5 hours of Capcom's worst video game failures! (MEGA COMPILATION)

hey so what's all this then well quick psa the next what happened should be up next weekend but in the meantime i thought i'd give y'all something to put on if you're ever doing chores something to study to or just say lengthy distraction from living on the perpetual trash fire known as earth and what better than over five hours of capcom messing things up a compilation like this will not be a regular thing at all because honestly there's no other publisher that even comes close to this amount of coverage so just consider this a one-off bonus type thing enjoy the ruining of some of your favorite franchises and i'll see y'all next week welcome back to another sad sobering episode of what happened the show where we dig up the embarrassing dusty skeletons of video game disasters both small and large bad and worse and stinky and stinkier we've covered games so far on this show that we're all somewhat destined to fail for one reason or another either from overly lofty ambitions marketing sleaze dicks or just plain stupidity today's subject however is far more tragic is not only were we punished with a less than ideal piece of electronic entertainment not only did it result in the closure of an entire company but we were also denied an interesting title in its own right that was brimming with potential today dear viewer our subject is final fight streetwise [Music] in the mid-aughts capcom was putting out hit after hit across the current generation of consoles you have your animooshes your re4s your devil may cries your phoenix rights but while all these games were distinctly japanese distinctly capcom there were a few titles produced by the company that were not handcrafted by superstars like shinji mikami hideki kamiya or shu takumi to properly tell the tale of final fight streetwise you have to start with a little-known and even less existing team within the capcom umbrella and that is of course production studio eight founded in the late 90s in sunnyvale california the small team started life as capcom digital studios with the head of the company being one david siller notable creator of crash bandicoot and arrow the acrobat within just a few years of growth where they mostly worked on ports and cancelled pitches it was 1999 where they released their first major title which um was uh final fight revenge they lent their programming art and animation talents to this arcade fighter but the project was mostly overseen by key members of capcom japan david siller himself was credited as co-director along with yoshiki okamoto who produced or was involved with almost every notable capcom franchise you could shake a steel pipe at now to keep a bad story short final fight revenge didn't do great it saw very little distribution in arcades at the time you're already dead and received only one lonely port on the japanese sega saturn and cacom hasn't spoken about it since i've talked about it though because i have a copy things however did get brighter for the company with their first solo game in 2002 a playstation 2 title based on the fantasy world of ghosts and goblins maximo ghost to glory this was their first fully 3d game reviewed fairly well and it was met with enough success to quickly green light a sequel maximo versus the army of zinn david siller would leave the company shortly after the completion of ghosts and glory and moved on to perennial flophouse favorite midway in 2003. so despite production studio eight's earlier encounter with metro city being nothing short of an unmitigated oil drum fire the success of two maximal sized notches in their belts convinced all parties involved that it was a good idea to bring hagar cody and guy into the 21st century it wasn't production studio 8's new entry in the final fight franchise released in february 2006 for the ps2 and the xbox got absolutely scathing reviews and the company closed the very next month um so what happen uh i i'm not 100 sure exactly what happened here because unfortunately there's very little concrete evidence we can mine from interviews press releases and the like in fact the company did zero interviews during this time period or even years after the fact but i think we can safely assume a few things [Music] with the freedom they were given to craft their previous titles in the ghosts and goblins universe it seems the same carte blanche was handed to them once again to make something completely new for final fight this resulted in the first iteration of the project which was dubbed internally as final fight seven sons we've spoken about this loss title multiple times but it was unseen 64 that first got details and footage of the game which is what you're watching here because for years no one even knew this early build even existed until 2011 it started a fresh new character although not named and featured a subtle cel-shaded art style something capcom and clover were already doing with beautiful joe and later okami the camera was also unique as it was utilizing a rail system that went from left to right to emulate old 2d side scrolling rather than an awkward third person camera seen in something like fighting force you also had a huge bevy of moves at your disposal as the main character employed a lot of punches kicks combos throws and could even enter a powerful hulk-like state where they could really do some damage it really seemed like seven sons was focused on an all-new cast of characters or be based in a different city altogether but unfortunately we'll never know what we can do is construct a timeline here now army of zen was released at the start of 2004 for north america but first to hit japanese shores months earlier in september of 2003 work must have began on seven suns in or around that time and from then on out to get a playable build up and running for a good old bun basher let's peg it around mid to latest 2004 more or less a year where production studio 8 began showing the footage internally around capcom for feedback this is where things get really shitty really fast as someone in a position of power clearly didn't like what they were seeing we only had the blur from unseen 64 to work off of but the story goes some higher ups within the company felt this was the wrong direction to go in and they should try to chase after the wafting urban scent of grand theft auto this might have been mandated by capcom japan as they were the ones who actually published gta in japan where both three and vice city saw phenomenal week one sales especially for western made games back in 2003 [Music] thus somewhere in late 2004 the decision was made to cut up and redistribute all the maps and assets they had make them somewhat interconnected to mimic a sandbox and give the entire game a complete presentation and story overhaul the rebranded final fight streetwise was announced in may of 2005 hen threatened to come out later that winter capcom was sure they're on to a winner here and were so confident with this strategy that they had already put into production another 3d beat em up this time being made in japan that was doing the exact same thing it was called beat down fists of vengeance this was almost indistinguishable from street wise in terms of story aesthetic and uh swear count god damn it what the [ __ ] happened here [ __ ] what the [ __ ] you piece of crap that arrogant [ __ ] sack over there i never did like you [ __ ] you think i like sitting on the sidelines like a [ __ ] [ __ ] stop it [ __ ] you can suppose that capcom felt with a new ip developed in japan an american game based on a well-known franchise and both of them being 3d action brawlers surely one of them would find six oh beatdown released first in november of 2005 and sold terribly and reviewed even worse streetwise never even made that initial release date and was delayed to next february around this time it always seemed that capcom usa and capcom japan didn't communicate all that well so maybe one of them realized that releasing two really similar games in the same quarter was uh you know stupid now when you have the bones of a game and you're told you need to give it a complete makeover in terms of aesthetics tone character and story um it's gonna be a mess you have to shift things around repurpose assets that might never have been designed for what you now needed not the best way to put together a consistent and solid piece of entertainment the streetwise camera is big clunks as it smashes into everything and has a pain and control because the camera was meant to be on that rail system there's lots of time wasting in the four major environments where it has you running from point a to point b over and over again as you complete really dull side quests and a bevy of hastily made mini games we spoke to one trent kenyuga a few years back who worked on streetwise as a writer concept artist and was the voice actor for kyle and when he joined capcom production studio 8 it was like a dream come true as he loved the company and his youth however when he came onto the project it was shall we say influx the mandate had already been given to reskin everything in that sweaty sleazy gta sheen but of course you know without the polish or budget so people were feverishly trying to slap this gritty urban mr potato head together trent had to come up with a lot of concepts for characters in this new style but he found when he tried to push the designs to be more unique or bring in more classic final fight characters like poison or sodom he was often told by marketing to tone it down make it more relatable and less colorful and over the top which is why streetwise has that dull generic gritty look we all hate and ignore today if you want to see trent speak more about this check out his video on streetwise concept art in the description below fascinating stuff so that basically sums up everything about no no no no no no you can't stop this train what's next on this tour ports now if production studio 8 was this busy trying to repurpose everything into this weird jigsaw of crime time fodder how the hell they have time to make this game for two different skus the ps2 and the xbox well trick question because they didn't secret level who you might know from being terrible is the company who delivered such classics as iron man iron man 2 and golden axe beast rider they were hired by capcom and got the honor of reporting street wise to the xbox and just like all their previous work it was not great yeah the xbox version is the inferior of the two and is plagued with save game issues where sometimes it'll just ignore your progress when you quit and save the game saving street wise even on the ps2 is kind of a gamble because instead of being able to save anywhere or like going up to a phone book or sleeping in a dumpster or to save your game it'll only just save when it wants mostly after when major story sequences are completed and you'll sometimes get a journal updated message but not all the time on the ps2 it seems to behave fairly consistently that on the xbox you could lose hours of progress for no reason awesome it's issues like everything i just said that contributed to final fight streetwise's catastrophic reception to gaming and review outlets and have placed an extensive list of top 10 worst games under various categories such as worst transition from 2d to 3d worst gta clone worst capcom game etc it's these reviews that incited complete public apathy towards the game and it wasn't exactly trending on a wave of smiles and sunshine in the first place most people hated the transparent and sloppy attempt at being gta when it was first shown months before and wasn't going to change any minds when it finally released this is a shame because you can clearly see a love for the franchise dotted throughout the finished game various posters easter eggs sound bites cameos and in-jokes from designers and artists who were forced into a less than ideal situation they had a solid foundation to work off of but with limited budget and time frame and the major aesthetic reboot the team's passion just couldn't save it while most assume capcom closed production studio 8 due to streetwise's failure it might have been something that was always in the cards as the publisher made other closures that year most notably clover just a few months later unfortunately this was the last major final fight release to ever grace us unless you count the much more warmly received final fight double impact collection which you should you can unlock the final fight episode of the usa street fighter cartoon and that being said even though streetwise is a permanent stain on final fight's record the characters and world of metro city at least live on in street fighter which as we know is as booming and as dominant of a force as it ever okay i'll stop i'll start put up your duke street fighters let's dump on an obscure fighting game that doesn't really deserve it shall we yes to be the realest of reals though i've wanted to talk about street fighter the movie the game ever since the inception of what happened because it's a story that absolutely fascinates every corner of my mind palace is is just so stupid so ill-advised so transparent of a cash grab that even in the naive 90s the most ardent of capcom fans were like are you serious this this is the thing you're you're you're you're selling this oh oh oh okay then but to properly unravel the tapestry of jean-claude van damme incredible technologies and oodles and oodles of blue screen we have to go back to the beginning and that starts with a soft pillowy year that was 1994. capcom was a dominating force in the arcade scene at the time with an avalanche of fighting games beat-em-ups and more fighting games and were positively beaming with large phallic energy they were especially bolstered by the phenomenon that was street fighter and decided to shop the ip around hollywood to see if there were any takers this group of capcom bigwigs headed up by kenzo tsujimoto came out of every movie studio meeting they had pretty disappointed as none of the pitches sounded right film studios either had no idea what the hell street fighter was or were at least aware of the franchise's importance but had no solid ideas universal studios was set to be the last of capcom's meetings and american movie producer ed pressman knew he had to impress the capcom crew before they headed back to far off exotic nippon where they could apparently never be contacted again he turned to steven e d'souza a writer on various films like die hard and commando and asked if he could throw together a rough script for the film that same night and have it ready for the morning de souza agreed but only on the caveat that he could direct as well which would net him a bigger payday man look at this [ __ ] guy you get that cheddar son is this a joke this money isn't worth the paper it's printed on he's set to work on the script hastily writing throughout the night which in turn urged the wheel of faith to start turning capcom as everyone knows hated the pitch and immediately took the next flight back to japan no against all odds they actually love d'souza's idea of turning the street fighter universe into a flagrant gi joe knock-off as it would easily lend itself to action figures and merchandise which it did the movie however had to be out by the end of that year so production was a frantic rushed affair there were cheesy one-liners bison dollars completely rewritten character backstories it just made you wanna change the channel now and this was important capcom was funding half the production themselves and thought that they might as well kill two bernies with one stoney and squeeze a game out at the same time why not we have actors dressed up right they're already working for us right mortal kombat is getting uncomfortably more popular every day right so let's just digitize these [ __ ] and show these punk kids eddie boom boom and johnny tubbs what we're made of oh wait we have no idea how to digitize actors transfer all that data and make a game out of it huh oh well who does incredible technologies now let's let's back up just a bit incredible technologies had been around the arcade scene for a few years as some of you may remember the unmemorable time killers which was their first fighting game they released a few coin offs under the label of strata games and at an arcade trade show in early 1994 they're exhibiting said killers of time to a crowded audience capcom who had a booth nearby noticed this and came to see what all the hubbub was about time killers was not known for its in-depth gameplay or much else but it did have a striking and colorful visual style and it impressed from a technical standpoint see capcom had been testing the waters on how to digitize game graphics as they felt it was a flashy look that was taking north american arcades by storm however rather than waste their own time and resources trying to suss out the details themselves once they saw what incredible technologies was doing with their arcade hardware they figured why not have these guys take a crack at it so a deal was signed and incredible technologies would start working on street fighter 3. i didn't stutter yes the original plan was for capcom to allow an unproven american company to develop what was at that time the most anticipated video game sequel ever so what i'll mention this now almost all the information here was gleaned from the legendary srk thread posted by one alan noon one of the lead designers at incredible technologies who had a big hand in developing street fighter the movie the game if you want a bit more in-depth insight into the project well just check the description below pressing forward alan maintained that yes in those early talks with capcom it was being thrown around that the game would be called street fighter 3 featuring lots of new characters combos and of course shen long shut up no i'm i'm being serious and yes more on that later these early talks were just that early and a lot of the team had incredible technologies seemed to be confused about what form the game would ultimately take this however was made clear when capcom asked them to fly down to australia where the street fighter movie was being filmed they would capture all the actors performing the various moves and stunts then fly back to chicago with all the data and get to work that's you know quite a long haul just to dress people up and film them why not just hire local look-alikes in studio and get the work done that way well capcom had such faith that the movie was going to bust all the blocks they're joking that they needed to have all these hollywood stars shine thespians like damien chapa grand l bush and kenya sawada however remember when they said that the shooting schedule for the movie was a rushed hectic affair since they needed to fart it out before december of that year well that carried over to the game as well the team at it were promised to get around six to eight hours of filming time with each actor so they could be sure to get all the data they needed to avoid future reshoots however jean-claude van damme only showed up for about four hours and then just left i guess because he's jean-claude van damme and there were unsnorted lines of coke somewhere on set and who wants to go with me mr noon described working with certain actors as ming na wan who played chun li and peter tuias hosopo as honda absolute pleasures to work with while some other actors were less so and there wasn't anyone more less so than greg rainwater the actor hired to play t-hawk wonder why t-hawk wasn't a selectable character in either the arcade or home versions well here's why on his scheduled day of shooting for incredible technologies mr rainwater had wrapped on the movie so when they realized he was running late for his session they knocked on his trailer it had been completely cleared out far in the distance an airplane could be heard sailing off into the sky as for the other performers that actually showed up while several of them could not even come close to pronouncing the iconic special move names fighting game fans could recite in their sleep its staff had an arcade machine in the studio performed the special moves over and over they had the names written phonetically and they even had capcom employees on hand to coach the actors no matter what they tried it was worse than what we got and of course what we got was ah i love it some of the recording sessions also took longer than others as most of the actors had never even thrown a punch or a kick in a movie before again since the production of the film was slapped together so quickly the on-set trainer benny the jet erkidez had only a few weeks to teach all the actors something before cameras rolled this is the opposite of mortal kombat's casting process because all those performers had years of experience in various disciplines which led to smooth filming this is partially responsible why some moves and animations in street fighter looked so bad but the bad didn't stop there since incredible technologies were so busy on set they had no time to check out what was new in arcades especially in far off australia so when super street fighter 2 turbo hit the scene they had heard whispers of a legendary warrior named akuma and they wanted him in their game real bad capcom couldn't provide much material for the character so it had to make their own interpretation of him and ask the costuming department of the film to whip up something and i present to you something they didn't have a lot of time left to film so they asked a stuntman who had a martial arts background if they would be interested in helping out since the recording sessions up to that point were taking forever someone with more formal training would make the most of the filming schedule they had left now since not a lot was known about akuma at that point a lot of his moves and animations are sort of just yeah oh there's more we need a new character too who can we get uh uh we're running out of time oh they got lots of spare bison troopers suits and wardrobe let's let's throw him in there what's his name uh knife man bazooka dude a blade yeah yeah blade um we have no one who can play them though alan get your ass in that suit yes alan noon also played the blade some [ __ ] are always trying to ice skate uphill now one of the crazier things about the movie that bled into the game's development is that one of capcom's mandates for the film's script remember they were co-financing it was that every single street fighter character from the cast of the new challengers had to be included in the story but what about fei long well to be blunt he was just straight out cut to be accurate though he was in earlier drafts of the script and was working with guilin kami in the an forces suddenly though capcom just started to push actor kenya sawada real hard and he eventually just replaced fei long in the mid 90's capcom was looking to have this guy as their own sagata senshiro style mascot but that failed when they saw him act a single boat against everything he's got the pilot would have to be out of his mind and this guy is just bubbling with charisma isn't he that being said incredible technologies had two recording sessions with him one is sawada and the other in full feilon garb and even performed all his moves for video capture unfortunately due to time constraints they had to drop one of the characters and due to capcom's insistence on pushing the sawada agenda feilong was dropped oddly enough though he does make a sneaky appearance in a mortal combat inspired arena for some reason now the elephant in the room shen long this was a character inclusion incredible technologies was pushing for on day one but cacom had always refused you've lost your balls halfway into filming however word came down shenlong is a go remember when this character appears it must be like god is coming down alan noon was in charge of this character so he found an actor dressed him up in green and black training outfit gave him a beard and wrapped a headband over his eyes you see akuma had punched his eyeballs out in a previous encounter but shenlong was so opp didn't need them i guess you didn't see that video also he had a big scaly horn dragon arm now the idea here was if ryu and ken could use the key of a dragon to shoot energy out from their hands or light their own fists on fire shen long had gone so far beyond that he was literally morphing into a dragon he would also have no blocking animations yeah you could hold back to block but he would simply weave out of the way of every attack matrix style under the hot studio lights the dragon arm makeup would start to melt after a while but some of his moves did get filmed sadly they were not finalized in time for the game's launch and the character was cut there's not even a surviving photo of the costume which is a real shame because it sounds hilarious now with all that the development of street fighter the movie the game was much like the film itself a chaotic whirlwind due to the accelerated production schedule there was the obvious excitement of a young team getting to work on it wanting to impress capcom trying to implement lots of new elements and gameplay but all these factors wound up resulting in feature creep see since they spent so much time up front filming the actors and didn't have access to their actual workstations back in the us they had very little time to plan out the game beforehand therefore once they returned to their studio in chicago a lot of stuff was just crammed into the game without the proper amount of thought or testing or thought what also didn't help matters was the fact that when the movie released that december it was met with commercial and critical failure this didn't do much to boost the morale of the team who were left stuck making an adaptation of it sft mtg actually hit arcades a full six months after the film in june of 1995 which was probably the worst june it could have released in the day street fighter the movie the game released was the most important day of your life but for me it was tuesday mortal kombat 3 virtua fighter 2 and even street fighter alpha warriors dreams had all been unleashed in and around that time as well so who the hell would pump quarters into this when you could just be playing this aside from just the visuals and the stigma of being attached to such a stinky movie the game was also really hard to take seriously from a gameplay perspective insanely overpowered characters and combos that permitted nonsensical juggling secret [ __ ] moves like guile's handcuffs cami's whip sagat's eye lasers or balrog's projectile reflection all made street fighter veterans vomit in rage compared to what was coming out it was seen as an absolute joke and was considered the first real misstep with the franchise capcom sensing either the displeasure of fans or after playing it themselves decided maybe something could be salvaged from this disaster enter the home versions handled internally by capcom's california-based office this might as well be considered a completely new game it was originally going to be released on the psx the saturn and the 32x as well until someone actually looked at a 32x and quietly canceled it the biggest difference was that dj and blanca were added to the roster as the actors had their sessions recorded but the data was not cleaned up for the coin-op version in time so capcom just decided to simply draw over the missing frames themselves this same treatment happened to just about every other character in the game the actors awkward stances and moves were edited to more closely reflect the hand-drawn sprites from older street fighter titles the voices were completely redone and re-recorded all new backgrounds were added super moves changed all the crazy [ __ ] and juggling was just cut out it was a complete page one rewrite with the only connecting fiber being that it used digitized graphics well kinda although sadly no shen or fei long in sight well this version was made exclusively to try and right the wrongs of the arcade version it really did no such thing as it was again critically lambasted by game magazines and the like although one positive was the subtitle the japanese version street fighter real battle on film which is a money name regardless a question needed to be posed on fighting game fans why would you play this if you could just get super turbo on the 3do or simply wait for home ports of alpha why would you want to buy it at all when the movie at the time was so reviled again there were a lot of factors here that simply made the current market pretty hostile thus limiting the chances of street fighter the movie the game to stand out the fact that capcom went with digitized actors was such a flagen attempt to grab some of mortal kombat's limelight did it no real favors it's very narrow-minded tunnel vision ah that game looks like this that's why it's popular digitized actors were only part of mk's appeal the technique had been seen before in other midway titles like pit fighter or warriors from the hood so it wasn't just that what capcom failed to realize was that the unique martial arts meets fantasy-inspired story the characters the violence and the different style of gameplay made for a mix that's simply dressing up a bunch of weirdos in front of a camera impossible to replicate this is what made street fighter real battle on film get relegated to the dustbin of history so so quickly and remains one of the only games in the franchise history to never see some sort of re-release as for capcom themselves their fighting games are existing cert certainly um you know there's been some missteps but but yeah hey look over here resident evil 2 remake whoa uh but it's not all bad news for capcom in regards to this particularly dark part of their hilarious past let's discuss street fighter the actual movie one last time now upon its release it was considered a massive failure but it actually turned out to be really lucrative for capcom in the long run since they co-financed the film they wound up getting quite a good deal in terms of video sales and rentals and even better when it came to broadcast rights when i was invited to their pre-e3 captivate event back in 2011 a senior capcom official told me yeah yeah the movie sucks huh it was a huge mistake we make a million dollars every time it's shown on tv you got paid of course as for incredible technologies well sadly they closed their doors shortly after street fighter wait no they're still in business turns out they were also responsible for the popular golden tea series and we're making new entries for it up until the late august and currently design home software and casino machines so good on them oh right alan noon played himself he was briefly at epic games on shadow complex remastered and is currently working for um magically uh vr company i think not entirely sure now despite this being one of those rare cases where all the companies came out the other end and tacked and are all still in business it doesn't change the fact this is a bittersweet story in his form posts alan noon states he was a massive street fighter fan at the time i mean who wasn't in the 90s and it was a dream come true to work on the franchise however due to the time constraints working with new technology and an aggressive production schedule he laments they just weren't able to make the game they wanted to incredible technologies had hope this would be their big break and set out to make the best game they could but unfortunately it just couldn't come together in the end but personally i think any piece of media that can give us [Music] can't be all bad if you'd like us to shine our judgmental light on another steaming pile of video game bile drop a hint in the comments below or send a concerned and strong-worded email to mattmanmuscles gmail.com thanks for watching everybody [Music] welcome to another dope crazy savage and smoking sick episode of wahapa the show where we chronicle the catastrophes document the disasters and recount the regrettables and for talking regrets there's a few companies that have made more decisions that would be better off just not happening than capcom therefore this week's subject is going to take the combined might of two brightly colored bone-based mascots to hack and slash their way through it so without further ado let's get crazy i'm madmen muscles and i'm gonna tell you what happened hey matt please allow me to interject here and fill your dark soul with lights oh it's derek from stop skeletons from fighting hey that's me i'm derek it's me derek i figured it was about time i invaded one of your videos for a change huh and besides this story is more than just a story of one game it is the story of a legendary video game company and their struggle with the relevancy between two sides of the planet and it's a story that my partner grace and i have researched a little bit about so allow me to be the virgil to your dante mattel buddy so let's talk about what happened to dmc devil may cry [ __ ] you ah capcom remember the mid arts where calc i i mean cap god could do no wrong yeah they had an absolutely uh flawless record no i didn't mean those games i meant like like dead rising and and stuff like that there yeah there were some bad ones too but it wasn't entirely their fault this point in time was the middle of a hard decade for japan based developers and publishers the japanese markets were shifting and games with a i guess japanese flavor stopped making sense as the years went on for example in 2002 it was estimated that half of all video games sold were bought by the japanese but by 2010 when dmc was officially announced the japanese people only bought 10 percent of all games sold for instance you know street fighter 4 yeah that was a mega hit right well in 2008 the first console edition of street fighter 4 sold about 200 000 copies in japan and about 2.3 million overseas the times they were changing and this is where our story begins proper with the release of devil may cry 4 in 2008 devil may cry 4 represented capcom's first big return to a classic ip in a while building off the critical and commercial success of devil may cry 3 dante's awakening the series had already been brought back from the brink after the mess that was devil may cry 2 capcom was very optimistic for the sales potential of the franchise and they really had every reason to be the god of war series showed no signs of stopping and prove there was a global appeal to character action games not only that it would be the series first time on hd consoles that's right we said consoles this was the first time the demon killing stylings of dante would see release on non-sony machines adding the xbox 360 and pc to the mix at launch hd development as many companies found out saw a dramatic increase in costs and development time all those fancy over-the-top cutscenes aren't cheap so when it was all said and done 2008 devil may cry 4 sold a total of 3 million copies worldwide which ain't a number to kick out of bed but wasn't dramatically better than the last game you see dante's awakening topped out at around 2.3 million units though wait no things weren't adding up at all dmc 4 was available on three different formats which should have resulted in a way better style rating what just an a ah capcom was hoping for a triple s so it's not like dmc 4 was a flop or something wait did capcom think dmc4 was a flop or something it's kind of hard to say but yeah kinda i mean when it comes to the whole saga of dmc devil may cry in reboots in general the first thing publishers should do is properly read the room so what is the thought process here well most would say maybe that's just the upper limit of how many people are actually into dmc because wrong says capcom the problem is that people are just tired with the current style of devil may cry no no we're not we're not we're right because game reviewers are complaining about the cheesy dialogue and the silly characters oh no don't don't get rid of that that's what gives the series it's yes and we can make the combat less complicated for newcomers hey can you even hear us hello yes this is brilliant oh my god everyone start picking out your yachts this is going to be the best-selling devil may cry game ever oh wait no no so what happened devil may cry is at its core a complicated combo based franchise or requires high execution has weird over-the-top storylines and is also merciless to newcomers so you can bet it really stung when god of war did something similar appealing to the west but resulted with god-like sales numbers but regardless capcom thought there was a problem and felt that devil may cry 4 should have done better commercially and capcom of course had a sure-fire solution appeal to the west this edict spearheaded by one kj inifune whose career has been documented with stalker-like precision over at ssf oh yes thank you thank you too kind thank you resulted in such other what happened fodder like this and that and even more of this now despite all those games being massive mistakes capcom producers were already acknowledging this in 2009 by the way that there was a problem with western versus eastern development coalition cooperations but there was still plenty of gas left in the tank and capcom had their sights turned westward and just couldn't turn the car around in time to stop all this so for rebooted devil may cry they decided to let some action game luminaries handle their precious ip ones that have made some headway in the west kinda now we enter ninja theory now while they're relatively recognized today back in 2010 their name would elicit a hearty who well their previous efforts included 2007's heavenly sword a game many hardcore action game fans criticized for its somewhat simple combat and the fact it seemingly prioritized elaborate story and facial animation technology instead then there's their 2010 effort enslaved odyssey to the west a game criticized for its somewhat simple combat but lauded for its elaborate facial anime and who could forget kung fu combat a game criticized for well this so yeah even though their combat chops were arguably spotty at this point in time there weren't many western options who could really come to grips with the legacy of devil may cry's combat anyway rumors however of a dmc reboot began circulating in 2010 with the may issue of game informer even stating ninja theory was involved this really couldn't have been timed any worse if they tried by this point capcom's big western campaign was pretty busy being a massive embarrassment both bionic commando and spyborgs sold dismally the previous year and dark void released earlier in 2010 was hot on its heels to sell even worse not to mention the original devil may cry creator hideki kamiya and his new studio platinum games at this point had proven themselves to the public with the incredible bayonetta so by the time this game informer report hit capcom fans were already starting to push back against the inevitable dmc was basically doomed at least from a pr standpoint before it even had a chance to prove itself so again in a read the room style moment we're not sure what capcom was expecting when they officially unveiled the debut trailer for dmc devil may cry at that september's tgs to a very mixed response and when we say mix we mean it was colossally one-sided first off you have a trailer that let's be honest here didn't look all that good the character models felt off it showed zero real-time gameplay it wasn't made by capcom and was yet another attempt to have a product appeal exclusively to the west when all signs pointed to stop doing that this made for a goopy miasma negativity that always permeated the news whenever dmc devil may cry was brought up and would be something it never fully recovered from oh and one last thing the kai that helped launch this whole westward expansion thing and specifically was heavily involved in dmc's redesign kj japan is over in afune he said yep good luck putting out all my fires peace out and left capcom literally a month later to start working on his own massive successes even if ninja theory were making the best playing action game ever created and they were not they still had to contend with fans who were very not into the tonal shift of the characters and the world when fans thought of dante they thought of things like this and the concept art images and designs coming out of dmc we're giving them this this however actually turned out to be capcom's doing rather than ninja theories i can't emphasize this more ninja theory we're basically just journeyman developers giving capcom what they wanted conceptualizing the new dante during development saw the art team coming back with designs that closely mimicked his original look but it was the producers at capcom japan including devil may cry 3 and 4 director hideaki itsuno and keiji inafune who urged ninja theory to explore more alternative options so while it's easy to blame the new developer at the wheel they were mandated by capcom to overhaul everything in terms of art and aesthetics but of course the fans didn't know this at the time and were looking for any and all reasons to tear into the game so capcom would need to be very cautious from now on so as not to further god damn it so here is the last and maybe the most damaging aspect of dmc's development tamim and tionadas ki shall we say was not remotely prepared for the backlash against dmc's new direction or you know maybe that's too generous on venture beat shortly after the game's really hated revealed trailer a question was posed so how do you feel about the fan reaction to dmc tamim took a drag of his cigarette and then without blinking and without pausing to exhale the smoke from his mouth he said i don't care first off i'm suddenly really starting to believe the rumors that the new dante was based off of you and second of all you know who probably did care about their game selling to meme grin bionic and airtight games i'm just saying that catering to your fans is not always a bad thing especially since the whole point of this reboot was that so that dmc would grow the fanbase and not shrink it but the tamim train doesn't end here and now it's time for what else did tamim say well the essence of devil may cry is all about cool it's about dante being cool making you feel cool when you're playing it and so the combat and the style system and everything is integral to that but you know what was cool 12 years ago i think that was when the first game came out isn't cool anymore anyway tamim goes on to say if dante dressed as he was walked into any bar outside of tokyo he'd get laughed out while the core of these statements have some merit this is not what you should say to convince capcom fans that their franchise is safe and when you think of video games as a medium it seems as long as you make great games generally you're fine if you keep doing the same thing over and over okay the next quote i want to treat you to is from a mid 2012 ps3 magazine at this point in our story ninja theory had been receiving death threats so i can't exactly blame him for this but it starts out good kinda usually the worst creative crimes are made when you're trying to make a game for someone else some perceived demographic that in all likelihood doesn't actually exist from my point of view there's only one way to try and make a successful game and that's to make the game that you want to play a game that everyone involved is proud of okay you know that's fine so from that point of view i don't care if it sells a thousand units or two million units oh oh no to meme oh baby no now to be fair this article was full of weirdness like the interview really asked the hard-hitting questions like what about the series history with massive tits to which he replied i've got nothing against big tits i'd rather have my head resting on a pair right now okay duly noted um while we applaud to meem for living his devil may care gimmick all this was a risky attitude to put forward if you want you know your company to continue to exist anyway it might not surprise you but tamim did less and less interviews as time went on no really yeah i know and that spanned a good two whole years of solid development during that time we actually saw subtle changes to dante his voice attitude and other visual aspects were tweaked despite to meme claiming he didn't care about fan feedback my name by the way is doite but you can call me don't take the demon killer has a nice ring to it don't you think one of the more evident changes was dante's body type he went from being somewhat scrawny and emaciated in his debut to then suddenly pack an absolute beef stuff by the game's launch so at least improvements were happening minor as they were other trailers like the one from e3 2012 seemingly put more emphasis on story and characters and well story was always kind of viewed as secondary or even tertiary in the devil may cry universe with action being the primary focus dante was just a half-even hybrid that liked killing things and being crazy he was never much deeper than that and he didn't really need to be but then capcom decided that he really needed to be now he's a misunderstood rebel who has a rough exterior but secretly wants to find his place in the world but needs the proper motivation to do so to fulfill his destiny and blah blah blah blah blah again this shows a disconnect between capcom and their fan base dante's appeal was that he was a goofy [ __ ] and it's unlikely these more serious story-focused trailers sold many new fans on the franchise because it certainly wasn't pleasing the die hards now while all this was well and good theoretically to appeal to potential new fans of the series on a visual level gameplay obviously required a redesign as well which is a far trickier and some would say pointless endeavor lead combat designer ronnie tucker said the goal of dmc was to make a system that allowed newcomers to create their own elaborate combos but still offer multiple elements veterans can enjoy however this is like saying you want all your groceries in one bag but don't want the bag to be heavy the black and white of it is that high execution character action games like this are not meant to be friendly to newcomers and designing a system around tackling this problem is basically wanting your pizza and eating it too all these quotes about gameplay system changes were not going down well with the people who cut their teeth on things like dmc 3. okay so now would be a good time to sum up everything so far that was working against dmc's success a developer fans were unsure of a very divisive art style and tone combat that was trying to appeal to all ages and constantly being compared to what was seen as the real action games coming out of platinum so things really couldn't get any worse until they did ninja theory's last game enslaved odyssey to the west exclusively ran on the unreal 3 engine which was you know pretty standard at the time but was not standard however was its inability to handle 60 frames per second because in terms of pure design it was never initially intended to run games at such a frame rate so the fact that ninja theory were using it for dmc was um cause for concern capcom knew there was no sense in hiding it because as soon as they showed real-time gameplay people would use their eyes especially long-time fans of the series who were accustomed to the silky smooth action that all the previous entries featured but not all was lost while 30 frames per second would be the default on consoles if players really needed to double or triple that they could just purchase the steam version yes with the power afforded by pcs dmc would run at an unlocked frame rate with 60 being very much doable capcom did put a lot of work into this particular pc port but still wasn't enough for hardcore fans were upset that what was seen as a long-standing dmc tenant 60 frames per second was now locked away on a particular format so yeah the reaction was not exactly what capcom was looking for at the end of the day though if unreal 3 couldn't do 60 on consoles then there wasn't much else they could do oh right well okay so unreal 3 could get to 60 on consoles but only by netherrealm studios the blowback against dmc wasn't even exclusive to this game it also managed to splash onto other games like playstation all-star battle royale now we're not gonna mince words there is a lot like a lot you can say about the roster of playstation all-star battle royale but one of the more unfortunate choices was using dmc dante or dino or don't tag or whatever fan name you prefer as a playable character in lieu of the classic white-haired look you have a game that was supposed to be at least fans thought celebrating two decades of playstation titles and characters so when the older dante that had three exclusive sony games under his belt was excluded it was it was bad it was a bad idea it was wrong move this is no one paying attention here especially when classic devil may cry 3 dante found his way into marvel vs capcom in 2011. it just seemed like capcom made a deal to advertise the upcoming game as playstation not so all stars released at the tail end of 2012 which was not too far off the january release date of dmc a mere two months later this inclusion slash exclusion again kind of rubbed a lot of fans a lot of the wrong way when everyone's skin was already kind of raw and bloody from the previous rub downs now with all of this ill-will to mean drive-by comets and the fact that capcom never truly found their footing throughout the early hd era of gaming would be easy to assume dmc's launch would get a d or less in terms of style but it wound up launched to mostly positive reviews overall in fact the reviews were pretty much in line with what dmc 4 initially got however critics still found the story predictable and a little on the nose with paper-thin characters instantly plot twists and dialogue thank you dante so in terms of critical reception nothing really changed here for the better or the worse but the commercial aspect is another story capcom's initial projections for dmc was to sell 2 million copies in its first fiscal year which it did not do and then later revised that to 1.2 million furthermore for their sales report that year kakum stated a few reasons why they felt the releases were languishing behind their projections and while they didn't name dmc directly at least one of the explanations could be applied to the project there was a delayed response to the expanding digital contents market and insufficient coordination between the marketing and the game development divisions in overseas markets and finally there was a decline in quality due to excessive outsourcing so yeah whatever that meant in fact it took about five years for dmc to sell what they were initially hoping for with capcom reporting back in the summer of 2018 that the game finally crossed the 2.4 million unit threshold placing it far behind the 3 million plus copies dmc 4 would achieve the main goal of this project was to catapult the series to greater sales and notoriety while it failed to do that dmc at least did not become the dreaded entry that killed the franchise like say the bionic commander reboot or on amusha 4. still capcom remained quiet on the character action front until they released the definitive edition for the xbox one ps4 2015. this had tons of gameplay improvements that fans had been vocal about featured 60 frames per second on all versions had all the downloadable content and additional costumes bundled in including that classic dlc costume that was available a few months after the launch of the vanilla version of the million years yeah i guess that million years came faster than you thought anyway sometimes you know definitive versions are not much better than the originals but this is not the case here capcom listened to a lot of feedback and made some smart changes that truly make this the best version of dmc ever and while that's great it does make you wonder how much better the reboot would have done if all this new content and gameplay changes had been there day one furthermore from what we can tell the two studios are still friendly and it suno has even said he would have loved to make a dmc devil may cry 2. fate would deal eat to know another hand a hand that would see long time devil may cry fans rejoicing at last at e3 2018 during microsoft's conference the announcement of devil may cry 5 the sequels of devil may cry 4 was made public after several months of rumors within seconds people could see that this was ignoring the continuity of ninja theory's world with the return of dante nero a bevy of new characters and the cheesy cheekiness the fans have come to admire about the series this then of course also marks the final nail in the coffin for ninja theory because much like grin and airtight games before them they saw their doors closed after working with cat what huh what oh no that's right ninja theory actually survived the dmc debacle in fact they found great success with hellblade their attempt at what they called a triple a indie title which sounded risky on paper but their slow rollout of well-optimized ports on the ps4 pc xbox one and the eventual switch version has clearly paid dividends this also happens to be the next directorial effort by our old friend to meme who has seemingly chilled out in the subsequent years so yeah capcom didn't die ninja theory are doing well and unlike many many many less fortunate ips devil may cry is still table hopping and devil triggering to this day but it's probably safe to assume that the book on the rebooted universe is not gonna reopen anytime soon this is a case where a misguided attempt to broaden the appeal of a series neither destroyed nor caused it to flourish which is exceedingly rare in the video game industry it just goes to show that devil may cry fans are absolutely crazy and are strong enough to endure a few bumps on the road for their favorite missile riding pizza eating guitar plane motorcycle swinging series speaking of a few bumps in the road however maybe you'd like to see what difficulties capcom had bringing over some of their other famous franchises like mega man or uh devil kings oh yeah do you want to hear how devil kings is kind of but actually not at all a spin-off of devil may cry why not check out the video in the link for how the west was worst capcom edition in the next little while we're gonna have a part two an exclusive about the east versus west changes for street fighter and final fight oh final fight you say well i might have a few morsels of information i could contribute you know i had a feeling you would matt be on the lookout for that over at stop skeletons from fighting derek thank you so much for helping out on this episode of what happened and tell grace thanks for her tireless research as well oh i will you're very welcome thanks for having me so from me matt muscles and derek i'm wrong about eternal darkness alexander it is not for me thanks for watching everyone yeah whatever come talk to me when you finished ill bleed [Applause] oh shut up [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome once again to another episode of what happened the show where we 24 7 365. [Music] but no one is better at taking their fans for a ride than capcom the seminal japanese publisher developer who's probably responsible for everything you've ever liked about video games however that ride has undoubtedly had some peaks and valleys along the way as some of those capcom franchises or characters that you fell in love with have since been blipped from history nowadays though if you're into resident evil devil may cry or phoenix wright you have it pretty good in all honesty but there's one fanbase that have it not so pretty good and those are the ones that maybe supported capcom the most and that's the pn09 fans i mean fighting game fans the last several years have been kind of very rough for a variety of reasons be it lukewarm launches poor communication or iffy dlc practices but while street fighter 5 more or less managed to turn itself around capcom's only other fighting game of this generation marvel vs capcom infinite has to be one of if not the biggest failure in the realm of fist the cuffin yeah you hear that crosstech and you're off the hook yeah we knew you could do it whoa whoa whoa slow down there did you really think you were going to hog this subject all to yourself why if it isn't guinness book of world records winner for most subscribed channel that specializes in fighting games maxum million dude hey there hello matthew stop calling me that anyway with max's help we're going to be tag teaming to break down the long tragic journey of marvel vs capcom infinite so without further ado let's go so grab your time stone and let's travel back to one of the most glorious years in all of the years 19 goddamn 94. the world was fertile and vibrant and blessed with many natural wonders such as jamie lee curtis and true lies ace of base donkey kong country but that's all garbage why because x-men children of the atom that's why this absolute magnum dick of a fighting game set a new standard for graphics and gameplay in the arcades as it took full advantage of capcom's cps2 board it also set an exciting precedent for fans of comics or video games in general oh if capcom is making marvel games what if both sides clash in an epic struggle what if ryu could dragon punch cyclops what if zangief could pile drive cyclops and what if m bison could kill cyclops unfortunately those questions would go unanswered for about two years because then x-men vs street fighter was released thus kicked off half a decade of amazing manic over-the-top combative fanboying between two pop culture powerhouses this culminated in 2000 as it saw marvel vs capcom 2 new age of heroes released which really cemented the legacy of capcom vs fighters clocking in at 56 god damn characters upping the teams to an insane 3 versus 3 and introducing my personal favorite the sexy seductress amingo marvel 2 established itself as an absolute classic things only got more hype from there as the unbalanced but nevertheless fun and deep gameplay exploded in popularity just two years later as it was heavily featured in the early evos becoming a pillar of the fighting game community then for a long time nothing happened during these dark ages fighting games particularly 2d ones struggled to find relevance in a marketplace filled with games like virtual fighter 4 dead or alive 3 and of course the king of them all mortal kombat deception then in 2008 capcom returned to the arena with street fighter 4 which proved to be a sales success and felt they needed to capitalize on this fighting game renaissance while it was hot and what better follow-up than clashing once again with the marvel universe things had changed since the late 90s however and rather than being almost out of business business was a booming and a whole heap of marvel heroes now had maximum mainstream exposure we're talking about guys like iron money hot god and captain duty and since his movie was in the works at that time they threw in sassy doctor as well marvel vs capcom 3 fate of two worlds released in 2011 with one of the worst logos ever and longtime fans lost their collective [ __ ] the game featured a bold comic book art style had a great balance of fan favorites and newcomers and was generally really fun to play a lot of skeptics however assumed capcom would just put out a better version a few months later which they did but hey ultimate marvel 3 had some awesome new additions and was seen as a superior iteration with that being said the game definitely needed some balance changes but official support had dried up and capcom wasn't talking the next time marvel 3 was mentioned was when it was delisted from all digital services in late 2013 in fact this even kicked off lots of marvel franchises disappearing from the digiverse including marvel origins collection and its terrible terrible box art this move to start regaining their franchises that they had licensed out to companies that were now smaller than them and infinitesimal next to disney is a behavior that would be intrinsically linked to marvel vs capcom infinite's eventual fate [Music] in december of 2016 capcom announced a new game in the series at psx what's psx you ask well it was a big playstation themed show that sony just stopped doing now this was a bit odd why didn't capcom show it at e3 or evo psx wasn't exactly the biggest venue to show off a brand new fighting game especially one that was multi-platform so why not just wait until e3 no there's something else [Music] something ugly something malignant regardless people were excited because the mcu was now um doing pretty good but hardcore marvel players were a bit more subdued infinite reverted back to the 2v2 setup of its roots and infinity stones were added to the main gameplay loop which would be the replacement for that third character while it was nice that calcom were shaking things up some people thought they detected the memorable stench of gems from cross tekken which would thankfully not be the case one thing however that definitely was the case was the suspicious roster now some people were pretty enthusiastic about x's inclusion yo [ __ ] you oh my god what the [ __ ] yeah that was pretty good others felt it was a bit worrisome that there was nary a whiff of a mutant the months ticked by and was quiet on all fronts until e3 2017 where infinite had its first proper unveiling the story mode was highlighted in a new shiny trailer and it probably shouldn't have oh cool there's thanos and there's frank weston the rocket and oh my god what would you do if i sang out of two now we don't want to harp on this but it can't be overstated how chun li's creepy porcelain baby face stuffed in a sausage casing permanently damaged the fan perception of marvel from then on out no one on the greater internet was talking about the gameplay the infinity stones or the story itself because just take a look at this also get a load of captain duty [Music] so why did certain characters like monster mash over here look like monster mash over here conversely why the new fighters look pretty sharp well there's a good reason for that or a bad reason really because the developmental details of a lot of capcom projects especially those tied up by a bunch of nda psych locks aren't really privy to the public thankfully though almost two years since its debut enough pieces of the puzzle have been put together and enough lips have gotten ever so looser close to the launch of the game some staff within capcom under anonymity revealed that the budget for infinite wasn't exactly high with one quote putting it succinctly by describing it as cheap as [ __ ] while exact numbers are not known marvel's entire budget for the base game was comparable to just one season of dlc for street fighter 5. now capcom's flagship fighter did have additional backing by sony but seemingly no such deal was put into place for infinite thus it's safe to assume capcom was funding most of it if not all of the game by themselves and they weren't exactly splurging on it now how do you cut costs in a fighting game well you just do what you do in the old days see okay so let's compare say venom and dante notice the distinct drops in quality here here and and here well that's because they just grabbed dante's model or his animations from marvel 3 a game with a very different art style and just plopped them into infinite do that a few dozen times and you have your roster what's more is that both games ran on vastly different engines as capcom's proprietary empty framework which they have since abandoned powered the comic book contrast of marvel 3 whereas infinite used unreal 4 which powers just about every other fighting game nowadays this might have caused some awkwardness look look speaking of art styles many fans pointed out infinite's lack of one maybe capcom didn't want this to be seen as a mere upgrade to marvel 3 so a softer more semi-realistic look was chosen instead it was pretty apparent that most of the models looked rushed and sort of cheap while the new fighters had a considerably more polished look according to anonymous capcom staff these issues were raised to the higher ups who were producing the game the concerns however were apparently waived off citing that it was a non-issue as no one would notice yeah well i want it on record that this is a bad idea now while this has a modicum of truth to it as all the frantic action and screen filling special moves would make it nigh impossible to discern such detail but that doesn't hold true if you say then zoom in on the crypt keeper during your story mode trailer not content with just that capcom released a downloadable demo for said story mode that same e3 weekend to spread positive word of mouth about the game so what the hell happened it didn't now it might have been a good idea on paper but this demo could have possibly done more harm than good there was no versus component of any kind no training and was compromised of just a few limp fights against computer-controlled drones that was it even as a product promoting a story mode it did little to excite and also prevented people from really experimenting with the gameplay infinite's best feature that was the one thing people were actually pumped about as everyone playing verses on the e3 show floor were having a blast but the majority of fans sitting at home were getting a vastly different experience one more thing that happened during e3 2017 that in conjunction with all the other bad press formed a type of icky pace that just gooped onto marvel infinite and never let go that of course being [Music] namchai and ark system works literally announcing another fighting franchise that had a dynamic art style three versus three tag matches and featured legendary characters known the world over you can't do nothing bout that while competition is a good thing and it should strive to push two products to be better it didn't really pan out that way more on that later oh wait more on that now simply put marvel's chances at making some type of impact were dunked into a coffin from outer space by android 16 and then nuked everything infinite left fighters had and more not to mention namco scheduled the first public beta for dbz the exact same weekend as marvel's launch convenient intentional or not in the fgc at least this was seen as the darkest of shades the memes and [ __ ] posting came sliding in hot and wet across social media so the public opinion again was a bit skewed then fortunately uh actually things got even worse speculation over the lack of x-men or fantastic four characters was no longer unfounded but was in fact very much found near the end of 2017 marvel put all x-men books on hiatus as they were embroiled with the disputes from 20th century fox over the characters then they relaunched x-men later that year but the fantastic four they had been in the craft shack since 2014 as marvel had been devaluing the brand so fox would just give up and relinquish the rights and we could you know get good fantastic four movies for once this was ruthless by the way marvel was scrubbing them off any media they could hell the fantastic four logo was even taken off bombastic bagman's bag in spider-man unlimited shiva took the ice cube trays out of the freezer what kind of a sick [ __ ] takes the ice cube trays out of the freezer pettiness like that goes all the way back to marvel 3 as the producer of that title when ryota nitsuma admitted they weren't the easiest company to work with and cited a specific example where they would stall development agonizing over the details of dr strange's hand movements other anonymous capcom staff also stated whenever they would request the use of certain characters they would often get rebuffed from marvel if they had no plans to use them within the mcu one such instance was with the god damn juggernaut and his very very tight suit capcom wanted the big jugs to return but marvel had no interest in pushing him and in fact capcom were the ones who fought for characters like x23 and deadpool to be included in fate of two worlds and only after sustained campaigning for them would marvel relent capcom tried their best to gather the most interesting heroes and villains they could but if you have a partner who's difficult or unwilling to play ball there's not much you can do therefore infinite would have no sentinel magneto doctor doom or etc and despite them usually being at odds with each other both the fgc and casual audience came together to hate this as a united people capcom obviously couldn't go with the whole it's marvel's fault route so instead they went with the whole characters are just functions approach then producer of capcom's fighting games peter combo fiend roses famously said in an interview if you were to actually think about it these characters are just functions they're just doing things magneto case in point is a favorite because he has eight-way air dash and he's really fast right well guess what nova can do the same thing captain marvel can do the same thing it's just the function that people are associating with the character and there's no shortage of that we wanted to make sure that if a legacy of characters doesn't happen to make the roster this time that playstyle would still be represented the quote did certainly rub a lot of people the wrong way but combo fiend couldn't exactly throw marvel under the bus over this so he had to take some tact when these issues came up and present to you some tact looking back on it this is literally the only thing he could have said so as to keep the heat off any one group and i'd imagine if he had been even one percent more provocative in his answer disney would make sure there would be a severed beta ray bill head under his sheets that night infinite launch on september 19 2017 less than a year since its reveal and a few months shy of releasing alongside one of the biggest movie events of all time avengers infinity war not the most synergistic time frame from a marketing perspective one of the biggest advantages of a crossover title like this a colorful cast of characters and a fantastical storyline wasn't really being used to its full potential why they didn't wait a few more months to be closer to the hype of infinity war is a journey into mystery itself and considering the state of the game more time and development wouldn't have heard it so with this negative perception circulating around the game what with its lack of an exciting roster and more enticing alternatives on the horizon it's no surprise that all these foibles masked infinite's best quality its gameplay very quickly people realize the infinity stone system didn't hurt marvel but only strengthened it it functioned more like the grooves in earlier capcom titles and led to lots of creativity and combo potential characters from marvel 3 aside from their looks got some fun changes and the new cast received similar praise as well most reviews took these positives into account claiming that the core game was really enjoyable however the ho-hum graphics the lifeless stages the stunted roster drab menus and presentation and the mediocre story mode were not enough to balance everything out then like within days of launching capcom announced that a lineup of dlc characters were coming soon suspiciously soon the six fighters would include black panther venom monster hunter and the rest and while not known at the time it has since been revealed that all six were originally scheduled to be in the starting lineup producers on the project felt it would be better to cut them from launch and make them dlc as they didn't even have a long-term road map for future content yeah that always works out great or if they did had scrapped it this is partially evidenced by both monster hunter and black panther appearing within the story mode with the latter also getting their own wakandan themed stage the first three were added 30 days after the game launched and all six were made available in less than three months which also marked the last bit of content the game would ever receive also filipino champ let the world know that there was originally going to be like maybe 61 characters in 18 stages but aside from that i think we've covered the cavalcade of bad decisions and worst timing that plagued marvel infinite one of the biggest fighting game disasters but what about evo ah right okay now it's time to talk about this not only did infinite september release put it far away from avengers hype it also missed out on evo 2017 as well marvel would have to survive a good six months to hopefully get picked for next year's championship series during said announcement stream of the lineup mr wizard listed the games that would make the main stage and infinite was not among them although two other tag focused games dbz fighters and blaze blue crosstag battle ruby thing did mr wizard stated this was due to lack of participation from the community as well as low stream numbers during other tournaments many people felt this was unfair as marvel's numbers in those areas were not bad by any stretch and rivaled or surpassed other games especially crosstag battle whose numbers were zero since it wasn't even released when the evo announcement was made what's more is that this was the first time in 16 years that a marvel vs fighting game would have no main stage presence after the live stream markman another evil representative and stick god made comments that inferred infinite exclusion was not due to capcom or even evo themselves saying i go to many fgc events probably the most outside of sponsored players i know that mvci is being played but it's hard to include a game that doesn't have support i'm not talking about capcom because they've supported it the most we've had meetings with some pubs and devs about including their title as a main game at evo you know what we didn't get the blessing that we hope for sometimes we actively have to seek permission and or content licenses to be able to include certain games why exactly did this happen well while not confirmed internally infinite was seen as a failure due to the online backlash the reaction to the roster the reviews take your peck but we were exposed so since the perception of marvel was so poor trying to improve it with more dlc or graphical adjustments or even an ultimate version was felt as a waste of money which no company wants to do instead it would simply be better to wash their hands of the whole thing and and just move on hell marvel was already doing that with fantastic four but just ignoring their existence so why not do the same here the last patch that the game received that fixed a few bugs was in january of 2018 so that was one two three five months of official support and then just nothing like cross [ __ ] tekken had a better shelf life than that for shock's sake it was that evo fortunately though infinite did make up for all this failure by at least selling what capcom projected which was about two million copies in the first fiscal time stone failed to sell two million copies and instead barely sold half of capcom's projections this was less than marvel 3 had managed to move six years earlier by the way and since the mcu brand was more popular than jesus well uh that ain't good we are now almost two years away from infinite's launch and um things are different disney now owns 20th century fox or the x-men the fantastic four back in the fold all the comics are getting relaunched and and just look at the cover of ultimate alliance three it involves thanos and the gems and goddamn wolverine is front and center slapping you with this hairy adamantium dong there's there's even gonna be a dlc pack for the fantastic oh man listen it's pretty clear that marvel vs capcom infinite got dealt a bad hand the timing the competition the budget everything was working against it and many of those elements were simply out of capcom's hands every so often though rumors pop up of the game returning in some form or a full-fledged sequel might even be in the works but unfortunately there's no concrete evidence to support that but still it makes you think what if my spider sense i'm picking up nothing [Music] thanks so much to my marvelous tag partner max for the team up hey no problem matt my name is max and i'll see you next time and thanks to all you flophouse vipers for voting strong and proud and saying when's marvel and if you out there true believers know of any other games fighting or otherwise you'd like to see on what happened punch up your comments below or webster your way to the flophouse vp patreon to officially cast your vote on our next video and that is nuff said [Music] lots of you have been asking me to cover resident evil games ever since i started this show with these suggestions running the gamut from resident evil gaiden operation raccoon city and oh i haven't forgotten about you umbrella core but there's one particular title that stands above the rest in terms of fan outcry the game that was too big to be contained to spain africa or even terragregia the game that needed a 600 employee strong workforce cost more money than any other capcom published title before it and have the distinction of being the most divisive entry in the franchise this of course is resident evil 6 and that is the key word divisive because make no mistake resident evil 6 has its fans and looking back on it nowadays many people have come to appreciate its eccentricities critically it also holds a spectacularly average metacritic average which plays right in line with the general zeitgeist around the game oh but it was a huge sales disaster though capcom lost like a billion bison dollars on it right now that's not true either resident evil 6 is indeed one of if not the most interesting game in the long running series well aside from gba re2 of course oh man that looks so [ __ ] good all this to say we are not here to discuss whether re-6 is the worstest game of all time i mean you can do that in the comments if you must but rather find out the who the why and the what the hell happened it's 2009 and resident evil 5 is a certified blockbuster that busted the [ __ ] out of said blocks it was capcom's highest selling single title for almost 10 years until raphaelos and friends took that crown from it now the lesson that capcom learned from that success was well we put a thousand more explosions and way more set pieces in co-op inari 5 and it sold better than the last one so let's do that again what they wound up doing was making an action movie so bombastic and over the top that it makes michael bay films look like downton [ __ ] abby the director of this insanity was ichiro sasaki who previously helmed both outbreak titles on the ps2 which when compared to other mainline resident evils are distinctly smaller scale but it's his last game right before helming the globetrotting horror venture which was re6 that is far more interesting zack and wiki or as most mainstream gamers have come to know it as uh zack and the wikipedia i don't know it's that thing i didn't buy because i'm a philistine now i love me some zw but i don't think it's a project that adequately prepares hisaki for the immense task he was about to take on but why was he chosen to begin with well unfortunately experienced directors were slim pickings at capcom in this time frame it suno was busy with dragon's dogma and mikami's hands were full with being bitter and of course not even working there to hopefully guide sausaki was resident evil shepherd hiroyuki kobayashi whose claim to fame was producing just about everything and it's with him where we'll start our journey to see just how re 6 started to fall so hilariously off the rails one of our original goals was to create a horror game of course but we wanted to create what we're calling horror entertainment stop right there like i said in our brink episode game devs please refrain from using terms like genre breaker and blank killer so with that let's add horror entertainment to the list alright there we go let's continue we realize that there's a segment of the population out there that likes entertainment but not necessarily horror they're put off by horror so how can we combine the two in a way that would bring in people who usually have an aversion to horror related things how could we bring them in and allow them to enjoy it this was the first goal of the game red flags are waving and i know that when i explain it like that it seems like those ideas are contradictory and that it would be hard to achieve something like that and i don't necessarily disagree which is a sign you shouldn't do it for those that are maybe not familiar or need a refresher re4 was a more action orientated push for the series re5 mixed in even more spicy action and the addition of co-op and re-6 offered four completely separate campaigns each with their own gameplay style and tone which was them trying to appeal to absolutely everyone but when you attempt to do that you're not actually appealing to anyone at all this is where the divisiveness of 6 comes into play because capcom wanted slash needed for not to only bust blocks but to absolutely obliterate them truth be told in terms of other franchises capcom lacked many big hits during the seventh generation outside a few exceptions so a lot was riding on the success of the resident evil team's gamble to appeal to those people who didn't really like resident evil hmm does that sound familiar at all so hey did you kind of like re4 or 5 play leon's campaign he's cooler than ever and not a dork like he was in the past i see you don't have a lifeguard here at your beach i'm not at the beach this is a bathtub yo you like call of duty not so much [ __ ] well drunken amnesiac chris redfield and this uh this gu guy they got what you need no wait you look like an re3 sort of person am i right well go on a punch venture with jake and sherry like spy [ __ ] and uh scarves aydah wong's got that [ __ ] on lock the problem here is that every campaign had contrasting tones pacing and gameplay styles but without a unifying vision gluing them together each one individually felt a little rushed and slapped together while taking lots of qte and non-interactive shortcuts to pad it out of course to craft all these campaigns don't get me wrong took a lot of hard work as capcom did at one point have 600 employees spread over multiple companies to get all these assets made this was doubly impressive as they were still using their aging mt framework engine with the ambitious design maybe outstripping its technological progress logically this also resulted in the longest game in the ari franchise pie far clocking in at around 21 hours compared to re4's already beefy 16. now while some can certainly argue that it offers the most proverbial bang for your buck others call it bloated and unnecessary what is this wow what a mansion instead of having a singular adventure pace to fit that story is for separate stories that try to converge at specific points which is ambitious yes but maybe not the best expenditure of developmental resources the whole idea of multiple campaigns was risky and kobayashi was well aware that fan desires sometimes clash with capcom's intentions and leading up to the game's launch set as such the way i always think of it is that if resident evil represents a child then the fans and us as creators are the two parents the resulting games are like the children that are born between both of us and just like real parents you're not always going to agree on what is best for raising that child now we do always have our ear to the ground and listen to what the fans are saying and we try to take that into account when we are making the game but it's our job to create a new gaming experience and to offer something that's fresh and challenging we want to make sure that what we do pleases them but the initial reaction might not always be positive it wasn't while the initial trailer for re-6 set the senses ablaze featuring tons of characters both crusty and fresh epic set pieces horrendous new monsters and what clearly seemed to be a planet-wide threat things took a turn for the worse when capcom released a playable demo bundled with dragon's dogma in that summer honestly this might have been the most damaging thing to the game's reputation more than anything else at least amongst the hardcore now capcom wasn't wrong to do this as the demo for re5 stoked the fires for that release all the more but it seemed like it had the opposite effect for re6 displeasure almost immediately arose with many fans on publications citing problems with the awkward camera which was changed to be more in your face i guess to various other technical issues like screen tearing and absurdly long load times it also gave people a window into the action focus the series was steering hard into which survival horror fans were already a bit wary of after resident evil 5. in fact the demo was so poorly received capcom immediately took steps to mitigate the damage by saying they were taking the feedback from the demo we'll be improving the base game with it kobayashi's official announcement of this came only days after the demo's initial frosty reception we've heard a lot of feedback based on the demo we released the team is still working hard to fine tune it we understand that parts of the demo were not received favorably to put a mile late we want to make sure we could try to improve on these things the camera angles the tearing and other issues now this was great to hear because while many companies often say they're taking feedback into consideration very few actually do the character positions were changed to be on the outer edges of the screen while aiming rather than hogging up the middle portion of the screen the hud was now completely customizable and even the obtrusive call of duty-like waypoints could be turned off there was another unforeseen issue with this demo however as modders were able to mine data revealing that ada wong would be the fourth campaign which hadn't been announced yet as well as other various monster names modes and difficulty settings fans were still very hesitant when it came to capcom and on disk data and dlc as the controversy that surrounded street fighter cross tekken was still fresh in people's minds as that released just earlier in the year this unfortunately is something we'll need to loop back on now despite capcom's assurances that fixes were coming make no mistake this demo hurts resident evil 6 especially from a long time fan perspective the technical shortcomings and the double downing on increased action and qtes had many people worried and thus the game released on october 2nd 2012 after shifting away from the initial competition filled november 20th release date re-6 touted in its debut trailer again to capcom's credit the main game indeed was improved from what the demo had offered months earlier however the issues we outlined before about the game's bloated hedonistic campaigns its increased action focus and chanwoo shooting mechanics were not things that could have changed when it was so late in development these were the fundamental pillars that resulted in that astonishingly average metascore the director ichiro sazaki on the eve of launch even stated how he was nervous about the game's length fearing some players wouldn't even bother finishing it yes i'm just a little worried about that however because of that we have developed this new service that ties into resident evil 6 called re.net we hope this service will really motivate people to keep playing the game it's for you and your friends it will help keep all of you connected and looking forward to clearing the game hopefully it will spur people to continue playing and make it to the end what oh sorry i was just checking to see what re.net even was i completely forgot about this anyway things unfortunately don't end there much like cross tekken on disc dlc was found by hackers and modders in the guise of the no hope difficulty essentially the leon must die mode for the game it was partially on the disc but did need additional data to function however map packs and ada's co-op partner were all listed on the disk as well just not the actual data this still resulted in multiple articles posted across the internet that had re 6's [ __ ] on disc dlc in the bylines despite it not being 100 accurate regardless this coupled with the game's already mixed response well it didn't really help capcom again we're going into damage control over this saying that all of re-6's dlc needs that additional data to work and this situation wasn't even close to all that disk character dlc of cross tekken to further smooth things over the first major title update to the game was 100 free and included the no hope difficulty ada's story automatically being unlocked you needed to beat all the other campaigns to access it at launch and various other fixes and quality of life improvements unfortunately all these little measures were band-aids on bullet holes and didn't really result in their main goal to make this the best-selling resident evil game of all time in two months re5 sold five million copies back in 2009. capcom stated in their projections earlier in 2012 that they expected re-6 to sell 7 million copies in that same time frame this did not occur only 4.5 million copies of re-6 were sold in its launch period which is pretty shocking considering the additional ps3 and xbox consoles that were sold over that three year span between releases in addition when you take into account the project's exponentially increased budget it went a long way into painting re-6 as a failure capcom even needed to explain to its shareholders why profits were down for the year and cited re-6's under-performance as the main culprit we believe that the new challenges we tackled at the developmental stage were unable to sufficiently appeal to users in addition we believe that there was inadequate organizational collaboration across our entire company with regards to marketing promotions the creation of plans and other activities we will re-examine our eternal operating frameworks in order to identify areas that need to be improved concerning development as well as sales and administrative operations that's business speak for we [ __ ] up oh my god it's awful they essentially tried to make four games in three years but still sell it for 60 dollars and just threw an army of people at it to get it done coordinating all those employees across several smaller studios resulted in a shaky unfocused title headed up by a director that wasn't really ready for it i mean it took seasoned veteran shinji makami a good five years to perfect re4 reiterating it again and again burning through various versions until he got what he wanted sasaki though wasn't afforded that same luxury capcom was attempting way too much in too little time and resulted in this giant expensive homunculus that didn't really know what it wanted to be it failed to please some long time fans and also didn't really rake in any new ones that's why it still lags behind re5 and lifetime sales as of 2019. for reference it took re 6 7 years to sell what capcom wanted it to sell in two months we have obviously seen the consumer and critical response there were some great positives out of re6 but it was a mixed bag as we saw from the review scores we probably put too much content in there there were some comments from consumers that said it felt bloated the leon missions went down very well and because we did resident evil revelations there was an outcry for us to focus on survival horror rather than be too many things to all people you'll find where we go next will likely be more targeted at our core fan base said former senior vice president of marketing michael pattison his statement at the end there also turned out to be extremely true as both the re2 remake and re7 returned to a more focused horror-based experience along with of course more realistic budgets and projections capcom has since stated that both titles have exceeded expectations and hope to build on that further with the resident evil 3 nemesis remake which releases in just a few weeks i honestly can't wait but when you think about it in a weird way this new resident evil renaissance we now find ourselves in might have only been possible because of re-6's muted response and sluggish sales numbers its quote unquote failure showed to capcom it wasn't exactly the best path for the series to take we are now probably better off for it in the continuing evolution of this legendary franchise you could say that re6 was a necessary evil [Music] and with that bad pun staining your mind if you know of any other inadvisable idiocy you'd like to avoid let me know in the comments below or drag your rotting corpse over to the flophouse vip patreon to nominate your chosen game or movie to be our next subject see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to another face busting tag teaming money losing episode of what happened the show that asks you will you cross the line into finding out just what went down up and wrong all over with capcom's infamous street fighter cross tekken now this is an episode that's been years in the making so make sure you've properly stretched and have all your gems set and ready to go okay 20 percent attack oh wait no i tried times five uh no cause this story is about to get down right fierce so like many of our previous jaunts through capcom's hall of shame there's not exactly a whole lot of inside information from the front lines it's a secret of company that more often than not is rarely plagued by problems during actual development very few of their in-house games run into engine trouble or some other type of technical issue what does happen however is a breakdown between the developmental and marketing teams along with the bosses at the top it's why we have misfires like dmc dead rising 4 bionic commando and all the rest fortunately i was lucky enough to speak to a former staff member at capcom usa who is right in the trenches during cross tekken's launch narrowly dodging fireballs timeout victories and disastrous marketing gimmicks we'll be checking in with them often it all starts of course with street fighter 4. now it was a huge risk making this game which took yoshinori ono months if not years to get green lit from those aforementioned bosses at the top fighting games despite some gems oh god i gotta watch it with all the gem references was certainly a genre that was in a sort of dormant phase worlds away from the sonic boom period of the 90s so the fact that street fighter 4 was such a huge success in both the arcades and especially the home consoles was a big win for capcom and just about everybody else it absolutely pushed other publishers to start developing their own fighters once again but no one was quicker to capitalize than capcom themselves the company now happy or confident or maybe over confident decided to start green lighting a bunch of other button bashers which kind of made sense throughout the 90s and even the early 2000s they had about 34 different fighting franchises all going on at the same time since the 90s however many other genres experienced their own boom periods so there was more competition than ever before capcom wasted no time and began dropping hints about a new fighting game in early 2010 with many people expecting a new dark stalkers ah i just reminded myself but what no one expected was at that year's san diego comic-con where katsuhiro harada patriarch of the tekken clan crashed a panel held by ono and suddenly announced street fighter cross tekken people were caught off guard in the best possible way while initially seen as a bit of an odd pairing it was nevertheless pretty damn hyped to see two universes cross over now this was clearly a deal whose inception started in japan so when capcom usa was let in on the secret they were of course blown away but there were some concerns while it wasn't the exact crossover most of us would have imagined coming about it was still seen as a fresh and exciting concept especially considering there was going to be the tekken version how tekken characters would play in a street fighter game was definitely a question but we were riding high off the reviving of the fighting game genre just two years earlier that said there were some reservations that came about which in hindsight were the cracks that would soon form the main one was the insane initial sales forecast which basically added together the user bases for street fighter and tekken at the time not considering that a there may be some overlap and b there are a bunch of o niners who weren't going to switch over from street fighter iv so yes maybe with egos slightly inflated and expectations a tad too high cross tekken was pegged to be a big seller by capcom but why wouldn't it be their flagship fighter was doing well tekken had just launched their first game on then current consoles so this was going to be the slam dunk a dragon punch or an electric win god fist right well very quickly money started to get spent and not all of it smartly capcom contracted out another company to animate loads of cgi videos maybe more than they needed instead of simply relying on their in-game musicians they splurged on licensed music that also maybe wasn't needed it's 470 000 sir finally nemco obviously would need to see some money back in exchange for the usage of their characters so capcom's fat stacks were quickly getting less fat so because of all these factors right off the bat this left cross tekken in a sort of pit that was ever so slightly getting deeper and deeper but it had to crawl out of to reach profitability the former staff member i spoke to explains the budget versus forecast was done in a way that was the opposite of how it should go every time the budget would increase which would be quite a bit due to common game design bloat and things like the polygon pictures trailers the forecasts would need to increase to match it without anything being added that would get us to that forecast so we found ourselves on the marketing side having to sell more copies of the game without additional tools in which to do so which as you can imagine was difficult maybe knowing this would become an issue capcom decided they would need to take steps to combat the problem head on and to do so they would need to increase their attack by 30 without sacrificing their speed gems were instituted as a way to offset all these costs it was something that was interwoven into the game's design from a very early point even before capcom usa was told of the crossover's existence just as a reminder for those that are fortunate enough to not know or have forgotten if you bought the special edition of the game you got an additional like 45 gems which is almost the amount that came with the base package and as a follow-up to that one-two combo each brick and mortar store also had their own exclusive packs of gems with almost all of them being better than those [ __ ] level one versions for loser idiots i mean like even even playstation home was offering its own gem pack wait what was what was playstation home again i legit forget oh my god playstation ho out of all the egregious dlc practices capcom was dipping their dick into during these trying years the gem system was often seen as the most ill-conceived and transparently greedy of them all and in a damned if you do damned if you don't type moment players could go gemless if they wished which was good because selecting them brought the pace of tournaments to a grinding halt and were eventually banned from most majors because of this though gem dlc sales were exceedingly low because they simply boiled down to pay to win mechanics which many people tend to hate a whole bunch so they didn't quite become the cost off-setting mechanic they were designed to be which wasn't great for cross tekken's long-term goals because initially gems were meant to go on for years and years and years one of the concepts was that the gem system would become so robust that you would ostensibly have an infinite amount of fighter variations there are ideas for very powerful gems down the line that would basically turn one character into a completely different one they were thinking that each average player would spend 12 on gems in total which was aggressive at the best of time so i think it goes without saying they did not hit those numbers and because of that there was gem dlc for only a few months until it was quietly cancelled even before launch the initial reaction to gems wasn't exactly a fan favorite but it was only the first in a long list of things that fans were very much not favoriting street fighter iv on the xbox 360 and ps3 were essentially the same game but things suddenly changed when capcom revealed in january of 2012 that the playstation 3 version would receive five exclusive characters all of which would be immediately banned in all tournaments this motley crew of combatants included two cats who were playstation mascots in japan the dude from infamous i don't remember his name and finally two men of the pack and mega varieties now while the first three make sense from a mascot perspective why was a capcom and namco icon sony exclusives well i'm sure it was befuddling to some back then and even today but it was like a lot of things in cross tekken another way to mitigate costs capcom typically approaches both sony and microsoft early on development with a build a plan and a hope that they'll get a co-marketing deal for street fighter cross tekken sony was willing to offer a ton of money for co-marketing as again this was hot off the heels of street fighter 4. as with all deals like this there were some concessions and this one was probably bigger than most because they were mostly joke characters and because it was forecast that the ps3 would have outsold the xbox 360 version anyway it seemed like it would have had minimal competitive impact in the end what didn't have minimal impact was that last character in the list mega man or bad box art mega man specifically which was its own whole huge embarrassing separate thing now this is one of those issues that was kind of no one's fault but somehow simultaneously still everyone's fault bad box art mega man or i think he was just called mega man he was a victim of timing when the game was being developed and when he was being added to it mega man was not in a bad place mega man universe had been announced there was mega man legends 3 and a third project was also in development it was really looking like a time to celebrate mega man so the team wanted to have some fun with it and then the sequence of events happened where all three titles were cancelled so it turned out to be the year of the death of mega man then they announced him for cross tekken with him looking like bad box art mega man and without that context about when and why he was developed it really looked like another slap in the face to mega man players so again he was a victim of timing in fact pr in general for cross tekken always seemed to run into some type of embarrassing snafu with certain ventures while maybe not hurting the actual game certainly didn't help lift the already pungent miasma that lingered since the big gem reveal okay so with that we are now reaching the third strike across tekken and as i'm sure all of you are aware [Music] it's time to talk about od dlc [Music] xbox 360 versions were leaked and split wide open and out toppled 12 dlc characters all on the disc all essentially finished as to why they were finished and not included in the base package well they're being held back as they were initially going to be timed exclusives for the vida port just remember the veda port well it was scheduled to come out six months after the home console launch apparently another part of the co-marketing deal with sony now you can say a lot about cross deck and people have but this was such a catastrophic pr nightmare for capcom that it changed how they did downloadable content from then on out especially for fighting games with all the other very not good press surrounding it capcom moved up the launch of the dlc roster to july as console warriors were furious they would have to wait six months to play with characters that were already on the disc that they had paid for due to a vita version they didn't even want hackers would even go online with these characters further adding insult to injury and i can't imagine sony was happy about all this either this whole disaster wasn't something that took capcom and especially capcom usa by surprise as they correctly predicted this would happen but wouldn't you know it their fears were waived off street fighter cross tekken became the poster child for on disc dlc there was a meeting between the production team in japan and the marketing team in the us we had stated people are going to find the on disk dlc because 100 of all xbox 360 games are cracked before launch and the response to that was why would anyone crack the game that's illegal there was a long pause a very long pause and then the director of marketing replied back to that with a very blunt please remove the on disk dlc and the response to that was well if we do that we're going to have to push the game out to april or may and we'll have to tell mr tsujimoto that it was marketing's decision to push it to the next fiscal year it very well could have been true that the work needed to remove the content would have pushed them back but basically they were saying we need to have this release by the fiscal year and if not well that's going to screw over the company and it's going to be your fault so that was pretty much a direct threat we just had to lose that battle and lose they did capcom's projections for cross tekken were 2 million units within the launch period but by mid-may they barely moved 1.4 considerably slower than the last couple of fighting games released by either capcom or namco and i'm getting a bit ahead of myself here but i haven't even gotten to the actual game part of all this yet because many fans especially within the fgc weren't keen on how the moment-to-moment fighting played out because of the way the tag system worked a higher than normal percentage of matches would be decided by time out then there was pandora a heavily advertised comeback mechanic that no one wanted to come back to and don't forget the incredibly distracting sometimes unclear ui that just for a more in-depth breakdown of all the issues players had i suggest stumble b's video on the subject as it looks more at the minutia of all the fighting mechanics that didn't quite work at launch so all these factors coupled with capcom's dlc dollar sign dreams being shattered firmly planted cross tekken in that slippery pit with no real way to escape you can't escape what also certainly contributed to its financial failure was the competition which was an assault that came from pretty much every angle and somewhat ironically came mostly from capcom itself remember the very same year crosstekken was announced in 2010 calcom also revealed marvel 3 and also launched ultimate all-stars and also launched street fighter 4 arcade edition in 2011. that's four different fighting games trying to co-exist all at the same time by the same company and it simply wasn't viable with that said capcom didn't give up entirely yeah they cancelled the thousands of gems they had planned and had to blow their character dlc load early but they realized the game still had a lot of fundamental problems that they were committed to fixing this brings us to cross tekken 2013 edition a way to let players know it was receiving an overhaul without having to spend money on new assets or features because the last thing they wanted to do was spend more money that they weren't making this patch addressed almost all complaints players had characters were rebalanced the ui was fixed and made more clear the tag system and grey life adjusted for all intents and purposes this was the game that should have been available at launch and smartly capcom made this a free update but once that update was issued that's all she wrote for cross tekken the four new street fighter characters that it introduced rolento hugo poison and elena were then added to ultra street fighter iv so some smart asset reuse there in the subsequent years fans have since rallied around the game especially on pc well with its impressive modding scene growing it to an obviously small but passionate fan base [Music] this was only made possible with the positive changes seen in the 2013 update and in terms of the core fighting game people's views on cross tekken have softened because of it now as for tekken cross street fighter the tekken focus 3d sequel that was never officially announced and never officially cancelled well after the tekken team finished tekken 6 and then tekken tag tournament 2 then tekken 7 arcade then tekken 3ds then tekken 7 faded retribution then tekken 7 the console version they haven't really made any strong indication that they'll ever return to the concept if capcom's attempt had been a rousing success you most likely would have seen harada's take by now it's odd how since this whole misfire capcom's fighting efforts have struggled in some form or another i hope my horrible ugliness won't be a distraction to you [Music] while tekken 7 has emerged as one of the most popular fighters of the last few years selling 5 million copies and still going strong it's fairly easy to see a pattern here capcom tried to push out multiple fighting games often in the same year and often cannibalizing its own sales while tekken focused on one release at a time writing out their success until they were ready to announce another the former capcom employee sums it up best in regards to the whole unfortunate situation after all the gems and all the on-disk dlc it made us say what is going on with this game and that sort of brought up the in-joke that it must have been greenlit over an ancient native american burial ground because it was just cursed and that was the other name we had for the game which was street fighter curse tekken because nothing went right with it so make no mistake the intentions here were good deliver a fighting game that many weren't expecting that featured lots of over-the-top mechanics but due to poor planning and poor budgeting and just plain old bad luck cross tekken was the partner that got sacrificed for other fighting franchises to thrive and with that if you know of any other pugilistic punch-em-ups that had problematic perils let me know in the comments below or cross the line over to the flaphouse vip patreon to nominate the subject of our next episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] fight well world warriors it's now that time strap on your headbands your eye patches and your banana hair because it's time to talk about how the most popular fighting game series in the world became not the most popular fighting game series in the world and it all boils down to the divisive 22nd entry in the 30 year old franchise street fighter 5. okay so oh god where do i start okay so listen real talk it's pretty well known that sf5 had numerous issues both pre-launch launch and for a good number of years post launch most of it being covered in a million other videos eight frames of lag lack of content less than optimal online play unbalanced characters kind of stale gameplay esports shenanigans etc etc etc and while i'll mention those when applicable it's not going to be the focus here just why did street fighter 5 you know kind of not do as well when compared to street fighter iv and many other recent fighting games what were the core issues that caused everything to sort of just fall apart from a business and developmental standpoint well let's whip out our crystal balls to see if we can make it a bit more clear as to what the hell happened it's 2014 and ultra street fighter 4 the fourth version of street fighter 4 had just released that june which was probably to help boost capcom's bottom line when you know who failed to sell their sales targets then barely six months later capcom announces the next numbered follow-up at sony's playstation experience after a leak of course that's so capcom okay anyway right here yeah this exact moment is where things started to go wrong at least in terms of public perception it's only been half a year since the last version and ultra wasn't some minor upgrade or anything it had drastic gameplay changes and several characters who had been locked in the cross tekken jail this already shows a massive difference in how other publishers were handling their fighting games at the time ai a little bit more cautiously as outlined in a previous episode nemco would release a new tekken entry and then several years later announced a brand new one building up anticipation for something fresh netherrealm would release a new mortal combat followed by a new injustice with each passing off the baton to the other every two years but capcom bring out the chart as you can see here at any given time at least two major capcom fighters were competing with each other in the same year not to mention all their various online enabled hd re-releases it's safe to say that while looking at this chart that they may have stretched their fighting game fans a bit too thin now when street fighter 5 was announced many people were excited which is great but there was also a good chunk of fans that felt this announcement was maybe ill-timed droves of people were still playing for especially with the changes ultra implemented and then there were those that scoffed and said yeah i'll just wait for the good version that'll be released later which was a behavior that capcom themselves fostered what with you know all these oh wait wait i forgot one yep nope that's five now and we're just talking about the initial reaction to the announcement to understand how this all came about we're going to need to back it up a bit street fighter 5 was actually being developed far longer than most may realize with the intent to release it nice and early on then next-gen machines a producer on 5 when koichi tsugiyama was interviewed in the japanese street fighter 5 artbook and in a roundabout way revealed that the game was floundering early on street fighter 5 was something we've been working on since 2011. all the way up to sf3 the series had been rendered in pixel sprites but for sf4 the graphics were all done with 3d models so we had to go through many phases of trial and error in order to nail the same sort of visual impact that the series is known for for sf5 we were working with unreal engine 4 which is known for being particularly good at rendering photorealistic visuals so once again we did a lot of experiments we actually put together a build of sf5 that was rendered in photorealistic graphics but when we did we realized that it just wouldn't be street fighter without the bold anime-esque look and feel to the game so we decided to shelve the whole photo realism idea altogether i spoke to a source close to capcom that said this experimental period lasted for a good two years that's 24 months and however much money spent on a pitch that was ultimately scrapped what's more they were doing some weird [ __ ] during those 24 months hobo or hot ryu was actually going to be his default look with the story being that the eternal fighter had been training up in the mountains for quite some time just returning to society as the fifth game kicks off bison was also given a radical redesign making him almost 100 percent biomechanical but like tsugiyama said the build was shelved development started over from scratch in 2013 and just defaulted back to four's anime look but with a light oil painting aesthetic oh one minor thing though the game also switched developers the photorealistic build which was more of a visual test rather than gameplay was being handled by polygon pitchers who capcom ono specifically had worked with before on various projects and with that build being thrown out five was then just shuffled back over to demps who had been busy trying to fix cross-tekken in 2013 and were also developing ultra street fighter iv this left them very little time to play catch-up trying to nail a new visual style as well as you know do everything else here's a dramatic reenactment [Music] now with two years essentially wasted the clock was ticking to get the game out in a timely manner to take advantage of next-gen consoles which were already well underway by 2014. this would ensure sf5 would cost through the generation with various updates and content as it was skewing towards more of a live service model rather than just huge updates that would be packaged as new versions with separate skus something that i again outlined in the crosstekken episode was that capcom was always looking for co-marketing deals that would help save costs and who better than the company that demanded cat mascots johnny infamous and bb amm in their playstation branded fighting games sony was more than willing to play ball and in exchange for exclusive console rights to street fighter 5 they'd market the ever loving [ __ ] out of it hence the playstation experience reveal now in terms of budget it was reportedly robust overall but remember a portion of that budget had already been flushed down the proverbial birdie stage toilet you can't blame capcom here well i i mean xbox fans sure did but if you're being handed a big check and your projects getting kinda shaky you'd take the money too as you'd expect former capcom employee matt dahlgren had a far more lip service-y take on this momentous deal the reason we partnered up with sony is we share the same vision for the growth potential in the fighting game space i'd say that the key aspect they're working with us on is executing cross-platform play this is going to be the first time we've ever united our community into a centralized player base sony the champion of cross platform play yeah that makes sense now moving on to the actual development well dem scott handed a raw deal they had been exclusively using capcom's mt framework for their last couple of titles and were then handed unreal four with zero experience working with it and just told to make it work it's about here where you start to see where all the problems the game had at launch originally spawned from but fortunately things only got worse from there five's online beta launched in july of 2015 and capcom was able to utilize all the data players were sending them and all that data said loud and clear this [ __ ] doesn't work now the point of these types of betas is to identify problems going forward but you could probably count the amount of matches that actually took place during this beta on a single hand it was so unstable and frustrating for players that capcom just shut it down early and rescheduled it for later that summer this didn't exactly inspire confidence considering a huge chunk of a fighting game's worth is determined by a solid online experience so there were obvious concerns coming from those that wanted to test their medal against worldwide competition and the notion that street fighter 5's netcode was not up to that task it has unfortunately been something that stuck around ever since conversely on the other side those that were looking to enjoy a lot of solo content well i sure hope you liked unlocking colors with their accelerated time frame to finish the game as well as feverishly rewriting netcode it's not surprising demps wasn't able to offer a lot of content for customers to chew through at launch making the core fighting work and be fun is the most important thing but charging people full price for a game with little to actually do is not really ideal the source i spoke to explains why the game came out the way it did i think the capcom pro tour and the fiscal year cut off march 31st 2016 were the main factors there with the understanding that sf5 would always be an evolving product with a lot of free updates coming down the line meaning that theoretically any initial backlash would have been mitigated eerie coincidence with cross tekken there that game's whole ondis dlc fiasco only occurred because capcom wasn't willing to miss the end of their fiscal year cutoff something most companies wouldn't risk so the lack of content for five could be chalked up to er we'll have to do it later unfortunately these two core problems a dearth of modes arcade chief among them and spotty online play kind of ensured that neither camp was really happy with the end product so it won't shock anyone to know that with this really rough early reception that capcom needed time to regroup and figure out how best to move forward which of course meant that weeks ticked by with few updates and sporadic communication i think for a while after launch they were particularly short-handed so they just didn't have the foresight to know what their pipeline looked like or when they could provide updates to the community this live content model was also a new venture for the team so there are a lot of unknowns in that sense during this time something that was meant to be a big band-aid for the game was the promise of a cinematic story mode this was a point of contention between capcom usa and capcom in japan with the u.s side insisting it needed to be included with japan being somewhat resistant it took a lot of cajoling to sell them capcom japan on a proper story mode which came via title update long after launch capcom usa identified that as something certain competitors did better than street fighter and wanted to close that gap i'm not sure what capcom japan's position was but they seem to take a lot of convincing perhaps understandable when you consider how much development was required for something tertiary to the main content in hindsight it might have been a mistake or at least a waste of time as stated the story mode wasn't at launch instead arriving almost 6 months later and while being free was good for people who had already purchased it it didn't exactly entice new ones and thus didn't increase capcom's bottom line it certainly would have helped if it had been on offer from the start of the first round but the fact it came so late and the fact that a shadow falls was kind of uh intruders i understand i'll get back there right now hey wait made it forgettable in a lot of respects obviously there were way more bumps afterwards and the game took ages to see a steady stream of content but is with the advent of season 3 which saw a host of improvements including arcade ladders heavily fan requested characters along with several new ones sf5 finally hit its stride in terms of providing a full-fledged fighting game something that many of its competitors were able to do right out the gate the rushed initial development and the transition of moving into more of a live service platform was clearly bungled from a variety of angles 10 years ago capcom learned that street fighter 4's 40 dollar overhauls while something that may have worked in the 90s were somewhat unreasonable in the late 2000s but they're embracing a more modern content delivery clearly needed some work as well street fighter 5 has indeed improved in many areas but it took essentially four years for it to get there there's now a massive roster of characters with one final season still coming please add soda plenty of modes costumes rewards and better online play that still might need some tweaking capcom's fighting game output in general has since slowed way down releasing only marvel vs capcom infinite in the same time frame that uh that that yeah so they are learning however slowly that it's a genre you have to do right at launch to take your time delay it past your fiscal year cut off if you have to it'll be okay the [ __ ] uh monster hunter and there's gonna be four new biohazards they they can carry you don't worry it's weird then giving this really obvious basic advice to a company who essentially birthed the fighting game but sometimes you get a little rusty in between matches and you need to take a few hits maybe get knocked down before you rise back with a wake up dragon punch that finally finds its target [Music] you win thanks to big boss c2 for you for the nomination and if you want to put forward a game or a movie of your choosing then flash chop your way into the flophouse vip patreon to force me to spinning pile drive it on our next episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] i've covered wars you know well that's great frank because we'll be covering another war on this week's episode of what happened a war of dueling ideologies of dwindling resources and a war of sadly big dumb mistakes this was the war between capcom vancouver formerly blue castle games and capcom japan formerly of capcom japan hot off the heels of the xbox 360's launch the blue and yellow logo showed up in the right place at the right time on the right games putting out both lost planet and dead rising for the first high definition console on the market uh warts and all while both were made in house at capcom vancouver's blue castle games were contracted to follow up with a sequel to dead rising after having impressed inafune with their engine tech shortly thereafter 2010 brought us dead rising ii and then case west and then k-0 and then off the record and by then they were probably getting a little tired of dead rising that being said their work on the series was a big success and capcom even bought the company outright re-christening them to capcom vancouver which is certainly a distinction after all the other failed this stuff wanting to transition to making other projects the heads of the studio assigned smaller teams to begin making prototypes for potential ips to pitch to capcom one of these games was codenamed brazil an action horror game that showed more than a passing similarity to dead space after close to two years of work disagreements arose between the production staff and the capcom higher ups which eventually saw them shutting the whole thing down and the team were then shuffled onto dead rising 3 which was then entering production now unlike the dead rising 3 we know today this early version began life with the intention of it being a 360 and ps3 title as a sort of send-off to both machines this is what happened though and complications quickly arose with this particular title complications that would set off a chain reaction of decisions communication and miscommunication that would have dire consequences down the line vancouver had some big ideas for dr3 but their technology was lagging behind them as their game was supposed to be pushing a seamless no loading open world and a large variety of zombie shredding combo vehicles now while both consoles were struggling to do these features justice the ps3 was being particularly nasty about it and performance was stated to be so unstable that the entire project had a good chance of getting a bullet into the brain fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it microsoft began investing in third-party exclusives for the all-in-one entertainment system the xbox one which saw such classics as ryze son of rome fighter within and other used game ben fodder anyway since the ps3 version was being the primary source of the project's woes capcom took the deal microsoft funneled more money into the project and an extra year in development was given so it would be an exclusive launch title for the one around the same time vancouver again tried pitching a brand new ip to capcom no doubt wanting to diversify their portfolio a little bit because it was starting to really smell like a zombie new frontier was a wildly ambitious space-faring action rpg that focused on high-speed vehicles planetary discovery and melee combat six months was spent making a vertical slice which was then presented to capcom unfortunately the project was deemed too ambitious and expensive to produce and since they were unwilling to invest in it the pitch was rejected by the way get used to the words the pitch was rejected that can't be good it's also around the same time that capcom vancouver's original president and founder rob barrett decided to step down from the company for unspecified reasons blue castle had only started producing games around 2007 so barrett's sudden departure was a bit odd and very very foreshadowing in his wake the producers who had brought dead rising 3 to market have been elevated up the company ranks in the interim which is certainly the best option they had at the time but it also marks another important point in this story from here on out the studio was lacking solid leadership now with dr3 in the rear view the team needed to push forward with a new game and in the exclusivity deal with microsoft the computing giant was also given a first refusal of whatever came next for the zombie franchise meaning if capcom was to make a sequel microsoft would get offered it first however in a post the last of us world the xbox would need its own exclusive zombie survival franchise to compete and hey would you look at that we kind of already have one with microsoft producers now on the ground floor and with both them and vancouver enthusiastically embracing change dead rising 4 or known by its code name climber was set to turn the series on its decomposing head after three technically four games back to back all being very similar in design and tone vancouver was thankful to finally work on something fresh now the only people not aware of this sudden change in direction was capcom japan who didn't really oversee vancouver's work on a day-to-day basis only touching base every few months and since they only seemed interested in having the studio pump out more dead rising coupled with one of these long periods of silence between the two led to microsoft and the new head of the climber project josh bridge to start getting very very chummy with each other climber's narrative was going to be unconnected to the previous entries and be far more grounded overall it was also going to place a greater focus on true open world design and not be under the roof of a mall or casino or water park or whatever you'd be stealth killing zombies rather than mowing down hordes of them and while you could still craft and create combo weapons you couldn't make a spike encrusted super soaker that shot electrified fire aside from just the last of us climber was going to take inspiration from other popular zombie media at the time for example the walking dead which would have been on only its fourth season at this time god that feels like centuries ago the team plugged away at an ambitious prototype for most of 2014 with microsoft very much hands-on during its creation eventually however capcom japan wanted to check in and confident in what they had created vancouver presented them the playable prototype which was met with mouths a gape and not the good type of gaping mouth no the uh the the bad one yeah so capcom japan expected a dead rising four to be pretty much like all the other dead risings and since they were not consulted on this new direction they hated it and asked for the brakes to be slammed down on they then ordered vancouver to start over again from scratch i guess the thought process here for josh bridge and the rest of the team was that was better to ask for forgiveness than permission because if they had asked for permission to sort of soft reboot the franchise it would have been rejected like so many times before all three companies then begrudgingly agreed to just make a far safer sequel so josh bridge decided to pitch the safest idea he could think of bringing back frank west placing it in willamette and instituting combo mech suits as the game's big new feature this of course pleased capcom japan who was given the green light to move forward and that's when the disaster really took off now why did this disaster take off i don't know well the main reason was despite vancouver having to start over from square one capcom refused to allocate additional funding or time and microsoft wasn't really in a position to offer that either vancouver had to then use the remaining budget and working days they had spent on climber six months worth on essentially a brand new game this left them roughly a year and a half of real production time as very little work on climber could be reused come october of 2014 capcom decided to take a slightly more aggressive action firing several major producers of the little misbehaving canadian studio including josh bridge essentially punishment for making climber without their knowledge well [ __ ] this was a massive blow to the company and put the rest of the staff on high notice with many fearing that with such major firings the company's days were numbered complicating matters is that those same firings were the leads on frank west's big return leaving the game without any focus for months now due to all these factors much of the staff saw the bloody writing on the wall and decided to leave the company before its inevitable closure with roughly 40 of the original staff cleaning out their desks vancouver's remaining troops assuming that dr4 was going to be canceled tried pitching other safe projects including but not limited to a small prototype for resident evil x a action-flavored spin-off on capcom's crown jewel this pitch was again rejected by capcom japan as the lukewarm reception of re-6 fanned away the distinct michael bay-esque smell that the series was starting to emanate and here's the devastating one capcom vancouver also pitched a new entry in the long abandoned ip dino crisis for then next-gen machines this didn't even get into the prototyping phase as capcom japan yep you guessed it rejected it outright because this story wasn't sad enough i guess but it doesn't stop there capcom reportedly also had no interest in reviving either on a musha with a brand new game or a side-scrolling action title set in the mega man universe no surprises there no one knows what it's like to be hated with none of these projects getting picked up the remaining staff was resigned to just try and focus on dead rising 4 with designer joe nichols reportedly stepping up to lead the project even with that though things were very tough going as the studio was still bleeding talent out of every oozing orifice every single month dr4 dragged on one of those talents was annie reed long time writer of the series who left near the start of 2015 with all her work up to that point being rewritten by others which explains the problems that fans had with frank and pretty much every other character and you believe that how [ __ ] naive are you oh that's nice tank bus holy [ __ ] frank this is some atrocity level [ __ ] going on here and the best you can do is crack wise that is unfair i have photographed things and thought about things what in the world [Music] from this point on with the budget and time rapidly draining away many features from previous entries had to be cut or if they were extremely lucky greatly simplified one of these features was psychopaths the studio was struggling with how to implement them because as of 2015 cartoonish parodies of mental illness were seen as a tricky subject to tackle ultimately though it was really the lack of time that killed their inclusion as designing several compelling boss fights would eat up precious time and resources as a compromise maniacs were shoved into the game at the 11th hour mini boss encounters that were greatly scaled back in presentation and ai compared to the psychopaths of old frank west's photography skills increased however as a direct emulation of popular assorted detective visions from batman and a bunch of others vancouver wanted to do even more with this feature designing an almost metroid prime-like search view that would activate certain paths and objects but with time very much not on their side it was cut but wait there's more things that didn't exist at one point there were side stories which focused around serial killers with frank having discovered clues at various crime scenes with the help of his camera any guesses on what happened to this feature any guesses at all man another big and some would say biggest missing feature indicative of dead rising was the timer which was a source of tension throughout the games while the decision to cut it was partially due to vancouver microsoft and capcom all not wanting to restrict players anymore from experiencing all of the game the main reason it was cut from the game is that it simply didn't offer enough game all the things we've discussed thus far that were cut while that fed into the staff's inability to craft multiple endings there just wasn't enough stuff to really do in dr4 to warrant it and no time to do it in that's actually pretty meta when you think about it because vancouver themselves had their own big scary timer always counting down all of these massive problems resulted in microsoft taking a good hard look and petitioning for the game to be granted a few extra months unfortunately this time could only be used to reiterate and polish what was in the game rather than add more content into it the dead rising 4 team knew the game would not be embraced by fans due to all the missing um everything but not really being a position to argue kept plugging away with the few precious months they had left okay now this part this this is the part where it actually gets insane during all of this the development of dr4 in fact most of 2015 a small team broke away and began prototyping a dead rising five now i know what some of you are gonna say one why and two why the [ __ ] as we explained in the sonic boom episode if a big studio doesn't have a secondary project lined up and ready to enter full production by the time their current project is done then more firings are expected you need to constantly be grabbing hold of the next branch just as you're letting go of the last one and since capcom japan clearly had no interest in green lighting anything else from the studio it wasn't a carbon copy of the last dead rising the safest bet was more dead rising at this point vancouver's main goal was to just keep everyone working but we are not done yet with good ol frank west because unfortunately capcom vancouver made their own decisions that did no favors amongst fans oh [ __ ] [ __ ] perhaps even more so than missing side quests boss fights or a timer recasting the voice actor for frank west tj rotolo in favor of a slightly older sounding voice actor was uh another big misfire for the game the official company line on the matter was given by dead rising product and license manager trent lee amy's we wanted to work with someone to provide a more grizzled older take on frank at this stage dead rising 4 takes place 16 years after the events of the first game as such we decided to cast a new actor for the role that reflected his age while still retaining the charm and humor that made him such a hit with fans we think frank's new voice actor has done a phenomenal job and we can't wait to share more of him with you in the future it's no disrespect to history or previous actors tj has done a bang-up job it was a chance with a new game to progress the franchise as best we can with a different vision just as we see new james bonds over the years now what is the real story on this the backstage ska well it turns out capcom vancouver wanted to cast a new actor in the role of frank west yes no money disputes or creative differences here since the team so desperately wanted to try and break away from series trappings wherever they could they simply made changes in areas that wouldn't ruffle feathers at capcom japan this was a mistake but it wasn't the last one they would make dr4 stumbled onto the xbox one that holiday season and it was not met with much enthusiasm especially in the already crowded holiday marketplace while series fans view it as some sort of affront to gaming it still posted some respectable reviews but in terms of a standalone main line release it is amongst the lowest rated of the entire franchise just a few notches above the amazingly bad chop till you drop stop skeletons please cover this game soon capcom vancouver then attempted to address the many criticisms the game received through both free and paid dlc this included harder difficulty modes and kooky capcom costumes that had their own movesets all things which didn't really make the game any better the timer was brought back in frank's big package dlc that oh i get it a penis and knowing it might be tough to recoup costs based on only one console's sku dr4 made its way onto the ps quadruple ballin after one year of being an xbox exclusive unfortunately even with all these updates it did little to salvage the dearth of content the bugs the inconsistent performance the hurried and kind of weird writing and characterization of frank as well as countless other smaller things despite all that dead rising 4 was able to amass sales of over a million copies but unfortunately due to the realities of then next-gen development the money lost on the failed climber pitch and the delay the game suffered it didn't come close to achieving a healthy profit the lost goodwill from fans those lower reviews and sales and with a whole host of its own unique problems caused capcom to then pull the plug on dead rising 5 which was a whole other thing if you want more details on that then i urge you to check out liam robertson's fall of capcom vancouver video over at did you know gaming as he goes in depth on dr5 as well as more rejected capcom ip revivals yes folks there's somehow even more anyway we're almost done in 2017 capcom japan finally greenlit a project from the studio and for the first time in its history wasn't dead rising this of course was the massively disliked reboot of puzzle fighter which was massively disliked due to well i mean look at it capcom japan a few months after puzzle fighter's release but before switchport could be completed finally swung the axe that was floating above vancouver's head and officially shut down the studio the only public statement regarding this was as a result of reviewing titles in development at capcom vancouver capcom has decided to cancel the development projects at this studio and will concentrate development of major titles in japan ever since then there's been nary a gurgle about dead rising returning as capcom has been focusing on their own internal japanese teams which is a good thing of course but it would have been nice if capcom vancouver could have been turned back into blue castle games and have continued to make their own ips from then on out okay i'm gonna be real no one looks great here the vancouver studio should have kept capcom in the loop microsoft maybe shouldn't have butted in capcom japan should have had faith in the studio and maybe allowed the staff to stretch their wings like a little bit this was a disaster that everyone helped to create so after seven years and seven standalone dead rising releases the studio behind dead rising was uh dead it's over for us thanks again to liam robertson for his help with this video and if you know of any other shambling husks of video games or movies that have been put through the ringer you'd like to see on the show moan it out in the comments below start grasping and clawing at my twitter or bite into the arteries of the flophouse vip patreon and become a big zombie boss to nominate the subject we'll be targeting next see you next time thanks for watching [Music] now it has been uh six days since we last talked about a capcom game here on what happened but thanks to big boss trey adams at the flophouse vip patreon this week we are table hopping into the story of how capcom almost killed one of its most influential franchises that originally spawned at one of their other most influential franchises this is how devil may cry 2 nearly sealed the fate yet at the same time went on to reignite the swords slashing series with smoke and sexy style dmc as some may know originally started as an attempt to craft a new resident evil title the re4 in fact but with the radical changes that windex enthusiast and man who still has me blocked hideki kamia instituted it was decided to spin the game off into its own thing capcom was and still is all about producing sequels for just about everything except for spyborgs and it was much the same here when it came to their newest star the demon hunter dante see they were very confident in dmc's chances at retail for a few reasons with said reasons being it was directed by the person who helmed re2 it was an exclusive for sony's follow-up console which was a pretty popular and lastly they knew that dark soul would go on to be a cultural milestone moment that would define a generation so a team was put together to start working on a sequel but unlike most video game publishers or businesses in general this was done before dante had yet to bust out a single stinger yes a follow-up was greenlit before the original had even been released which was incredibly ballsy of capcom but given the eventual success of dante's first adventure they were right to do so because there wasn't any real reaction to the first game yet no feedback to draw upon the team were given pretty much carte blanche to do whatever which is one of the main problems that plagued devil may cry to lack of any real direction and a team that was incredibly inexperienced now what do i mean by that well in devil may cry 3142 graphic arts various staff that had worked on the series since its inception shown some lights on the dark soul of the project one of these staff members was legendary capcom artist ikeno who detailed just why the team that was put together maybe wasn't the best choice capcom had traditionally been split into two main pillars the arcade division and the console division but with the ps2's increased processing power and a change in the nature of capcom's arcade game market meant a company-wide shift of human resources from arcade to console with the company's big hits at the time like resident evil and dmc many of the arcade fighting game teams were switched over to teams making games for the home consoles these former arcade division employees were put in charge of the dmc sequel this was a problem because with all their design experience coming from arcades quick quarter munching experiences that could be completed in 30 minutes or less it left the team with little knowledge on how to craft a beefier level based action game for context capcom's late era arcade titles were things like power stone and spawn in the demon's hand projects that wouldn't have adequately prepared them for tackling the complexities of creating a sequel for a franchise that they had no hand in creating what's worse is that pretty much every major staff member who contributed to dmc one was absent on the sequel with some not even being aware that dmc 2 was a thing that was happening until months after the fact kamiya kobayashi pretty much all the experienced hands within the console division never even touched this thing in their stead capcom put fresh new hire tsuyoshi tanaka in a producing role with directing duties being handled by a question mark this is one of the still remaining mysteries which clowns devil may cry to as the original director to this day has never been publicly named some have speculated it was shinji makami or the windex master himself even though none of that makes any sense for literally all the reasons what we do know is that the initial team makeup was composed of people who had worked on capcom's arcade fighters but beyond that the original director remains an enigma trapped in a riddle trapped in a red coat now earlier i mentioned this new team was given maybe a bit too much freedom in their approach to a sequel and aikeno gave some insight into their thought process at the time which was many of them didn't even understand or like aspects of devil may cry at first the protagonist wasn't even going to be dante but rather some guy with a green jacket looking back at the game's fundamentals like the visuals and the overall design we didn't take the parts of dmc one that players wound up loving into account so the second game felt very artificial i think our attitude was a little too much we're gonna make it how we want to dante's sudden change into a more taciturn or reserved character was the producer's decision because he didn't like the joke i was about to say joke asking wisecrack joke cracking wise ass dante from the first game the team agreed and that was the direction we went in dante's sudden silence almost seemed to imply that something terrible had happened between the events of one and two aside from just changes to characterization the team struggled in another area level design since the original dmc was built off the skeleton of a resident evil game multi-tiered level structure backtracking and puzzle items were prominently featured this new team having zero experience designing in that style simply made large mostly barren stages that had little functionality or detail leading to a very empty game world by comparison [Music] things meandered on like this for about a year with the game and team never really coalescing and with only six months left in the proposed deadline this is when capcom higher-ups took a good hard look at the project and realized it was probably going to get an f ranking in the style department therefore they stepped in to try and course correct now i know what you're thinking oh man this must be the part where things got really [ __ ] and in a nice twist no it's not it is in fact where dmc2 got unfucked or uh less [ __ ] i should say with everyone else at capcom kind of busy or maybe when asked if they wanted to take over directing duties and replying with oh oh i'm [ __ ] not hideaki itsuno was then hired to reorganize the project with the older mystery director being hoofed out in the process now it's true that atsuno also came from an arcade background having worked on both rival schools and power stone among many others but at the end of the day still had a ton of experience leading on big projects there was a lot of drama over my replacing of the old director and i had nothing but bad memories about that part in particular but basically they said that nothing was getting done and had needed to change the scenario hadn't been written the cut scenes had yet to be shot and they hadn't decided what to do about dante's devil trigger they had determined that the stinger attack was essential so at least they had someone who was going to take care of that but none of the other attacks had been worked on at all speaking of attacks and combat it's another aspect of this sequel that the team felt needed to change despite it being an integral part of the first game see when capcom started receiving fan feedback and reaction from dmc one some of it revolved around its difficulty as there was really nothing exactly like it on the market dante's quest challenged you to stylishly kill enemies without ever getting touched which was something not every player was accustomed to so it was decided to lower the overall difficulty and when i say lowered i mean spam your guns seriously 75 of the game can be trivialized by whipping out ebony and ivory and to never stop shoot banging this distinction is what caused some to call dmc 2 the best third-person shooter released in 2003 and unfortunately this was something it suno either didn't or couldn't really change the hardcore fans of dmc one weren't exactly happy but newcomers to the series liked it a lot the people who especially liked it were the ones who had tried dmc 1 but found it too difficult and quit part way through i read a lot of survey responses along the lines of dmc 1 was awesome but i just wasn't feeling it i felt it in dmc 2 though so thanks i need to meet these fans seriously which part were you feeling there bro this [Music] with half a year left there were only so many things that could be addressed and finished and considering the overall quality of dmc 2 i'm not gonna lie i would have loved to have played the original pre-itsuno version just to prove to myself that i could with that said it's actually surprisingly not all bad because under its suno some novel features that started here went on to become dmc mainstays this includes switching weapons mid combat evasive maneuvers like rolling flipping and wall running assigned to a button and finally the introduction of bloody palace mode which is something that's now expected in all future dmcs but as much as it's suno's involvement helped there were plenty of other lamentable decisions that still managed to slip through a big back of the box selling point was the addition of a second playable character something so groundbreaking and bleeding edge that it would need its own dedicated disc to become a reality lucia was a crimson-haired counterpart to dante who he would sometimes suddenly bump into during the course of the game putting the lucia disc into your ps2 would then allow you to play the game as lucia and that's it minor differences aside both discs contain almost identical data so it's been rumored that this was simply a marketing tactic to make players believe they were getting tons of bangs for their bucks now while this being the case was never confirmed by a capcom employee i mean yeah it was strange that final fantasy 10 a cut-scene and dialogue filled 40-plus hour rpg released two years earlier was able to fit on a single ps2 disc but dmc 2's 5 hour odyssey could not now as for lucia herself while brimming with potential wasn't handled all that well as cutscenes and story were hastily put together leading up to the game's launch this left her designer aikeno lamenting the fact that they were not able to expand upon her character sadly the characters in dmc2 dante included are fairly tight-lipped and never really take any drastic action i feel like if we had included a scene that showed how the standoffish lucia is actually kind at heart she would have been a more appealing character but that sweet side never emerged only the prickly one was ever shown and that kind of thing is hard to show comprehensively in any kind of performance now with all that out of the way let's just get right to it remember that time when dmc2 had diesel brand clothing diesel brand clothing diesel branded clothing seems like something of an odd fit for a capcom game they didn't typically succumb to the allure of product placement in their titles but in this case there was a surprisingly simple but still nevertheless stupid reason it's in there it was because tanaka-san the producer used to work for them it was a collaboration that made good use of his last job people on both sides talked at the time and felt that dmc2 and diesel's visual styles would work well together and would be quite appealing to the casual audience seeing dante and lucia wearing diesel fashion on screen was very cool there's something neat about watching them run through the game's story while wearing those clothes it reminds me of re in a way again i i don't know who this appeals to who looks at a shell full of games money clutched in their hands and goes i refuse to buy a game unless it's got some bomb ass diesel jeans oh yeah i got this what a difference anyway despite you know everything it suno did the impossible in a mere six months dmc 2 became unplayable to playable albeit a very unexciting action game filled to burst with infested tanks helicopters tanks tanks and more hella tanks and the reviews were uh mixed to say the least with many outlets citing it as the most disappointing game of 2003 with others well not going as far still marked it as a fairly weak follow-up dante even though gaining one of his sharpest designs was criticized for his lack of styling and door profiling with many fans not appreciating his attitude adjustment till next time son of spada a dynamo of charisma complaints were also lobbied against the superfluous second disc boring bosses and inspired level design and especially the brain dead difficulty but especially the overabundance of infested ah god whatever now despite the negative reviews dmc 2 was still a financial success really the only success that matters to most publishers as it wound up posting similar numbers to dmc one at the end of the day it was really this uh thirst for dante which saved the franchise from falling over the edge into obscurityville walters down there who was in there oh that yeah who haven't seen you in a while so in a nice twist to the story that's a rarity here on what happened dmc2's reception is what reinvigorated the series to begin with as in suno was determined to right the wrongs when he first wielded rebellion part of me was dissatisfied because i hadn't started with the project from day one as far as i was concerned that didn't amount to a proper level of involvement with dmc so i asked the company if they would give me dmc 3 from the start and they agreed without dmc 3 i would be known as itsuno the director of devil may cry 2 as far as the series is concerned many of the same arcade staff who cut their teeth on console development with itsuno joined him on dante's awakening as well and they all rallied around the idea of going back to his cockier roots infusing the game with a youthful energy and providing deeper combat mechanics making this a prequel to the first game also then logically plays dmc2 at the end of the series timeline chalking it up to yeah in the future dante he doesn't really talk that's hey look over here he's doing silly things with missiles and [ __ ] so you can say that this unfortunate bumbling step in the franchise is what informed the rest of the series going forward which only got progressively more eccentric every time so in that way dmc 2 is surprisingly important this does of course remind me to remind you all that dmc 2 is available in stores on the devil may cry collection as well as a standalone package for 24.99 on the nintendo switch for some reason if you know of any other stylishly troubled video games movies or consoles let me know in the comments below rainstorm down into my twitter or take a motorcycle ride over to the flophouse vip patreon become a big boss and nominate the subject of a future episode of what happened see you next time kids and thanks for watching i'm not even gonna try to come up with a clever intro here because this week's game comes from a particular publisher that we're very familiar with here at what happened and i'm just so so tired this is like the eighth or the ninth and a half time i've done this and it's all because of one little yellow and blue logo that won't let me stop seriously though i have a lot of respect for capcom for all the wonderful franchises they've given us over the last 30 some years unfortunately those who have lasted for 30 years well you need to churn out a lot of sequels and just by the law of averages a lot of those sequels tend to lose their way and few capcom properties lost their way harder and more constantly than the blue bomber and in this particular instance his distant cousin whatever from the future mega man x to be honest i long stopped paying attention to the franchise after x4 which was the peak for me as a fan because it was the only one that contained i mean the regular mega man series kind of burned itself out with derivative sequels so it's natural that the same would befall x therefore i'm not 100 sure where the franchise went after its playstation debut so let's take a quick jaunt through the information super highway to find out that oh well it all starts with x6 really after a lot of really similar sequels getting pumped out almost yearly it's safe to say that the mega man team at capcom were running out of steam among all the 2d games in the franchise x6 is often pegged as the weakest all north american and european numbers from that era are hard to pinpoint in japan sales were dipping with every new entry with x5 having topped out around 215 000 copies whereas x6 barely crawled over the 100k mark those numbers however were still healthy enough to spur capcom to greenlight more of sequels try to act surprised and while not even close to what resident evil was selling it was clear that x6 was made fast and cheap so it didn't need to be a blockbuster one other potential reason as to why there was a downtrend in interest was that x6 released at the end of 2001 more than a year into the playstation 2's life which was taking the world by storm the mega man x series was still sticking to its 2d roots so it probably looked archaic to the eyes of new fans and the press oh how they would come to regret that perception this dip in sales was enough to cause capcom to change course it was time to bring x into the 22nd century or you know the 21st century it was time for him zero and the rest of the maverick hunters to go 3d now unlike some other series we've covered in the past like castlevania and bubsy capcom had already seen success transitioning to 3d hell there were already two highly regarded mega man legends games so things were looking up [Music] oh but this is also where things were looking down because some behind the scenes changes were happening at the company as the shepherd of the mega man franchise kg and afune had stepped away from the x series see x5 was the last one he worked on in any serious capacity as he wanted to focus on other projects now bit of backstory real quick x5 also happened to be the one where zero gets killed off which was at inafune's behest but in spite of that the fiery herod maverick hunter was going to be returning whether he wants to are not i'd always plan to make zero come back to life in the mega man zero series but then x6 comes out sooner from another division and zero comes back to life and that and i'm like what's this now my story for zero doesn't make any sense zero has been brought back to life two times this has become a real pain i want a full explanation when this is all over capcom restructuring all their internal teams something i covered pretty heavily on the flophouse files and it was this new studio that the keys to the ride armor were given unfortunately production studio 3 just couldn't get it together as the titles they were pumping out leading to the release of x7 weren't exactly things you'd want on your resume they did have some staff that worked on x5 and x6 but after the shake up the titles coming from the team were a bit dino stalker pro cast sports fishing the gamecube classic disney's magical mirror starring mickey mouse and finally a ps2 version of dino crisis 3 that was cancelled which is [ __ ] i swear every time i talk about a capcom game on this show it makes me realize i'll eventually have to talk about another capcom game on this show [Music] you can probably already see where this is heading the studio was obviously a little on the wobbly side they were working with a very established and well-loved franchise and the series long-standing producer was moving on to other things so it's no surprise that i'm writing this very episode of what happened right now about this game they really made a mess with inafune's departure some of the producing duties were handed over to tatsuya kiribayashi who had just been promoted as part of his move to studio 3. he was previously a programmer on the aforementioned gamecube smash hit disney's magical mirror starring mickey now during the start of x7's development inifune was consulted on one thing and one thing only the design for the new character axel the poochie of the mega man x universe maybe what i did was wrong but like we were a perfect team don't you think when we kicked that big dude's butt i thought yeah axel was the first of many changes the team wanted to make and for whatever reason one of those was to push x further into the background despite his name being the only one on the box the storyline justification for this was that x retired from the whole maverick hunting jazz into more of a support role and thus a cooler younger and louder hero was positioned as the main protag in his stead so where's x been lately i haven't seen him around now if you think i'm kidding about axel being created simply to be the cooler younger hero well here's this quote from kitabayashi where he says that axel was created because they wanted a cooler younger hero he's young he's running away he's like the new younger character of the group and that's why i wanted to put him in there axel comes equipped with a weapon not an arm cannon but a gun it it doesn't shoot lemons it's it's just a gun i guess production studio three felt that the gun is good zero back from not being dead is the second playable hero and both can be swapped in or out during the course of a stage this was all done to freshen up this series new console new perspective new gameplay systems new hero that makes sense given the rut that the games had found themselves in but it's never the smartest move to lock the title hero behind a fetch quest if you collect slash save 64 of 128 reploid hostages throughout the game then x finally gets added to your team i mean i mean why not just have that be zero makes a bit more sense why x look his face is right front and center on the box anyway those big changes continued with a beef bottling mix of 2.5 d stages and 3d stages that were clearly designed by a madman they also happened to be the cause of the lion's share of ire that x7 has earned this was all due perhaps to the team's inexperience with fully 3d games or a hesitation to move the x series into that new scary dimension but regardless the choice was made to anchor the camera at an awkward angle almost as if it was being shot from ceiling mounted security cams this would result in many enemies and hazards popping up at the top of the screen at the last second making rooms harder to react to when compared to the 2d bits the game also instituted an auto targeting system that neither targeted nor did it automatically well i mean it did but it actually just did it way too much if you're squaring up against one enemy then it's fine but the introduction of multiple enemies attacking all at once in the crazy world of 3d space would make it near impossible to shoot what you wanted why must reploids fight one another i've had enough violence things didn't improve when controlling zero who can only attack via his z saber which requires him to get much closer than the other two i mean it's nice that the experience is equally miserable for everyone but i don't have a way to finish that sentence zero's play style always kind of worked well enough in 2d but when placed in a 3d environment just a lot of these issues and design decisions might have been alleviated giving it enough polish and iteration but as luck would have it the team on x7 got a bit too ambitious spending a lot of time on other stuff that didn't quite work out in a 2003 interview another producer who had worked on the x series before tatsuya minami confirmed that they were working on something that the x universe hadn't ever attempted before multiplayer with the inclusion of so many other characters in the game we decided to make it possible for two people to play at once capcom even advertised the multiplayer in press materials meaning it was definitely going to be a full-fledged planned feature but for reasons i wasn't quite able to nail down it was cut or or deleted now typically multiplayer modes from this era were usually things tacked on in the latter half of development oh we have some time to slap this together so why not but the fact that this was eventually axed probably meant they simply didn't have enough time to get it to work smoothly and considering the rest of the game yeah that makes sense it's entirely possible that figuring out the headache that is the third dimension and the multi-player thing resulted in less time given to designing the mavericks that xerox and the other guy had to hunt down while mega man veterans probably know them well enough for the casuals out there do you remember vanishing gangaroo borsky wind crow rang splash war fly snipe anti-tor tornado tanya an actual onion soldier stone kong and flame hyenard do you remember flame hyenard well let me refresh your memory we also can't forget the extremely forgettable red the sigma stand-in what is he well he's just sigma again as if that's not bad enough perhaps due to pressure to get the game done to capitalize on the ps2's booming popularity x7 was notoriously buggy it was played with a lot of tiny but annoying gameplay issues that resulted in a less than ideal experience i mean aside from all the clunky 3d stuff these bugs included but were not limited to incorrect crushing damage applied to the collision of certain harmless walls which would kill axe zero or the other guy just by brushing up against them the whole aspect of powering up your trio was fundamentally broken since you only get x roughly 70 into the game zero and the other guy would be ludicrously unbalanced with the power ups they had gained up to that point power power-ups that can't swap between the three leading x to feel weak right off the bat he is however supposed to take less damage than zero due to his armor but sometimes when you swap between the two mid-level the game still thinks you're zero so x takes the same amount of damage even though he shouldn't and then there's many many many other things [Music] so taking into account all those many things is it really a surprise that x7 is one of the worst reviewed console mega man titles uh ever i think outside of dos ports of course in its review ign stated pretty fairly i feel we can't help but think that mega man x7 would have been better suited staying 2d but until capcom realizes that the better action orientated 3d titles allow you to manipulate the camera wholeheartedly future installments of the series will likely run into the same problems that this one did many websites and magazines also took the time to dump on the game's voice acting which to me is a mega man staple a banner to which the community always rallied under me and zero make a great team and together we could take care of red alert are you mad you have no business as a hunter yeah i mean that sounds fine to me the underlying feeling was that the 3d sections were so bad but they single-handedly brought down the entire experience so don't be shocked that capcom took quick action to course correct phew somebody please tell me i'm through with the worst of it despite the critical beatdown in japan the game actually sold slightly better than x6 no doubt bolstered by the franchise's first appearance on the ps2 and it going 3d while a kind of going 3d so despite that small increase in sales shortly after x7's release the keys were yanked from production studio 3 and handed to production studio 1 who around that time were making games like resident evil outbreak monster hunter and beautiful joe so yeah slightly more stable hands even with x8 stripping out a lot of the 3d elements focusing more on a 2.5 d style and smoothing out the experience overall it was still met with a degree of apathy it had a really similar graphical style to x7 a lot of the same characters story and since it was released just a little over one year later wasn't really on a lot of fans radars so critically it fared better with many reviewers noting the improvements but sales-wise it was a massive plunge lifetime japanese numbers wound up being in the neighborhood of 35 000 copies a 69 percent drop nice this was probably due to a lot of factors the negative reception left over from x7 the fatigue from constant sequels and just a lot of other genres and franchises giving gamers things that mega man wasn't really offering this is one of those classic tales of a classic franchise going through those first fumbling steps towards change and it just didn't work out in the end capcom's priorities were drastically pivoting fighting games and mega man were getting less and less care and attention whereas bigger cinematic action titles like devil may cry resident evil and animusha were the ones getting all the funding time and experience staff it was the wrong place with the wrong team at the wrong time and it's really just as simple as that if you're aware of any other massively mismanaged mega mock-ups let me know in the comments below take a slow-motion minecart ride over to my twitter or entered through the boss gates of the flophouse vip patreon to nominate the subject of a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching resident evil is a pretty big deal if you have to make charts and graphs to herd people into specific demo availability times for a single player game then yeah there's probably a lot of financial pressure to make sure it performs back in the late 90s though the franchise was also really big but in a different way because much like street fighter if you simply applied resident evil's template to another setting bam you'd have a brand new franchise one such setting was of a particular type of crisis a crisis involving dinosaurs [Music] hey that's a catchy name the first dino crisis was directed and produced by shinji mikami and due to the already existing and very thirsty resident evil fanbase it was a smash success on the original playstation selling over 2.4 million copies worldwide when it released in the year of our lord thus much like resident evil a sequel was then immediately greenlit and launched just one year later in 2000 also on the playstation this second crisis that also happened to involve dinosaurs was more action focused and continued the story of its scarlet-haired heroine regina is it regina or wheat or is it regina ah okay thanks shinji makami though was busy with the pre-production and planning of resident evil for the gamecube so directing duties interestingly fell to shu takumi the father of the modern turnabout while selling a bit less than its predecessor at around 1.9 million copies it was still an impressive number considering the playstation double ballen was set to release just two months later regardless it was more than enough for capcom to again green light an immediate follow-up we're back a dinosaur tail 3 was originally planned for the xbox and the ps2 and started off pretty much as you'd expect but at the same time was very different from what we wound up getting the initial scenario was going to pick up on the story threads of time displaced dinos that were introduced at the end of the last game while it's unclear players would have controlled regina this one piece of concept art is the only thing we have of this early version there were a few other details that were made public it was going to implement ai control partners that would have actively fought alongside the player something capcom was kind of big on at the time it was also going to take place in a facility nestled in the heart of a large metropolis a metropolis which was all but destroyed the city would have been a crumbling wreck having seen damage from rampaging dinos and the subsequent battles to quell said rampaging dinos think of raccoon city but just dinos with the setting and platforms in place everything started to move in the right direction and until it didn't what are you talking about right when production studio 4 who were responsible for pumping out most of capcom's survival horror fare were about to launch into full production on dino crisis 3 the world drastically changed with the terrorist attacks of 911 and this affected many forms of media for months if not years in terms of video games being altered due to this well metal gear solid 2 is what most people think of as that saw multiple changes to the game's climax war of the monsters was also delayed for months as its depictions of collapsing buildings were also deemed to be a bit ill-timed delaying it to early 2003 despite being nearly finished but nothing could hold the candle or just be compared to what happened to dino crisis 3. unlike those games which were pretty much done capcom had only just finished the pre-production phase and felt that the depiction of a crumbling american-style city would be in poor taste so they just scrapped the entire scenario and started again from scratch that's ridiculous this as you can imagine is one of the major reasons why this game is on what happened well it's good to have foresight and sensitivity in regards to a tragic real world event scrapping their entire initial pitch was probably a bit of overkill why not just dial back that whole ruined city concept why not just focus on the facility there there's a million other things you could have done that didn't involve throwing away everything that just you know okay okay you're capcom you must know what you're doing right but an example of not knowing what they were doing and i guess in a bid to try and think up a setting that was so wild it couldn't possibly be linked to the original version dino crisis 3 took place 500 years in the future had absolutely zero links to the original games regina included and would also scrap the ps2 version all together okay so just wow uh what happened unfortunately by the time the project was reorganized shinji makami shu takumi and other senior capcom directors were busy with their own respective projects so directing duties fell to to less senior staff members tetsura oyama and hiroyuki maruhama between the two only hiroyuki had directed a game before but that game was a deep fear on the sega saturn we have no idea what's going on over there this is terrible my masterpiece is ruined oh what am i gonna do as to the decision to completely drop the ps2 skew and make the third game in a franchise and exclusive to the black and green beast well that's a bit more mysterious in an interview with ign back in 2003 when asked why they were ditching the playstation user base who in theory would have mostly migrated over to the ps2 legendary producer hiroyuki kobayashi stated simply they had the best platform to give us the graphics we felt we needed for this particular title now wait capcom was doing amazing things on the ps2 at the time such as onimusha 3 so to say it wasn't powerful enough to achieve their vision seems a little strange and and what was their vision exactly did the same metallic gray walls over and over and over again it doesn't really add up now while the following isn't confirmed it might be a bit more plausible so just keep it in mind capcom put out very few holy original xbox games during well its entire life cycle yeah there was a port or two but aside from the odd one-off they rarely supported the machine with exclusives so there's a chance this was seen as an opportunity to diversify their game releases to broaden their portfolio a little bit i mean since the game's narrative was now completely separated from the first two titles what could it hurt if it does great on the xbox then great and if it does terribly well that's less great but yeah no big deal picture capcom looking at their upcoming lineup and going okay which one of you wants to be an xbox exclusive come on people one of you needs to be a bill gates hamburger dino crisis three i'm looking in your direction so yeah back to those lifeless steel hallways now when you pitch something that starts with x but in space you're limiting yourself to only a few possibilities you're either on a ship or a base you're basically floating somewhere in space hence why the team drafted up the osmandius a big old space tub that the entirety of the game would take place on now while a lot of thought clearly went into the design of this ship and how the mechanics of it would work as it could shift and transform during the course of the game sadly it still amounted to everything looking very samey with a distinct lack of environmental diversity this decision led to a drab and unexciting looking game which would be a stark contrast to the elaborate cg cutscenes capcom had sprung for they spent not an insignificant amount of their budget all on this cg even going so far as to hire a professional filmmaker that they weren't even able to get shinji higuchi whom some of you may be familiar with worked on the special effects on the gamera trilogy storyboarded lots of anime and would go on to co-direct 2016's shin godzilla yeah they couldn't get him due to scheduling conflicts so their second choice imagine being the second choice to work on dino crisis 3 was makoto kamia who had assisted higuchi on the aforementioned gamer of films interestingly enough capcom would turn back to kamia decades later to direct two of those cgi resident evil movies you forgot even existed ah come on don't be shy capcom was awfully boastful in regards to these cutscenes and proudly proclaimed that over 50 minutes of cg was going to be used in the game which they tended to talk about more than the actual game in various interviews leading to the game's release you saw a pattern in what features they tended to big up how does dino crysis 3 take advantage of the xbox hardware it makes very good use of the hardware you can see in the cg movie scenes for example oh oh okay the the power of the xbox machine doesn't really affect cg movies but okay what uh how about another question why are the dinosaurs missing their outer skin you should just play the game to find out gee thanks how insightful now while all this superfluous stuff is indeed superfluous stuff it still didn't mean dino crysis 3 was destined to always be a bad game yeah the setting wasn't going to be as exciting as it promised to be and yeah fans of the franchise were going to be disappointed it didn't follow up on the cliffhanger ending of dyno crysis 2 but aside from that there was still a chance that it wouldn't be a tedious clunky slog right the game wound up being a tedious clunky slog now the answer as to why is kinda complex well actually it isn't really capcom decided to dispense with the pre-rendered backgrounds of their survival horror history and to go full 3d by itself this should work out just fine and when you consider code veronica it worked out just fine problem was that dyno crysis 3's combination of static camera angles controllable camera angles and automatic camera angles that would attempt to shoot the action on the fly amounted to something that could barely be played at all now throw in a fast-moving jetpack-powered character and even faster enemies and all these components would just clash in spectacular fashion i'm sure the thought process here was well we need to have those static camera angles to make people think this is survival horror we gotta have those and they weren't wrong on that ascertation but this particular game leans even more into the action-orientated direction of dino crisis 2 where you're mowing down most enemies instead of avoiding them static camera angles work well within resident evil as you mostly fight slow moving threats where you have the time to reposition yourself but take those same camera angles and make everything fast as [ __ ] and well he wind up with something like this you just can't see what you're doing most of the time either you're off screen or your enemies are kobayashi the producer described this increased tempo to the gameplay as speed feeling scale feeling and solid feeling basically blast processing marketing [ __ ] this was unfortunately the space death nail in the space coffin and there was no way they didn't realize this was a problem as it just hampers every second of gameplay i'm not putting up with this crap our best guess here is that because the game already had a false start that more experienced hands had moved on and it being a sacrificial xbox exclusive meant that capcom japan most likely didn't view dino crisis 3 as a major priority if they had swapped out dinosaurs to some type of alien threat and unlocked the camera giving you full third person control it probably wouldn't have been received all that poorly and could have even become its own franchise dead space before dead space but because it was dino crisis and not even a spin-off like dino stalker but a big mainline sequel it was just itching to disappoint which is no surprise when you consider it's in a dead heat for the crown of the lowest rated entry in the franchise unlike dino stalker though dino crisis 3 was far far more expensive to make as such capcom's sales expectations for the game 500 000 copies sold in its first fiscal year were uh not met safe to say how much did it sell well i actually can't find hard data on that what i did uncover was a 2004 capcom conference call which charitably described the game sales as sluggish for the next 18 years capcom would barely ever acknowledge the franchise aside from a psn re-release which is about to get taken offline thanks sony oh what's that they're they're oh they're not doing that anymore oh cool yeah there's the occasional regina reference or costume cameo but we've seen no remakes or remasters you know anything of real significance in fact only a few years ago capcom japan rejected a proposal to bring the series back via a pitch from capcom vancouver for more on that see my dead rising 4 video it's really depressing but when dino crisis 3 was such a disaster for the company it's not really surprising we can only hope that the original two games combined sales of over 4 million copies will be enough for capcom to finally realize that this is very much a series that should not remain extinct if you know of any other forgotten fossils in the video game or movie industries let me know in the comments below or over on my twitter and if you want to directly nominate something then blast off over to the flophouse vip patreon and become a big boss to let me know what you'd like to see next see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] so it's been about a month give or take since we last covered a catastrophic capcom calamity here on what happened which means we're due for some fresh meat hot dog meat that is so throw on your ratty green t-shirt put on your best scowl and attach your creepy arm it's time to [Music] hi folks matt mcmuscles here before we get into this episode proper i have to acknowledge that this is like the 37th time i think that i've had to talk about a capcom game and i don't even necessarily want to they're one of my favorite developers of all time street fighter final fight resident evil mega man auto modelista the list of their classics is endless however they have just as many non-classics in their long and storied history i am simply imparting this information to you and i have no personal animosity against them well i mean except for anyway i'm getting ahead of myself just thought you should know that i admire this company greatly for what it was and what it can be but in order to look towards the future we all have to learn from the mistakes of the past and really for capcom there are few mistakes bigger more embarrassing or more costly than the failed sequel 2009's bionic commando a game i'm sure most of you are passionately familiar with however you may not be aware of how this one innocuous gritty 7th gen action game in a sea of gritty 7th gen action games helped change the course of capcom's entire business model going forward so with the stage properly set just what happened to bionic commando it's 1987 and capcom has just released top secret in japanese arcades and localized the game as bionic commando for the west unfortunately the subsequent 1988 nes famicom ports failed to see sales numbers like mega man or ghosts and goblins in fact the famicom version hitler's resurrection top secret apparently sold quite poorly so outside the occasional handheld version the series remained largely dormant that is until 2004. ben judd a former employee at capcom of japan was a big fan of the franchise and would routinely pester his friend and boss good old papa inafune to bring rad spencer swinging back in the consoles but was routinely ignored judd then put together a written pitch and presentation to convince the other higher-ups within capcom and again was soundly rejected eventually though with inafune being worn down from months of campaigning he finally greenlit a new game for the psp which was planned to be done in the same style as other psp revivals like maverick hunter x or ultimate ghosts and goblins all of which were made internally at capcom with small teams work hadn't been going on for long though because in mid 2005 inafune decided that the game would be better suited for next generation consoles the xbox 360 and ps3 problem was that capcom themselves were already pretty busy with the likes of lost planet dead rising and others so inafune decided they needed outside help to get mr spencer back into the swing of things i'm going to be saying swing a lot here people so just just get used to it to make such a relationship work capcom and japan would supervise and produce gain the final say on everything it was their property after all while another studio would do the heavy lifting on the programming level design etc for reasons not exactly clear stockholm sweden's grin was chosen for this task which was a very unlikely choice because the only notable games they had made up to that point were ports of advanced warfighter 1 and 2 to the pc and that was pretty much it the 2.5 d psp project was then also transferred to them and became bionic commando re-armed an enhanced remake for both xbla and psn it would serve as a way to introduce players back to the franchise and would stick closely to the formula of the classic game but this time with an absolutely big slapper of a soundtrack courtesy of simon vickland rearmed released first in august of 2008 and was met with stellar reviews positive fan reaction and healthy sales but the reception of its big hd console brother simply named bionic commando was decidedly less stellar criticism was lobbied against the game's grittier art style attitude and character design dropping the cheesy but charming gi joe style trappings of the franchise to be fair to capcom and grin though pretty much every publisher was putting out a game like this because it was the style at the time now despite this being very common there was indeed pushback by fans over all the changes and was compounded even further because capcom was handing the keys to a franchise over to a non-japanese developer with an unproven track record staying within the lines of a 2.5 d remake was one thing but a big 3d sequel with a huge edgy attitude adjustment was another now i'm going to be honest not a lot is known about what happened behind closed doors during the game's development but what we do know is that it was rough rearmed went well but there was no reason to believe it wouldn't but for the console sequel comments from inifune painted a picture of a developer and publisher not being able to agree on a variety of things with one of those things being perhaps its tone and story at the beginning things were very very good between the two companies things get kind of weird from the middle and it gets really bad at the end especially for the japanese side what inafune meant by this i assume is that after enough arguing capcom threw up their hands stopped trying to manage the project and simply just wanted to get the game out the door unifune also took time to detail at what particular phase he felt the project fell off the set path and into a dangerous radioactive quagmire people should be more flexible about things if you don't do that everything will become messed up in the middle and that's the most important part not the beginning but in the middle and finishing the game this is often the case once you have an alpha version of a game up and running with all the main components working but in rough shape deciding then what to keep remove or tweak can be integral for shipping on time the former capcom bigwig also had some damning words for this particular phase of bianna commando's development describing the company's attitude towards it as being whatever do what you want i don't care now one of those things that grin apparently wanted to do and capcom did not was to incorporate an unintentionally hilarious plot twist if you don't want to be spoiled for this terrible bit of storytelling i just i i don't know clamp your hands around your ears or something in this gritty universe nathan rad spencer's bionic arm turns out to be composed of his late wife due to compatible memories or dna or some such nonsense i don't know inafune even gave a concise but accurate quote regarding this particular revelation simply saying i don't even know what happened there so it was pretty clear that even if bionic commando would go on to be a big success the rift betwixt capcom and grin had degraded enough that they couldn't continue their relationship fortunately though that didn't turn out to be a problem because the idea of bionic commando selling so well that would warrant a sequel was completely unfounded in fact if we were to consider the pedigree of the publisher the franchise the marketing campaign and the money spent resurrecting this particular series bionic commando might just be the biggest financial bomb we've ever covered here on this show and that's sane a hell of a lot we even did an episode on drake and the 99 dragons for [ __ ] sake in its launch month may of 2009 npd data put bionic commandos north american sales numbers across both the 360 and ps3 at 27 000 copies which is just wow now keep in mind bc wasn't some cheap quickly made cash grab it had a full multiplayer mode tie-in comic books retailer exclusive skins and even shelled out for mike patton of faith no more to give life to the titular hero you deserve a chair mag but the one i'm thinking of doesn't have wheels more embarrassing still bionic commando was outperformed by something far worse something grin themselves had made in an act of brilliance stupidity i'm not sure which they had also developed another action game for the 360 and ps3 which released on the exact same day enter terminator salvation this 3 hour long cover bay shooter was absolutely savaged by critics and the golf and quality between the two was pretty much night and day however john connor's adventure wound up selling close to double that of red spencers in that particular month and so hens the tale of grin and their risky release two action games at the exact same time on the exact same day eating into each other's sales strategy wait no wait no did i die essay 2 games i meant three now only a [ __ ] would think that that is all there is to it allow me to introduce you to wanted weapons of fate the third game that grin just so happened to make which limped into store shelves roughly a month and some change before commando and terminator and surprise surprise was a cover based third person shooter like terminator and surprise surprise was also not very good you son of a [ __ ] the commonalities don't end there because wanted also managed to outsell bionic commando now i couldn't find launch month sales for wanted but according to universal pictures by july it had moved more than 100 000 units so the odds were pretty good but not confirmed this has to have messed up the development of one or all three of these games having one studio burning the midnight oil just to make them the pressure at grin to perform must have been enormous this might be a first for us here at what happened one studio developing three very similar games for the same platforms and released within swinging distance of each other with the best of the bunch our beloved commando performing the worst but on the plus side at least the game performed better in the west than it did in japan [Applause] still though it's actually kind of impressive from a technical or man power standpoint that grin managed to pull this off utilizing the same engine to develop three games concurrently and seeing them release alongside each other it wasn't exactly a positive thing and none of them sold well but damn they did it as for bionic commando itself while their best effort still had its critics some of the negatives were restrictive level design which would kill the player if they tried to wander off the beaten path frustrating save and checkpoint systems and the needlessly gritty and dark storyline that rubbed many the wrong way conversely the core appeal of the game the swinging mechanics graphics and multiplayer mode were seen as the highlights but it still wasn't enough to get the game to capcom's sales targets even with a pc version that released a few months later now a lot of this doom and gloom has centered around this launch period but that's not the full story because a year later calcom came clean with how their recent slate of titles fared across all versions worldwide commando had eventually inched across 700 000 units but that was still pretty shy of the 1.5 million copies sales target fortunately though almost all of their western developed games performed poorly including johnny dark void and spyborgs oh i'll get to you one day the game's slow sales also affected relations between capcom and gamestop as capcom had overshipped bionic commando to them which is why years later you'll still see tons of these in bargain bins across the nation but despite all this it was actually the difficulties faced during the western and japanese dynamic of bc's development that seemed to leave the most lasting negative reception at capcom so it was decided by the higher ups that they'd keep such projects on a shorter leash they'd focus on releasing the ones they currently had in their pipeline like dead rising 2 and dmc but they would be far more choosy i.e stop green lighting any more western developed games capcom president haruhiro tsujimoto was quoted as saying our experience with bionic commando has demonstrated the difficulty of outsourcing the development of new titles to overseas companies however we cannot develop a sufficient number of titles without using the resources of these companies this is why we plan to continue using these alliances but we are considering ways to separate the roles of activities in japan and overseas we plan to develop new titles primarily in japan overseas companies may be used to mostly develop titles for existing game series with well-established characters and universal themes unfortunately outside of dead rising pretty much all of the titles green lit under infune's western push underperformed and he left the company later on in 2010 just a few months after capcom posted these disappointing sales figures as for ben judd well coincidentally this just so happened to be the first and last producing position he ever had at capcom and didn't receive another until 2011 and that's because he left the company he then joined up with inafune and went on to better things it's better than nothing at least that's my opinion luckily though bionic commando saw one more game released 2011's rearmed 2 which while not as fondly received as its predecessor at least let the franchise leave on a slightly higher note it was developed by another swedish company fat shark and also used the same diesel engine as grin's other projects and even saw simon victon return thank god but the fact that capcom quickly turned to another really similar studio showed just how frosty the relationship had gotten now while everything up to this point would have you assume this whole debacle is what killed grin well it really didn't square enix then came a colon and had contracted grin to make a western-flavored spin-off of final fantasy co-name fortress but when square became concerned with what was being produced cancelled the project with zero warning and didn't pay grin for the six months of work that they had already put in this this right here was the final nail pounded into the company's coffin they tried desperately to pitch a reboot of streets of rage to sega and even strider to capcom but both were promptly rejected with no money or projects left the grin finally became a frown and were forced to close their doors by the end of 2009 most of them would go on to form overkill software who then went on to develop a walking dead game which oh god i'm gonna need to do that eventually wait i i already did it yeah finally aside from some spots in marvel vs capcom games the bionic commando ip has remained untouched for the last 12 years and i can't say capcom's wrong to be wary maybe if they had stuck to the original plan of a simple cheap psp game it wouldn't have gone on to do the damage it did but when you're swinging through the air with your creepy hot dog wife arms swearing up a storm you can't be looking over your shoulder and regretting the paths not taken if you know of any other games capcom or otherwise there's still plenty you'd like for me to cover on the show let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or grapple your way over to the flophouse vip patreon and become a big boss and nominate what you'd like to see in a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] welcome to another episode of what happened where did listen i i know we just did a capcom episode like less than a month ago but but this is fighting evolution possibly capcom's worst internally developed fighting game ever it was such a disaster every which way that for a while it seemed like it was going to be the last pugilistic project the company would ever greenlight and i can't let that slide and have been itching to talk about this absolute cluster ever since i started this show not sure if you guys remember but the turn of the century was a particularly rough time for fighting games and all the punches ten strings and anti-airs didn't really prevent that while capcom diversified their lineup with survival horror and action games snk wasn't so lucky yes the story actually starts with the masters of the 100 mega shock shin nihon kikaku they were unfortunately at the center of a number of bombs like the neo geo cd and the hyper neo g064 and that's not even accounting for the sudden decline of arcades in the west which obviously hurt them even their collaboration with capcom which resulted in what some consider to be the pinnacle of 2d fighting cvs 1 and 2 well it did almost nothing to boost their bottom line since capcom were the ones who developed those smash hits snk saw a mere pittance via character licensing fees and their version of the same concept sbc chaos was rushed and unfortunately underperformed why was it rush though well because the company was imploding on the inside snk usa had to be shut down snk's founder left and all of the japanese staff splintered off to look for work elsewhere with some forming brand new companies like dimps now during all of this somehow capcom and snk were in negotiation to produce a third round of millionaire fighting but for the reasons i just listed the deal fell apart there's even more to the messy tale of snk's death and eventual rebirth but since it involves you know pachinko i don't really have the energy to go into it right now the important part for our story is that a number of snk staff including one toyohisa tanabe a systems and chief director on the first four king of fighters titles joined capcom around this time and it's with him where this layered story truly begins round one fight when tanabe and the rest of the snk refugees entered the osaka offices of capsule computers they did feel out of place in the company that had essentially been their rival for a number of years when we joined capcom there are two plans put forward for the kind of game we would develop we had a lot of people on our team with experience developing fighting games so our first idea was to make our own fighting game however creating a fighting game from scratch with a new gameplay system would have been very time consuming and as a new team at capcom we felt we had to contribute something to the company as quickly as possible so instead we went with our second idea which was to use capcom's pre-existing assets as the foundation for a new project that's how capcom fighting all-stars development began yoshiki okamoto a big capcom producer at the time also presented the former essence with another opportunity to work on an action game of unclear origin it was either dmc2 or chaos legion or they could just push forward with a fighting game project those pre-existing assets tanabe mentioned earlier those were the scraps of what had been capcom vs snk-3 apparently that had started life as a 3d project with actual models having been made but since snk had gone belly up and the rights to their characters and franchises were at that time very much in flux the work was just sitting there unused tanabe was made the director and decided that the best way to make something quickly was to opt for a capcom versus capcom style slugfest plucking several characters from not just their fighting games like ryu morgan and batsu but a few unexpected picks like hagar poison and strider hear you to explain this wild mashup that was more or less sticking to canon unlike prior vs games it would take place in a metro city that was under threat of exploding by a bomb known as laughter sun a plot literally orchestrated by death three particular characters however all ocs do not steal had a piece of a code that when combined would disarm said laughter son and pretty much save the day these three characters would logically be known as the code holders the games sometimes used but always derided subtitle now technically this would be the first traditional 3d fighting game developed by capcom that was using street fighter characters as the ex series was made by akira so there was obviously going to be some growing pains this is doubly true because the majority of the team was composed of ex-snk staff after all who up to that point had barely touched 3d programming and design while capcom had branched out in this way with other new fighting franchises like your rival schools or your power stones there was some hesitancy on how to approach a game like this to do street fighter and dark stalkers justice in a brand new dimension since tanabe had been appointed director he and his team felt it best to do something unique so they expanded on the story something street fighter had shied away from at this time they created four brand new characters that were designed to be a bit more stylish i.e snk as [ __ ] and then they wanted it to be more dramatic and they instituted a few new systems the first appropriately called dramatic counter functioned a lot like tekken 7 where the action would slow down to highlight whenever a character dodged then counter-attacked next was declaration of victory a special taunt that one could choose to invoke before a match if they then went on to win that first round then the entire match victory point would be awarded to them certainly a unique but [ __ ] feature that's almost as dumb as that critical parade i don't know sacrificing your tag partner for like a seven second buff oh i'm so glad that never existed [Music] the final spice added to the game was uh finishing moves yeah you heard right these were flashy attack animations that could only be triggered at the end of a match and while not graphically violent were kind of shocking to see in a 2003 capcom game it wouldn't be until years later where you saw more stuff like this such as various level 3 cinematic supers with all of these changes capcom upper management started to get concerned so they felt it was warranted that the cold holders should go on location to gather fan feedback by this point almost a year and a half the game had mostly been finished although it still needed fine-tuning extra characters and a translation pass unfortunately the location testing did not go so well as many players came away unimpressed by all stars from both a visual and gameplay standpoint the game didn't look very advanced when compared to the newest tekken or virtua fighter the original characters stuck out like sore thumbs when placed against capcom's most iconic and the gameplay was singled out as feeling a bit awkward and not in line with what most people expected or wanted these tests went so poorly even in japan that the fate of the entire game was hanging in the balance back at capcom headquarters tanabe's team wanted to take that feedback to improve the game and even started to staff up to expedite that process but before that could truly kick off the axe came down fighting all-stars was cancelled and while the feedback was definitely a root cause for this it wasn't the only one with arcade business dramatically slowing down and stuff like resident evil selling gangbusters capcom's fighting game division was in the process of being phased out you can get some additional details on this with our devil may cry 2 episode legendary capcom designer and artist akira akimanyusuda in an interview recalled this time at the company you know resident evil right the people who had started that project wanted to challenge themselves the old way of doing things was no longer working i think they wanted to find a new style a new way forward and it did provide some hints to the company's direction in a number of different ways i think there were also people in the lower levels of the staff saying that street fighter is no longer selling so we want to make something else that's not a fighting game the street fighter alpha series had been going on for a while and everyone was bored of that so i think this felt like the moment to try something new to go after a new challenge noritaka funamizu capcom general producer was also a big fan of animal crossing so i think he wanted to make something similar to animal crossing which in some way or another actually wound up becoming monster hunter while it's always good to diversify and challenge oneself it's still a shame because capcom were in talks with snk to acquire the rights for a special guest character which judging from his silhouette many believed to have been k dash but in subsequent interviews over the years it was heavily hinted to be kyo kusanagi snk had apparently signed off on this but since the game's arcade and eventual ps2 port were shut down so suddenly it never came to be tanabe as you can imagine lamented the game's cancellation i felt that fighting all-stars ended the way it did due to my inexperience it caused problems to the company and i'm sorry to the staff who worked hard on it and everyone who helped us even 10 years later it's still a bit difficult to talk about however i felt i'd been saved a little bit when ingrid appeared in fighting evolution ah yeah fighting evolution while i'm aware that's supposed to be the main game this episode is about this slapdash hack job wouldn't have existed without fighting all stars and while evolution's development was way shorter and less dramatic it's the far more infamous game tanabe and some of the staff moved on to flagship limited an independent studio co-funded by capcom sega and nintendo who would support them on various titles this left the work on fighting all stars just sitting there unused which was eerily similar to its precursor cvs3 this was the state of fighting games at capcom around this time abandoned and neglected [Music] [Applause] capcom higher-ups however were displeased that money had been spent without seeing a return well maybe you should have cancelled the goddamn thing thus they scrambled to do something with the concept hidetoshi ishizawa who had been working on capcom fighters since alpha 2 was assigned to pick up the pieces but one of the main producers backing him up had dropped out and thus yoshinori ono stepped in to manage the game's production the order from capcom bigwigs was thus finish this [ __ ] as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible don't spend money or get creative for any reason thus capcom fighting jam slash evolution was born since the fighting game division was getting murked left and right the team was given approximately zero budget so every character saved for ingrid was simply ripped from previous games despite them having you know incredibly contrasting art styles and animation quality street fighter several versions of it dark stalkers and red earth were represented but that still left out several fan favorite characters like ken morgan or kami capcom also had zero time to work on the game's endings so those were farmed out to comic book studio udon under the strictest of deadlines these endings were devoid of voice overs written dialogue or even sound effects [Music] something that was originally going to be implemented was a team repping street fighter 1 since it was the only era of street fighting not represented this faction would have consisted of eagle using his capcom vs snk look retsu the only other new sprite in the game and finally sagat a younger pre-scarred version of the mutai emperor unfortunately this entire concept was eventually cut try to act surprised as there simply wasn't any time or budget left for it these restrictions also affected the core gameplay as each faction of characters played like the games they hailed from so third strike chun li could parry but street fighter 2 ryu could not no matter what there weren't even any modes or grooves to select from so you couldn't mix and match each style which left the entire roster stupidly unbalanced and not in a fun jackie chan fists of fire way but instead in a lame unfun capcom fighting evolution way balancing can sometimes be the most arduous and time-consuming thing when working on a fighting game so it's not shocking there's none here the ultimate indicator that the game was rushed however has to be its backgrounds in the cvs games whether they were 2d or 3d the stages that set the tone for each bout were incredibly imaginative and detailed but that was worlds away from what was on display here simple static images some of which might be just actual photos of real places with barely a hint of animation proudly displayed character art ripped from completely random sources it's it's actually kind of unbelievable oh unbelievable the the only thing more unbelievable is all the amazing shinkiro art that was wasted on this whole debacle it wasn't even used for like the western box art when fighting evolution launched for the ps2 and xbox with almost zero promotion the critical reception was pretty savage with its scoring in the lowest bracket for a capcom fighting title since i don't i don't know street fighter 1 coincidentally sales were just as if not lower fans were also disappointed since this was coming off the cancellation of fighting all-stars and was released alongside games like tekken 5 and mortal kombat deception which had far more effort put into them and were pushing their respective franchises forward this is not a knock on the team at capcom mangy they were only working within their means regardless fighting evolution came and went with a barely audible fart as time went on technology progressed and other smaller companies were gaining experience working on anime fighters like naruto and dbz so with a dream in his head and a pep in his step ono decided to pitch street fighter to capcom once again and would specifically need to convince papa in a funeral of its viability since very few people at capcom even had fighting game expertise anymore ono suggested using companies like dimps and aiding to get the job done which would also minimize risk and not divert staff from other projects it was a tough proposition though tekken and virtua fighter were selling at an all-time low and even the reborn snk had failed to see success with stuff like samurai showdown sen fortunately the eventual success of street fighter iv would spur capcom to invest back into the genre and while it certainly hasn't been problem free since then yeah let's go with that street fighter's return seem to usher in a new chapter for everybody which is great but man it was quite a road to get there from snk's death to a cancelled cvs sequel to a cancelled 3d affair to one of the worst fighters the company ever put out now since the beat em up is also back in fashion why don't we start reviving final fight again please capcom i'll literally suck your dick if you know of any other genres games or movies that struggled to stay afloat gasping for every breath let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or take an elevator up to the flophouse vip tower and become a big shadoloo boss to nominate the subject we'll be taking on in the future see you next time and don't forget all over the world [Music] welcome back to what happened the show has still hasn't covered gta the trilogy the definitive edition the disaster of the year however the grains of sand are rapidly running out rockstar so take the time now to make peace with whatever deity you pray to anyway speaking of deities god hand simply put this is one of the most unique stories in capcom's history of uh unique stories but fortunately not for the reasons we usually discuss on this very program see when godhead was released during the halcyon days of 2006 it very quickly accrued a kind of reputation and unfortunately it wasn't a 100 positive one i don't think you realize what you're getting yourself into pindeo there's been plenty of rumors speculation and inaccuracies about its development some of which i hope to stomp out today so sit down chill out and grab a smoothie and or puppy pizza it's time to find out what happened to god hand finally a boss fight in the mid-2000s capcom acquiesced to the concerns of some of their creators like hideki kamiya and atsushi and naba who sought more independence and creative freedom within the company this is what formed clover studio and the creation of okami which was set to be the biggest title many on the team had or would ever work on now capcom was putting out a lot of horror and action titles that were making big bang as was the style at the time but the flip side of that of course was a sharp decrease in the green lighting of adventure and rpg titles [Music] the formation of clover was an attempt to offset that as many of the creative leads were burnt out on the conveyor belt of edgy 2000's fair but even more unfortunately the declining sales of the beautiful joe series and in spin-offs did put some pressure on clover to generate profits and it's at this point where's shinji makami the twisted mind behind the seminal capcom classic goof troop decided to join up after the arduous and stressful development of resident evil 4 he wanted to try something new and felt clover was just the place to do it opportunity is all about timing however and when mikami was added to the studio's ranks they were all busy painting up a storm with good old amaterasu in fact okami already had its creative leads in place so there really wasn't much for mikami to actually do therefore he spent the first few months of his time there drafting up multiple ideas for possible future games but eventually grew frustrated at the fact he wasn't able to create or contribute in a more concrete way he then asked anaba if he really had to wait more than a year for them to finish up okami before he could lead on their next project naba understood his plight but said unless he was willing to work with another team outside of clover there really wasn't much else he could do but as it turns out makami was absolutely fine with that he just really really wanted to make something clover was also fine with this as they realize what with okami's development taking so long and it being an expensive game to produce it would be a good idea to get more product out there in the meantime proving the capcom higher-ups that they were a financially viable team now while makami had written several game scenarios the inspiration to go with a combat heavy brawling title came from an unexpected source in a 2020 video interview the legendary game creator didn't mince words capcom usa were making a sequel to final fight in the united states when i played it it was [ __ ] i used to enjoy final fight so i was mad that a series i had liked ended up like this i thought that i wanted to make a game like that if i ever had a chance now just just think about this for one second final fight street helped inspire godhand i have never been so embarrassed so anyway no way i'm sorry we we have to look at that statement a little bit more closely than not at all okay around late 2004 early 2005 streetwise was rebooted into the pissy looking schlock we all know and hate today makami must have played an early build of that come mid or late 2005 and considering how the final game of streetwise ended up yeah it's no wonder he thought it was kuso if you need a refresher on streetwise's uh rather bumpy development well bing bong [ __ ] your life okay so walt seems like flexing on capcom usa played at least a small part in godhan's creation mikami also wanted this new project to stand out and for it to do its own thing thus he had his heart or head set on creating a melee based action game played exclusively from a first person perspective [Music] that was the original idea and they even got a very basic prototype of this idea up and running but was scrapped just as quickly most likely due to the complexity of creating such a thing see clover meant for this to be a quick project they could produce while they were busy with okami and trying to suss out all the details and technical headaches of creating first person fisting would kind of go against that whole mo and to let's be real here they're never gonna top breakdown anyway yeah got it in there now it's time to answer the question if clover were too busy whipping around the celestial brush who was gonna help makami enter value wave a smaller support studio that capcom utilized whenever they needed a few extra hands they pitched in on a bunch of mega man x titles as well as the aforementioned beautiful joe spin-offs makami would still direct the project with anaba producing along with a very small team of clover character modelers but in terms of level design programming sound animation and such it was all going to be value wave say what in addition to this being a quick project it also had to be made frugally as okami was taking more than the lion's share of allocated funds so to save costs on developing new technology they're gonna need to share some okami's engine is what god hand runs on and while that obviously had its benefits taking the core of a massive adventure game and using it to power a straightforward action brawler also had some drawbacks using this engine would also make sure this would stay a ps2 exclusive because even though capcom was supporting the xbox and gamecube in the mid-2000s they simply didn't have time or money to spread the game across multiple formats and since the first person idea didn't pan out the team thought it best a go for an over-the-shoulder camera perspective which while easier did make it look like many other titles at first glance fortunately clover always did things in her own way from the beginning god hand was never intended to be super serious and always had been designed to have a good sense of humor remember makami wanted to do something very different from resident evil so he filled it with dad jokes about 70s and 80s japanese pop culture and lampoon just about every action movie or media trope with that in mind it also forced the team to prioritize certain elements over others they simply didn't have time or manpower to create detailed open levels with multiple paths and points of interest or complicated explosive set pieces like any good director mikami had to make some hard decisions with the time and budget that he did have so he chose to focus on a unique in-depth fighting system detailed character models and a wide variety of expressive and over-the-top animations this coupled with the game's short development time which was just a bit over a year is why you see some pretty sparse basic environments when compared to your onimushas or devil may cries using okami's engine while retaining a locked behind the back camera also presented another problem it was never really meant to be used this way which is why you saw behind the curtain every so often but that was okay again the team wanted to emphasize the wacky post-apocalyptic world and the over-the-top characters which populated it jean was not your typical capcom protag and he didn't even want to be in fact none of the characters from olivia to ezell and especially gorilla mask felt like your cookie cutter cast you get the impression that makami and the rest of the staff wanted to poke fun at what was popular at the time while obviously paying homage to things like fist to the north star and jojo's bizarre adventure thus crazier and crazier ideas crept into the game like a musical number poisoned chihuahuas having mikami's severed head as an in-joke item a boss that may or may not be a man in a gorilla suit and all other manner of insanity wait you're not a human are you quite the contrary having limited time and technology was almost freeing to mikami in a way compared to the mountain of pressure and hundreds of staff members he had to manage when working on resident evil so while godhead was not going to be some polished mainstream 20-hour epic it wasn't meant to be it was just a game that makami was having fun making he felt that since he had produced or directed several high-profile games for capcom during his tenure there he had no qualms about spending a bit of their money to make something specifically for himself cut to e3 2006 where godhen was first shown to the public with a playable demo a demo that focused on gameplay and didn't contain any cutscenes so lots of people didn't quite know what to make of it yet especially when you factor in the difficulty it's not a simple arcade beat'em up you can just coast through but rather a hard as nails combat experience where you have to have situational awareness at all times as well as maximizing all of your abilities just bashing the attack button over and over would only get you so far and when i say so far i mean getting you [ __ ] dead you are dead not big surprise it's been reported that when clover saw people's reaction to the humor the demo did contain that they decided to inject more into it but i can confidently say that's not the case god hand released in mid-september of 2006 and e3 was in may and when you add in the lead up time to manufacturing and shipping well that doesn't really make much sense you need to be content complete that close to launch so the humor and attitude couldn't have been some last minute change based on feedback they would have needed to call in the voice actors for another round of recording as well as the qa department working overtime to test anything new and that's simply way more work than was feasible in two short months it's just not how traditional game development goes especially back in 2006 an era totally bereft of the day one patch makani in that 2020 interview i mentioned earlier also made no illusions about how he felt godhen was going to fare at retail joking with a staff member if everything goes wrong we might sell a hundred thousand copies making light of the game's chances so when it very much didn't sell that amount he was actually probably relieved now while most of you might assume it was some type of massive mega bomb that wasn't actually the case at least in japan it would go on to sell 60 000 copies which was higher than naba was predicting as he felt they would have been lucky to sell even half that so in terms of a quick additional project that was made on the cheap it did alright and while numbers in the west were never released we can safely assume they weren't much better advertising was pretty minimal as you'd probably expect but no one can deny that striking box art originally both the japanese and american versions were supposed to be more graphic with the fist clearly coming out of the back of the head but this was nyx by capcom marketing try to act surprised aside from having a less cooler cover what probably didn't help god hands chances was the infamous ign review you know i was going to bring it up which slapped makami's latest with a 3 out of 10 that'll probably be remembered until this flaming planet of pollution and regret we live on explodes in a celestial firestorm now what surprised me while researching for this video is a lack of any other major review outlets that were nearly as harsh the lowest one i can easily find is a 6 out of 10 from game informer everyone else was pretty positive or at the very least fair i had assumed just based on memory that god hand was received very divisively at the time of its release with several other sites agreeing with ign's scorching take but no regardless makami didn't actually care about the game's critical reception again he wanted to make something unique for a very specific audience so it could have received a million three out of tens it wouldn't really have mattered to him in fact years later when platinum was showing off vanquish at a press event in tokyo makami thought he'd have a bit of fun he asked the crowd at the event through a translator is there anybody here from ign me said a nearby member of the press ah yeah thanks for that god hand review which produced a sensible chuckle from the crowd you should consider a change in careers now there's still this stigma around god hand due to both the ign review and the sad fact that one month after its release clover as a studio was disbanded there's a variety of reasons for this with one of the main ones being that okamis simply didn't move enough units to justify keeping their doors open so for godhead well it just happened to come out at not the best time in the world as the decision to shudder clover was probably already in motion you all know the rest clover broke up and went platinum while makami would eventually form tango gameworks although i'm gonna be honest i'm getting increasingly worried about ghostwire tokyo as for godhan well nowadays it's looked upon very fondly as a unique example from a creative mind that was doing whatever the hell it wanted and oh isn't that cute ign even re-reviewed it which is quite a pointless and hollow gesture that accomplishes absolutely nothing but whatever that wasn't the point makami was tired and was burnt out on working on the same thing for more than a decade thus he cited godhand as the one thing he made exactly the way he wanted warts and all he wasn't ordered to make it accessible shoo in a multiplayer mode or whatever he just wanted to make a dumb unique thing for himself and was one of the last examples of capcom publishing a dumb unique thing an era that sorely missed today yeah i just had to find a way to leave out on a bummer there oh hey if you know of any other misunderstood miscreants in the video game or motion picture industries let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or punch your way into the flophouse vip patreon to nominate what you'd want to see in the future see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] my arm i am i am welcome to another jump punishing projectile pairing and tornado ddt episode of what happened a show that takes a look at video games both great and less great but all with troubled development cycles i gotta get that out there to try and cut off the amount of what street fighter 3 that that game's the sickest why would it be on your awful show i totally get it if you say street fighter 3 to anyone who's grown up with capcom over the last two decades they'll non wistfully while humming beads beats the beats beats in your head this is because the cps3 stunner and its upgraded versions are looked back on as all-time classics nowadays which is a stark contrast to the mid and late 90s where street fighter 3 was considered a huge financial bomb for capcom and the arcade business in general and not only that it went through a long protracted development that had numerous twists and turns remember it was going to be a follow-up to the most popular fighting game of the age and while you'd think there would have been a solid plan put into place to guide such an important project this is capcom who has had a history of things sometimes going off the rails so as for these reasons why street fighter 3 is now on our stage and with that i think you'll all agree yeah that makes sense so tighten your headbands and rip off your muscle shirts it's time to find out what happened to street fighter 3 if you were not alive from 1991 onwards quick recap street fighter 2 was the biggest thing in the world as it essentially birthed the modern fighting game and reinvigorated the arcade industry with a model that placed emphasis on competitive play yeah there were other combat of arcade games before but let's be real none of them were street fighter hey yo buzz cato and other guy did you get out of here this boom caused capcom's arcade output to double and then triple spurring them to split off their workforce into various teams who would all make fighting games all at the same time there were the x-men and then the marvel titles dark stalkers the expected street fighter 2 updates and finally the alpha series but there were also the 3d efforts like star gladiator techromancer powerstone and rival schools and then there was jojo red earth muscle bomber cyberbots and tons more i'm probably forgetting suffice to say the arcade division was getting burned out working on so much punching and kicking and with each team spread out amongst so many franchises an actual street fighter 3 wasn't even being considered this is because much of the original street fighter 2 staff had moved over to the alpha zero series which they were very committed to continually polish an update the story of street fighter 3 therefore spawns from a completely different street fighter list source tomoshi sadamoto had done design work on capcom's fantasy fair like magic sword king of dragons and dnd was given a small team to create a new try to be surprised fighting game in 1994. not only that it was scheduled to use capcom's in development cps3 arcade hardware a board that was meant to push 2d animation to its absolute limit satamoto was still quite keen on myths and legends and had originally planned for this project to take place in a more fantastical world at the time the game was known under its temp name of new generation simply because it was going to be a brand new ip the problem however was that sadamoto and his team didn't have any experience whatsoever making fighting games and therefore struggled for almost a year with the design process as well as trying to come to grips with a brand new advanced arcade board and that wasn't even the half of it up until that point capcom had one to two producers who were overseeing the entirety of their in development lineup and would work on all of them at regular intervals by the mid 90s though games were being greenlit faster than they were being finished so the capcom bigwigs hired an outside consulting firm who advised them that every project should have their own producer which would help mitigate the workload now while that seems completely reasonable it meant that sadamoto was promoted to producer and was therefore the only one in charge of the game which in turn was why he was floundering so with new generation without a main director designer it was going nowhere fast and many outside staffers thought it wouldn't be long before it got ko'd off of capcom's developmental slate while the team got a much needed boost in staff in 1995 it still wasn't enough for them to hone in on a concrete design and concept so it was here where it was suggested that new generation should turn into a street fight as a possible way to salvage it now while this suggestion came from akira akiman yasuda the idea of it actually becoming street fighter 3 was still up in the air if you've been paying attention for the last three years you might recall alan maintained that yes in those early talks with capcom it was being thrown around that the game would be called street fighter 3. that's right capcom were actually debating putting that lofty number three shaped crown on a few potential projects a new generation finally winning out in the end that's great news general congratulations on the contrary i mourn okay however as we all know heavy is the head that wears the crown so for a game made by a new inexperienced team to suddenly inherit such a prestigious sequel name meant the pressure was very much on fortunately that's precisely when here comes a new challenger an experienced staff member finally joined the team in an interview with matt leone for his amazing written series street fighter and oral history capcom shinichiro obata recalled by the time i came around the team didn't really have a very clear concept of what to do with the game it created a lot of animation patterns and they wanted the hits to feel like they had a real heft behind them to make it look cool when you took damage but the problem was the team had no idea what kind of mechanics should go into the game in order to make it an interesting fighting game there was no plan for that and there weren't enough moves for each character so i ended up joining the team when the game was in that kind of state obata came from dark stalkers and had a solid mine for fighting games so he was an indispensable addition however the complexity of working on the cps3 hardware was still slowing down development but once things started to wrap up on red earth capcom's first cps3 game more people were able to join the new generation team and or share their expertise [Music] speaking of which new generation was kept as the subtitle as it also referenced the fact that they were wiping the street fighter slate clean rather than cycling in the same core characters over and over and over again this was similar to the approach that was used on the first alpha allowing capcom's creators to either drastically redesign old characters or make completely new ones street fighter 3 was going for much of the same thing just going way way harder as even ryu wasn't originally planned to be included at all lovable new yorker meathead alex was being positioned as the new main hero which explains why he's given so much prominence in the game's attract sequence we live back at coney island with this [ __ ] show some respect to this boot right here there we go there we go capcom second guessed this move however as they were worried about potential backlash over a lineup without a single familiar face so the eternal warrior was added to the ranks the team then second guessed that again deep into development feeling that the roster was still on the paltry side so welcome to the new generation mr masters also they were able to just recycle a lot of reuse animation frames so that's pretty much how ken got in ah yes animation street fighter 3 was going to have more of it than any other 2d fighting game at the time which while an incredible artistic goal was a costly one internally within capcom there was worry that street fighter 3's ballooning price tag was becoming untenable and with the way the industry was moving towards 3d times were such that it was going to release to a marketplace that most likely had moved on and in oral history capcom usa's kris kramer explained those concerns at that point the street fighter brand was kind of in a rocky place you know sales had been good on the latest home versions the us arcade market was dying and everybody was looking at what was happening on playstation and saturn they were like okay 3d games this is the future and capcom was leaning in way hard on traditional 2d animation with street fighter 3 so it was like okay this looks great but it looks like more street fighter it was hard to say whether i thought it would be successful i think my initial feedback was it looks amazing i was then told oh this will be cps3 so we'll have all new arcade hardware they'll never be able to do this for the playstation it won't be able to do all the animation correctly the arcade guys always wanted to make the ultimate arcade experience even though realistically the line was like hey put it out in the arcades it gets popular and then six eight months later it comes home and then the sales explode from there he ain't lying street fighter 2 sold over 6 million copies on just the super nintendo version alone and that was a potential problem with street fighter 3's long term profitability no home console at that time would have been able to handle it hell the playstation struggled to run certain cps2 games with all the animation intact so what chance did ellen's idol animation have with six months left to go in the game's development the team got some much needed additions in terms of staff including alpha 2 alum designer hitatoshi neo g ishizawa who helped refine and polish street fighter 3's perry system super arts and super canceling were also last minute additions that the team worked hard to include and while that might seem strange due to super attacks having been around since super turbo it was another example of the team's slow kinda unconfident design phase the thing is there was so much pressure from within the company and from other teams because this was street fighter 3 right you know this was the sequel or what came after the legendary street fighter 2 so there was just no way this game would be allowed to fail and the team themselves they were feeling that pressure but they also felt the sense of obligation to complete what they were trying to do there was a lot of indecisiveness there was a lot of back and forth discussion on what to do and eventually they figured it out yeah maybe we should do this this and that so it took a lot of time for the team to gather its bearings unfortunately despite that passion when street fighter 3 or just 3 machines started arriving in arcades across the world apathy was at an all-time high it hit the scene right in the middle of the releases of two lavish 3d blockbusters that were also on their third iterations namely virtual fighter and tekken which were attracting crowds no matter what side of the globe you were on what's worse is that the fighting game limelight not only had to be shared with these cutting edge 3d slugfest but also with other competition like marvel superheroes versus street fighter dark stalkers 3 and everything from snk new generations stuck out but not exactly in a good way players would put in a quarter and see ken and ryu flanked by a bunch of newcomers or freaks as they were not so affectionately called the game due to its origins and how the new team had made it also felt very different when compared to the likes of the street fighter 2 or alpha series it was slower and more strategic whereas almost every other capcom game in the arcades revolved around insane combos team-up attacks and other flashy [ __ ] to casual players it seemed like every other game was all about offering more moves and bigger rosters whereas street fighter 3 seemed like a step back less characters less options for your supers less dimensions and less familiarity it was basically going against all the arcade trends of the day so it's because of this that in terms of cabinets sold new generation was an unmitigated disaster and i know i throw that term around a lot on this show but it really actually was the initial version of street fighter 3 saw shockingly low sales i remember seeing the numbers and just being really surprised at how the game just wasn't selling it felt like we created the worst selling game ever at capcom it felt awful the first run of orders for street fighter 3 reportedly hovered at around 1 000 machines to put that into perspective the original final fight had sold 30 000 an sf2 turbo 75 in an oral history several former capcom employees debated this number but the general consensus was is that it sold incredibly poorly so that coupled with the high price tag of the cps3 board and street fighter 3's overall development costs which were just over 1 billion yen or 8 million dollars still very high for a 90s fighting game that new generation failed to ever turn a profit of course a good chunk of this had to do with the sudden downfall of the arcade business in general because as a principal revenue source it was quickly being replaced with home consoles why drive or take a bus to the arcade to play tekken 3 that doesn't even have gone when you can stay at home and experience an even better version that does have gone speaking of arcade ports there is another reason why new generation was such a huge blow to capcom financially it took almost four years for a home port to be released street fighter 3 double impact was a dreamcast exclusive that launched in japan at the end of 1999 and mid-2000 in the rest of the world while it had plenty of value as it packed in two games by that time the dreamcast was already fading in much of the world and double impact was made further redundant when a port of third strike came out that following october ah yes three visions second impact giant attack was released just a few months after new generation in the arcades and it added two new characters hugo and urian and threw akuma in there as a bonus while seen as a marked improvement it didn't really move the needle much in terms of getting people to actually play it neo-g for his part was seen as a standout member of the team and was then given further control leading into the release of the next and last revision third strike fight for the future despite all the system-wide improvements and additions third strike was still criticized for its bizarre new challengers like 12 and q and while many applauded the return of chun li and her body yada yada alpha 3 cabinets would still see the lion's share of capcom fans quarters obada estimated that when you combined all three versions as well as the home ports street fighter 3 eventually dragged itself over the line of profitability by the end which is still kinda not what capcom bigwigs wanted to hear remember this was supposed to be the direct sequel to their biggest arcade hit of the 90s every iteration of street fighter 2 had been leading up to this so when it wasn't a success changes were therefore coming to capsule computers business strategy and street fighter 3's failure was a big part as to why former capcom usa ceo bill gardner had this to say about the massive decline for the arcade division when street fighter 3 came out the home console business was starting to really take off i mean really take off and so when we made our monthly reports in japan we go over and i'm reporting on a multi-million seller on home console right and coin-op was saying well we sold 450 units this month or something like that you know and capcom japan's ceo kenzo tsujimoto was just he was beside himself he was convinced they weren't working and he wasn't quite in touch with the revolution that was taking place so it wasn't long before those sweeping changes swept across capcom arcade teams were moved on to consoles and were told to either sink or swim if you'd like to see an example of them very much sinking check out my devil may cry 2 episode as the new millennium dawn capcom made less and less fighters until they were almost completely phased out by 2001 but in the years following that the general opinion on street fighter 3 third strike specifically slowly began to change this was helped greatly by japanese players showing off what the game could offer and just how hype it could be it was different yes and if you wanted someone that played exactly like a rose blanca or honda you're kind of [ __ ] out of luck but if you looked past the freaks and acclimatized to the systems and game speed you found a very deep very fighting rich experience thanks to all the tweaks and improvements that the team tried to squeeze in of course we can't forget the huge part that the early additions of evo played in this movement especially certain milestone moments in fighting game history hey that's me so throughout the 2000s third strike began to accrue this reputation as an underrated masterpiece that was not fully appreciated in its day as it originally came out during a time where the industry was starting to shy away from fighting games now bearing the dreamcast version the game never got a port on anything outside of japan until 2005 the street fighter anniversary collection and later in 2011 iron galaxy's sublime third strike online edition which should be re-released this is not the first or the last time i will ask about this capcom nowadays third strike is often seen by many as the pinnacle of the street fighter franchise from its tactile meaty feel to its graphics and animation down to every minutia of its gameplay but god damn did it take a long time to get there it's really amazing that it started out as a completely separate franchise that was never intended to be the next evolution of street fighting and it's mind-boggling to think about all the paths not taken capcom could have just kept running the alpha series into the ground until it petered out that they could have had their own 3d teams make a big lavish sequel and finally my favorite the exploding life bars and slam mastering of sf the movie could have been street fighter 3. just speaking for myself though in a way i'm glad that street fighter 3 had to persevere and fight for the respect that it eventually earned we'll leave on obada's words regarding what the team were striving for you know there are many different approaches you can take to game design one approach which we took in street fighter 3 is design your game around unanswerables i think with any game players will search for the best tactic the best strategy like if x happens then you should always do y if you do this here you'll always win there's competitive games like that where the match is essentially a confrontation of theoretical knowledge that each player has built up but street fighter 3 is a game that by design doesn't have a fixed answer to those questions there is no best tactic you can spend your whole life trying to find the perfect theoretical approach to a situation in sf3 but it will never be quite right you always have to be reading your opponent in the moment you can't just fall back on your theories it's a game that lets you search for answers forever some deep ass [ __ ] if you know of any other fighting games that were fraught with failure let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or tatsumaki into the offices of the flophouse vip patreon and become a big boss and nominate what i'll be flash chopping in a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] hey kids it's time for what happened the show that chronicles the video game and movie industries with the stories of i can't even that this started off way too depressing whose idea was it to use the moon shot as a cold open mega man legends 3 is uh yeah there's a lot of feelings associated with this one and thanks to emily down at the flop house vip patreon we are finally cracking open this energy tank of emotions are you okay mega man i hate my birthday if you were cruising along the information super highway circa 2011 you're probably aware of the cancellation heard around the world mega man fans legends one specifically have been waiting for a conclusion to the cliffhanger ending of 2000's mega man legends 2 for a decade so when capcom finally announced their intention to resurrect this spin-off of the mega man universe yeah no not that universe that's a whole we'll we'll get to that well the world came together in celebration finally there would be some type of resolution some type of closure to walnut's tragic fate but just as this newfound joy and optimism had begun to burn it was just as quickly extinguished which led to a whole lot of displeasure in fact 2010 and 2011 were pretty bad years for the blue bomber in general as two other projects entering around little guy were also cancelled and it all circles back to one man good old papa and afune so check your circuits and prime your busters it's time to find out what happened to mega man legends 3. here we go in the late 2000s digital downloadable games are starting to take off with mega man leading the charge it kinda sure he was no longer getting any blockbuster aaa releases but 8-bit throwbacks mega man 9 and 10 at least springboarded him back into the conversation now while 10 retreaded much of the same ground and was subsequently reviewed lower and sold less than 9 it at least seemed like the franchise would continue humming along underneath the blue armor though that wasn't exactly the case an ifune had hit capcom's glass ceiling at that point having quickly grown frustrated with the global head of production position he had been promoted to in early 2010. not only that some of his initiatives like capcom's big push into more western style games started generating more misses than hits now some of the following information throughout this video was imparted to me from a source with some knowledge of the goings-on at capcom at the time but something everyone knew was that mega man was more or less an ifunes baby he had started producing the entire series in 1996 and thus became associated with it more than any other staff member at capcom so using the success of the new 8-bit games as a launching pad he decided to set up three drastically different projects within capcom that would hopefully propel the blue bomber into further prominence there was of course legends 3 the aforementioned mega man universe and finally the never officially announced but nevertheless very real maverick hunter a western flavored first person shooter set in a rebooted x continuity i think which was being developed by armature who were composed of former members of retro studios which raises a pertinent question what is taking so long it was a big gamble launching three very different titles all under the same series umbrella but since inifune had been given the power to do so he decided to flex as 2010 wore on though he and the higher ups on the corporate level of capcom had some type of disagreement rumors about the issue ranged from fallout regarding the increasing failures from the western bush to inafune seeking more autonomy within the company and then being denied regardless of the reason the fact was he was gone and any of the games he was in charge of were left pretty rudderless this all went down in late october of 2010 a mere month after legends 3 was formally announced at a nintendo 3ds centered press conference with inifune being the long-standing producer of mega man this obviously raised some red flags within the community but fortunately the legends 3 team clarified that development would indeed continue don't worry it won't take very long now as admirable as that statement was it wasn't exactly the most realistic scenario in the world because it doesn't matter if it's 2022 or 1992 if a franchise doesn't have someone in power who can champion it it's unlikely to get very far with inafune gone one or more of these mega man games were getting the axe but legends 3 had something the other two lacked nostalgia it was a long-awaited sequel to a cherished spin-off series a known quantity when compared to say universe which befuddled many as to what it actually was having this type of fervor though is both an advantage and a curse yeah you have a built in fan base but if anything goes wrong which it sometimes tends to do then there's going to be a certain level of backlash the type that only slighted capcom fans can conjure aside from all that there was one more caveat to legends 3 a very specific chain that was clasped around its neck that being the dev room an interesting ahead of its time and misguided idea that was meant to bring fans closer to the development of the game remember this is 2010 years before things like patreon and kickstarter which were designed around the idea of taking in fan feedback and input and then applying it to creative endeavors reportedly this was something instituted by inafune at the start of the project as he was well aware of just how invested fans were in the legends franchise the dev room was a website forum essentially where fans would be able to vote in polls about visual designs speak to developers in q a sessions and be able to more closely track the team's progress as you can imagine though since this was such a new and experimental idea that they hadn't yet worked out all the kinks unforeseen challenges or even thought about it all that much the problem with the dev room was twofold game development requires big lead up times as certain decisions need to be made far in advance so other departments can work around them think about any kickstarters you might have contributed to in the past how many emails get sent out requiring users to update their info or to get back in touch with the dev team and that's when actual financial backing is involved so imagine then allowing tons of random users to dictate things on a message board for free with no centralized planning and then telling a relatively new and leaderless dev team to just make it work unless you plan it out very meticulously it's not going to be a realistic or time sensitive way to build a video game especially when capcom bigwigs were already shooting stink eyes at the project holes for character designs and such therefore became less and less frequent which caused that initial burst of fan enthusiasm to start to wane this was the second issue the number of active users in the dev room steadily went down month by month which is kinda to be expected and not a knock against the fanbase as time goes on audience retention levels will naturally decline as you can't assume everyone is going to be glued to their seats every single day especially if there isn't anything of note going on that week with development remember this type of social interaction was relatively new and wasn't expertly planned out so eventually people just kind of wanted to play the game to get the product in their hands is just how we've been taught to consume media what capcom didn't impart to these fans however was that the dev room was intrinsically linked to the survival of mega man legends 3. allow me to explain we all know about the capcom test quick basic ports of older titles to gauge interest in future ones do you want a new dark stalkers buy this and then we'll talk want more on amusha can i interest you in an hors d'oeuvre first for all intents and purposes the legends 3 dev room was the new capcom test it would closely monitor the interest over time and if numbers started to dip well then unpleasant decisions would need to be made the situation was even worse than that though because legends 3 was also on thin ice due to it being an inafune thing and it wasn't very far along development anyway so losses could be easily cut now as far as i can find the team behind the game wasn't running into any technological or design problems per se aside from maybe just being understaffed and underfunded it's just that walnut's return was conceived and announced under false pretenses despite being revealed at that nintendo 3ds event the game was never i repeat never officially greenlit for full production oh capcom announced that it was in the works and if everything went well it might see an eventual release but it was never locked in usually like 95 99 of games get announced after they've been officially greenlit but for some reason most likely at inafune's insistence it was decided to just skip that part that's right you've got it here's what the game's director mazukazo iguchi had to say in early 2011. on february 22nd we've got a company meeting where we will submit legends 3 to undergo the green lighting approval process at capcom you have to spend the first few months of a project creating a sample build then show it to various people and await their approval we've been working away trying to get that sample as good as we can and now is a crucial time for us you've all cooperated with us in getting this far so we've got to get this project approved if we don't we'll have missed the boat and we won't be able to proceed with the next phase considering the show you're watching it shouldn't be a surprise that we're not allowed to proceed into that next phase i don't understand now talking brass tacks here as loved as it is the legend series was not a blockbuster selling less than the mainline mega man titles of back in the day which were selling even less than capcom's horror action upper echelon now if we fast forward to 2011 3ds development was brand new and not exactly cheap so the project was 100 powered by the goodwill and positive vibes of a small but passionate fan base there were very few people at capcom who had any illusions that this was going to be a big money spinner and if you thought the quote from that director was bad well things got even worse the very next month mega man universe had its plug pulled after months of literal silence while capcom never shared any details as to why it's strange premise and lack of a prominent producer to champion it was the most likely reason and as for maverick hunter that was quietly cancelled way back in 2010 despite making it to a playable prototype it was deemed too expensive and too much of a radical shift in source material and thus was subsequently deleted warning signs were blaring throughout the mega man community at the universe cancellation and they were right to do so now since legends 3 failed to get the green light the team had one final hail mary play which was the mega man legends 3 prototype version this was pitched as a more convincing way to prove to the higher-ups that the fanbase was there and that the game could be a viable seller was essentially a vertical slice a chunk of the game that was meant to show off what the team was shooting for and pretty much was the bulk of what they had developed so far it was announced in april with a vague release date of soon but was also being advertised as a paid digital download not something everyone embraced warmly may 2011 then rolled around with no updates until it was announced that the prototype was being delayed to an unspecified point in the future and that's where it remained now reportedly capcom hireups wanted to see some serious numbers for this demo with 300 000 downloads being thrown around as the target and this would not surprise me because capcom was all about insane unrealistic sales forecasts around this time something we've covered before now that 300k estimate largely hinged on one thing the success of the 3ds itself but the march launch of that machine wasn't what many were expecting in fact the first few years of the handheld's life lagged behind its mighty predecessor in terms of sales due to the higher than normal price point and the rise of mobile gaming so on top of everything else the platform legends 3 was being designed for was sputtering out the gate and then when you factor in that the demo was going to be download only another barrier of entry well mathematically the math just wasn't matching nintendo 3ds owners would need to adopt an insanely high attach rate of buying games to even come close to capcom's projections something they would not achieve now would you like to hear my own personal perspective no well i was at capcom's 2011 captivate press event which took place in may of 2011 and while there were oodles of journalists lining up to play street fighter cross tekken resident evil mercenaries 3d and dragon's dogma legends 3 was represented by a singular kiosk flanked by a cardboard standee with a computer that was logged into the dev room forum that's when i was all like this whole situation with the prototype put everyone in an awkward position release the demo it doesn't sell very well and even more vitriol would spew about the game's inevitable cancellation now i know what you're thinking why not just release it who cares maybe it could have sold what they were expecting well has already stated capcom was hardcore into sales forecasts and mitigating all possible risks it was just how they operated whenever they did try to do something different it was often met with disappointing sales numbers so in this instance it was felt that it would be less damaging overall if they cut the whole mega man legends 3 experiment off at the knees thus two months later in july they made it official legends 3 was cancelled and neither the full game nor the prototype was going to be released while capcom of japan and usa remained as tight-lipped as possible it was capcom's european twitter account where the flames of fury were further fanned i'm sad to know legends 3 was canceled for 3ds someone making decisions at capcom's r d hq should get fired unfortunately so few fans took part in the creation of the game it was felt the project was not worthwhile now show any social media manager this tweet today and they'd also go it's not a good look to imply a game's failure to release was because of the apathy of fans but the fact was the tweet wasn't technically wrong just poorly worded i say this because as we've already discussed the dev room was the capcom test connected to the game's critical circuitry in a symbiotic way it's just that mega man legends fans were never given these schematics this then created a sort of vortex of death for mega man and mega man related projects the final robo nail in the robo coffin uh again as mentioned earlier without a senior creative head to protect franchises like these they tend to fall to the wayside like so many already have this particular situation made it so that the rank and file of capcom's staff were hesitant to even utter the name mega man rockman out loud which is why it took a further seven years for it to be revived with mega man 11. that game's producer kazuhiro tsuchiya didn't shy away from discussing this as i'm sure you're well aware and ifuna-san departed a long while ago obviously a lot of other people were working on mega man at the time and there were a lot of people within the company that had a strong desire to make a new mega man but it was very difficult the atmosphere just didn't feel right for anybody to raise their hand and say i want to be the person that makes the next mega man this was kind of the general atmosphere for a long while it was a big reason why there was a long absence for a new mega man game unfortunately it's been another 4 years since mega man 11 and there's still not much else going on with our favorite robotic killing machine we did get some great legacy collections there's always a new netflix show or a weird movie being announced then cancel i'm not sure and as of 2020 capcom has refiled for the trademarks of the misadventures of tronbon and rockman dash so that's something nah it's probably not why spend money making a new mega man okami or strider when you can just slap a skin into monster hunter i guess now modern capcom doesn't do everything right plenty of people have had plenty to say about how frustrating it's been to see them release games as good as they are but through a very narrow scope while routinely ignoring a lot of their legacy franchises while i do believe they made some positive changes since 2010 i'm going to throw over to former capcom unity manager gregaman who had this to say about what the company learned from the whole debacle obviously this quote is very idealistic the shareholders think very differently but it's really the only positive thing i could find to end on we as a publisher learn valuable lessons about the role the community can should and will by any means necessary play in my mind the devroom marked an evolution of our still fledgling community initiative a milestone lesson learned and taken to heart how lucky am i that i started my career here by helming the craziest weirdest most volatile experiment ever ventured by this department mml3 realigned our compass and whether you know it or not you've all had an impact on capcom it is my hope that in time this will lead to decisions that will bring happiness to each and every one of you so yeah that's a very nice thing to say but we are now in 2022 and are not living through some golden age of mega man titles or even a lot of classic capcom ip at all which is obviously a god damn it i ended on a downer again if you know of any other regrettable robotic wrecks let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or jump and shoot into the capsule that is the flophouse vip patreon become a big boss and nominate a game or movie i'll cover in a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] welcome back to what happened you know the deal this is a show i host it and we spend entirely too much time on capcom while they have a stable pact with the greatest video game franchises of all time in the late 2000s their high peaks were also often followed by deep valleys and honestly there are a few valleys as deep as 2009's spyborgs wait what you say a capcom action game i've never heard of well guess what that's why it's on this show what is that spyborgs was a wii exclusive and extreme case of identity crisis this is the story of a freshly birthed studio struggling to get a new ip off the ground running into conflicts with their publisher and ultimately having their game get released unfinished to the undulating sounds of absolute apathy pretty much taylor made for this show huh so uh prime your board bits and i i don't remember any other weapons or items from this game i can reference here so yeah what happened to spyborgs what the hell happened it's 2008 and capcom's yearly captivate press event is kicking off and while they mostly showcased updates on known titles there was one that was brand new the aforementioned borgs that were spies this was the debut title from new startup bionic no relation to commando games located in north hollywood they boasted staff from all over the state of california folks from insomniac high impact games blizzard never saw treyarch if you were a major studio in california at the time there's a good chance someone had just jumped ship over to bionic in the game's first trailer spyborgs is presented as a wacky saturday morning superhero game featuring radical skateboarders robotic ninjas and a fun self-aware sense of humor in it you'd pick from the cast of five spyboard protagonists and battle a rival team of villains the heroes included stinger bouncer clandestine kinetic and voxel that i mean voxel yeah that's better between the main action levels players will be treated to playable mini games which use the framing device of commercials that played during a block of saturday morning cartoons these interludes would revolve around wii remote centric motion controls apparently inspired by games like zack and wiki as a fun way to shake things up press were unfortunately not able to go hands on with swipeworks at the event as capcom opted for a hands-off demonstration and the only media that was released to the public were these screenshots seen here and a trailer that was very light on gameplay and none of these things went down too well with the capcom faithful what is that what the [ __ ] is that they're a publisher arguably most well known for their action game so when spyboards a wacky american pastiche of saturday morning cartoons was presented there was how shall i put the slightly noxious vitriol spewed in its direction the rough visuals and humor drew wide criticism from fans who frankly had different expectations of what a capcom game should be the now defunct capcom unity forums r.i.p were ablaze with complaints but one can only wonder how the response would have been if they had known the game's true beginnings in an interview with nintendo world report former capcom producer daryl allison explained when capcom crossed paths with spyborgs we were originally checking out a different concept as the story goes we saw some hero concept art on a wall and we were intrigued we wanted to know more about those characters and their world the more capcom learned about spyborgs and the development team behind it we knew we found our match this original concept art was most likely early work on the title codenamed team alphago a super spy cartoon inspired action game aimed primarily at a younger audience bionic had apparently made a lot of progress on team alphago like planning a wide variety of different gameplay types and minigames but capcom had reservations about the direction of the game and so wanted a new name so team alphago would be rebranded as spyborgs nonetheless after the lukewarm reception to captivate spyborg's the blowout the game would skip e3 entirely and capcom would start to get very very quiet behind the scenes they went back to bionic asking for what was essentially a complete reboot they wanted a game that felt more capcom-esque and to aim for a slightly older audience this led to shifting over to a beat-em-up style new character designs a new story with a more serious tone and the commercial mini-games would also be completely removed they would no longer fit in with this new direction go co-op playstation with an added emphasis on dual finishing moves and even if you were friendless a co-op partner controlled by the ai would be provided stinger bouncer and clandestine were kept as playable characters while kinetic was demoted to a narrative support role and voxel well you're gone with platforming and humor traded in for combat and cinematic special moves the team were effectively making a completely different game from what they originally had in mind and with less than a year on their contract's clock they were running at a time [Music] in a post on capcom unity former senior director of planning and research christian svenson explain why months after its announcement spyboardings had gone dark you won't see new spyborg's assets for several more months we're refining it considerably pretty much as significant in overhaul as dark void underwent from its first announcement to its first big reveal i have seen a new build recently though it's coming along nicely spyborgs needed to stay on track as it was a project that was being exclusively handled by capcom usa their main osaka branch had very little to do with the project as they already had their hands full with their own big dumb push into more western style titles capcom usa at the time were mostly focused on smaller scaled downloadables super turbo hd remix age of booty and commando wolf of the battlefield amongst others so spyborgs represented one of if not the biggest game they had been fully responsible for so it had to come in on budget and on time this then might have played a factor into the diminishing relationship between both companies which became incredibly strained in the last few months of development this resulted in financial issues for bionic with capcom allegedly delaying milestone payments for reasons that were not made clear to my contact this came to a head in the lead up to 2009 z3 where spyborgs had been scheduled to appear with a fully playable demo while bionic were working on said demo the studio held a meeting where management said that capcom hadn't paid them in a few months and they were effectively out of money they asked staff to continue working during the ongoing negotiations for a new contract and according to my source they may have gone so far as to threaten withholding that e3 demo until capcom paid up the finer details of the situation between management and capcom are still unknown to me but the spyborg's demo did materialize at e3 and development on the game continued at bionic so it must have worked out to some degree my source also mentioned that after this point they felt that the relationship between capcom and bionic became even colder than it was before publicly though the all-new all different spyborgs was first shown in video form at 2009's captivate event before fans would get to go hands-on a month later at that e3 unfortunately reception to the new version of the game was decidedly mixed some felt that it looked much better graphically and appreciated the shift in tone but ultimately felt that everything looked fairly generic and still wasn't up to the level of capcom's other action ips in regards to the game's history and mid-development reboot former capcom producer daryl allison stated playing to the strengths of the ratchet and clank development experience of much of the team the original concept had more platforming to it to go with some light brawling spyborgs has always been a cooperative action game the more the co-op action took shape the more fun and promising it proved to be and so we shifted gears to develop spyborgs into a full-blown brawler originally we had 10 different gameplay types between the platforming puzzle solving and action variations the game jumped between them and short cut scenes like a saturday morning cartoon and that flow provided the opportunity to set up and pay off humor that flow also let us insert playable commercials and with those the team could go crazy with the humor we love the commercials they are awesome fun and funny but they just didn't feel right anymore unfortunately what this resulted in was a gameplay experience that wasn't nearly as deep as devil may cry and wasn't as impactful or memorable as capcom's belt scrolling classics the only other thing you did outside of smashing robots was sweeping the ir pointer around the screen to find invisible stuff one of the few instances where the final game actually took advantage of the hardware it had been created for once e3 came to a close spyborg's next big milestone was to ship by september a scant few months later so what did capcom have planned for promotion the most charitable way i can describe it is outside the box okay i like it picasso in lieu of magazine or tv you know advertisements there were the online webisodes which were meant to flesh out the game's backstory a 13-page comic book produced by udon and there wasn't a third thing look what i found capcom had bigger fish to fry you see they just spent oodles advertising resident evil 5 and bionic commando it was understandably becoming an afterthought and in all honesty capcom were probably making the right move by choosing not to focus on it because the fans certainly weren't the cherry on top of this sloppy cyborg sundae is the fact that capcom actually shipped a beta build of spyborgs to north american shelves unfinished and incomplete in 2014 a former staff member of bionic tweeted about some of the behind the scenes details sharing that in the weeks leading up to delivering the goldmaster build bionic were burning the midnight oil polishing everything they could the two major things they were focusing on were adjusting the game's difficulty and overhauling the companion ai for co-op while they were doing this capcom and sent an earlier beta build to an unnamed texas studio that was tasked with fixing all the pre-certification issues that would be required to pass nintendo's guidelines bionic were not made aware of this and as soon as those required fixes were made capcom got that build approved by nintendo of america instead of waiting for bionic and then just shipped it those north american copies of spyborgs that you've all not been playing over the years have unaddressed issues with ai and difficulty balancing that same build was submitted but rejected by nintendo of europe who required additional fixes so at the very least pal gamers wound up with the final bionic approved version alongside this mess of a submission process capcom suddenly dropped the game's price by ten dollars less than two months before release signaling what i can only assume was an unshakable faith in its chances at retail the borgs then busted onto store shelves on the 22nd of september north america with australia and europe getting it on the 25th it would never be released in japan unfortunately the competition was fierce that same month in the lead up to spyborgs we saw guitar hero 5 murr mass of the demon blade mini ninjas and metroid prime trilogy then on the very same day as spyborgs marvel ultimate alliance 2 dropped and for those that owned both a wii and a 360 the choice was pretty clear as it was also the launch day for halo odst how bad not good furthermore the very next week would also see tmnt smash up my sims agents and dead space extraction all hitting store shelves fortunately though when it came to the reviews it wasn't a much better situation while some outlets like ign praise the borg's graphics and solid mechanics they criticize its bland world characters and admonish the punishing difficulty level imagine that the game would find itself sitting on a lackluster 66 average on metacritic so between the lack of promotion intense competition and middling reviews the spyborgs were destined for the scrap heap if this story wasn't weird enough though be prepared to suspend your disbelief beyond its natural limits while finding accurate numbers for any game's lifetime sales data can be tricky it took a herculean effort this time around capcom never reported any sales data and in fact never even used the word spyborgs in a single published quarterly report it's like the game never even existed there ain't no monorail and there never was according to leaked npd data though in the 11 days of the track period that it was on sale for spyborgs sold less than 600 copies that's six zero zero the source i spoke to said they felt that this number sounded accurate theorizing that it probably did wind up selling a couple of thousand units in total but admitted they never saw official numbers by the time the borgs had released though bionic games were already cutting jobs they only had just enough money to keep things going for the last few months of development but when it was clear that spyborgs were imploding at retail they knew there'd be no further checks coming their website would quietly quietly closed down sometime in 2011 without so much as a press release or goodbye message on paper capcom teaming up with experienced staff at a fresh studio seemed like it could have been a recipe for success but it seems the project was mismanaged in a variety of ways and not in line with what capcom fans wanted spyborgs along with a few other big failures around that era might be a contributing factor as to why modern capcom takes very few risks nowadays focusing on one or two blockbusters per year with the occasional collection thrown in not sure if there's any positive way i can spin this so let's just hear from daryl allison once more with this milestone quote to close things out action gamers have been waiting for a brawler that uses the motion controls right and shows what the wii hardware is really capable of then look at all the games this team has worked on in the past and who's publishing this game and if that doesn't excite you then sell all your games and systems now you'll need the money to pay for your therapy sessions so stupid trust me you'll be happy to add cyborgs not just your library of wii games but to the collection of all your favorites wow anyway if you know of any other ratchet robotic rigmaroles let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or smash into the offices of the flophouse vip patreon and become a big robo boss to nominate what you'd like to see on a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] screaming

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 515,929

Keywords: video game essay, compilation, study, workout mix, matt mcmuscles, What Happened?, wha happun, megacut, capcom, capcom's worst games, bad capcom games

Id: q1IVwpIwWlU

Length: 325min 37sec (19537 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/The_Draigg]

The fact that Matt was able to make a five and half hour video about Capcom’s failures really does speak to not only how many cool franchises they own, but also how much they trip over their own balls on a regular basis.

[u/5YearsOnEastCoast]

Capcom is Matt's favorite whooping boy

[u/rexshen]

So Matt jumping on the mash all your videos into one super video for maximum revenue things. Neat.

[u/storminsl1218]

I enjoy Matt's style of content.