of an orange flag maybe not quite up to Red yet because that would start waving in due time the Amiga version shipped first and on a staggering 13 floppy disks which you need to swap every time you fought a new robot that's how intensive the graphics were for the old Amiga the rest of the release was something of an incredible mess the SN yes version hit a month later in December and will come to North America Europe and even Japan oh man I'd love to see Japanese rise of the robot's money matches the Genesis version well there was no Genesis version because it released only in Europe so if you were a Sega fan and didn't own a Mega Drive you were [ __ ] out of luck same if you were one of the dozens of Game Gear owners who hated themselves because they wanted to play a game that looked like this foreign also due to the complexity of shrinking everything down to sort of kind of fit on a Mega Drive cartridge it was delayed for an additional two months to February of 1995 because of course it was print magazines since they needed such long lead up times to coincide with game launches didn't get any of their cards until a mere few days before stores did usually Advanced copies were sent to egm Mika power and the like so that the reviews would come out roughly the same time as the game but they were intentionally held back just for this purpose something we'll get back to in a minute you okay so the novel yes the novel um the novel actually did come out the same month as the Mega Drive Port so um anyone watching at home right now please leave a quick review in the comments if you've actually read this because I'm dying to know about all the cybernetic drama finally the cartoon the comics the toys the hentai the movie they were all regrettably canceled which shouldn't come as much of a surprise I'm actually really bummed by this because I mean Virtual Fighter Primal Rage and Killer Instinct all got schlocky American Comics let me come on throw these robots of robobone then a good 30 days after each version had hit stores the reviews finally hit as well and boy did they hit hard electronic gaming monthly's legendary Sushi X awarded it a 4 out of 10. Game Pro gave a probably more than fair uh for the Game Gear version but nobody came out of the gate swinging more than Amiga power which slapped it with a 5 out of 100 which while certainly shining a light on how ridiculous and out of 100 rating system is was certainly still a damning indictment the game was just plain boring to both look at and to play with static backgrounds that lacked a single animated pixel Rogue tour did sport CGI video clips which were especially impressive for the Super Nintendo but they didn't actually make the game any better and also weren't exactly enthroning in a narrative sense now while I mention all the fighting game competition that was around in late 94 and early 95 there is one game which completely invalidated rise of the robots and that was one must goddamn fall 2097 released one month earlier in October on MS-DOS and was better than mirage's effort in every conceivable way way irregardless due to those delayed reviews and the Unstoppable force that is hype rise of the robots was still a commercial success I mean it didn't do Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter numbers but it was enough to pave the way for a Playstation and Saturn 1996 sequel rise to Resurrection [Music] and it actually wasn't much better now on paper it should have been it featured over a dozen selectable Bots had fatalities and a fully original Brian May song called Cyborg and at least they made that happen but in terms of how it played looked and sounded oh I mean [Music] foreign that same year Mirage also released something called Bedlam I've I've never seen this before well what is this and since both games absolutely bombed in stores this time around Mirage then closed its doors in early 1997. this is definitely a lesson of a game's hype outstripping its actual design and ambition it was just going to be a basic button Basher for the Amiga but due to Absolute or Mirage or whoever's desire for Mortal Kombat style money bucks it quickly crashed and burned due to an almost overwhelmingly negative reception upon release and remains one of the 1990s biggest disasters as for Sean Griffis well he would go on to Rebellion entertainment where he where he produced 2009's Rogue Warrior black razor I can't make this stuff up people no that's why I love doing this show if you know of any other massive misfires of malfunctioning Machinery let me know in the comments below send me a message through cyberspace on my Twitter or head on over to the floppots VIP patreon become a big boss and nominate the episode you'd like to see next and if you've been fancying a sparkling fresh t-shirt mug mask or poster then head on over to pixel empire.com muscles to check out some new merch see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 317,141

Keywords: matt mcmuscles

Id: EH8tH1Ez8D0

Length: 272min 55sec (16375 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/The_Draigg]

Damn, it's a bummer to hear that Matt's family is going through some rough times at the moment. I wish him and them all the best!