7 Great Games That Were Nearly Extremely Boring

i don't know if you know this but there are a lot of video games sonic grand theft auto that one with the pirate ship sonic 2 and of course of those thousands and thousands of games only a precious handful turn out to be famously brilliant memorable games iconic games and a source of hours of joy for those who play them but the terrifying truth is some of those games came perilously close to being only average or worse super dull and not nearly so influential and entertaining as they mercifully ended up being these seven lucky games swerved dangerously close to being boring here's to living in donkey kong's best possible timeline everything you're about to see is being rendered in real time on a macintosh using opengl if i say halo you'll probably think of the famous first person shooter series exclusive to the xbox consoles or even better beyonce halo was first revealed in july 1999 at an event called mac world by a man called steve jobs and we're going to see for the first time halo this game didn't look like the halo we know and love however while it was still all spartans and covenant fighting in space to a thumping soundtrack this was a third person game an exclusive to the apple mac microsoft's hated rival platform this is gonna be good how did this happen well a year after halo was first seen microsoft bought bungie software the developer of the game and xbox revealed the third person shooter at their e3 presentation later that same year [Music] a huge get for microsoft that allegedly had a furious steve jobs phoning up microsoft's then ceo steve bulmer on the day of the sale presumably to yell at him apple did at least get halo on mac os but two years after microsoft released it exclusively for the original xbox console having rewritten the game engine specifically for it and turning halo into the first person shooter we know and love today but the change in hardware and camera angle weren't the only changes made to halo when the game was first conceived in 1997 it was to be a real-time strategy game more akin to the later released halo wars which if you'll recall really proves our point because it was kind of a snooze fest talking to official xbox magazine in 2015 alex siropian co-founder of bungie the reason for the change was just because they could saying as the tech and art made things look cooler we began to pull the camera closer to the action the strategy game became a third person game which became a first person shooter also bungie developers wanted to drive the big space car that's right chatting to official xbox magazine designer jamie grissomer credits the warthog as the reason halo became an action game explaining in the old rtsr game it was just so cool to watch a squad of jeeps driving across the terrain that we wanted to drive them ourselves in some ways halo is the story of the warthog and the universe we built to drive it around in wait till they hear you're allowed to make driving games that'll be the last we hear of halo the donkey kong arcade game managed to do a lot it introduced donkey kong and mario and served as a cautionary tale on the perils of unregulated construction work well none of that was up to code it also managed while it was at it to be a spectacularly fun arcade game with precision platforming and high score settings so addictive that punters couldn't help but be parted from their pocket money if it meant one more sprint up the scaffolding to show donkey kong whose boss oh he's gone well we sent a powerful message probably the last will hear of this unsavory kong fellow of course it wasn't and donkey kong's lasting legacy is that it established the almighty mario video game universe which makes it all the more terrifying how close this great game came to not doing that because if nintendo's plans had worked out donkey kong would have been about popeye kids ask your parents about popeye and once they've checked with your grandparents they'll be able to remind you that popeye was a famous sailor and performance-enhancing vegetable enthusiast who rose to prominence in the 1930s with his madcap cartoon antics i saw my duty and done it cause i'm popular and it was around this character as well as his love interest olive oil and brawny nemesis pluto the nintendo lynchpin shigeru mayamoto designed the game that would end up being donkey kong weirdly this sort of made sense pluto was a physically imposing enemy not above using brute force and trickery to win olive's love popeye is fond of a power-up and the three of them even have form dallying around on building sites [Music] the popeye project was approved but discussions to get the popeye license from owner king features stalled so mayamoto and nintendo scrambled to repurpose the planned game with new characters and the rest thank god is history [Music] and if you want to know quite how close we came to mario and donkey kong never existing well just consider the fact that only one year later in 1982 nintendo did sew up the rights to popeye and did develop a popeye arcade game [Music] so you have to think that if those early license discussions had gone just a teensy bit smoother donkey kong would have been the planned popeye game and nintendo's entire future would have been set on a very different path presumably one where mr gaiman watch is the mascot and popeye continues to star in a series of acclaimed platformers sure popeye galaxy 2 has the popular vote but i'll always hold a candle for popeye sunshine pluto's inside story if i'm in the mood for an rpg [Music] name three things about british spy james bond easy license to kill loves gadgets is able to walk in any direction he likes but the most famous james bond video game of them all goldeneye 007 for the n64 came oh so close to presenting players with a bond who could only do two of those things goldeneye was released in 1997 but work on this seminal shooter which proved extremely influential for the fps genre began way earlier in january 1995. developer rare faced an uphill battle in those early days because the team had to begin working on goldeneye long before the n64 was released and before they even knew for sure what nintendo's new controller would end up looking like not that knowing would have made things any easier probably i mean seriously what is this in those early days however one thing was certain and that was the specific game that rare was hoping to imitate a 1995 early design document opens with the surprising line the game will be similar to virtua cop in terms of gameplay [Music] virtua cop was a sega shooter released one year earlier that differs from goldeneye in many ways but the most glaring of all is that it's an on-rails shooter which means the game takes care of moving your character freeing you up to focus solely on gunning down enemies in this case members of the crime syndicate evil incorporated [Music] who i feel like there was an earlier opportunity to clamp down on maybe at the point where they incorporated a company called evil today it's bizarre to think that goldeneye could have been just another in a long line of on-rail shooters seeing as the game is extremely famous for its fully explorable 3d stages each of which is filled with multiple objectives that mean your path from beginning to end is anything but linear and yet for its first months of development goldeneye was shaping up to be the kind of game that featured no player movement at all it's hard to imagine but this footage confirmed by goldeneye designer david doak to be an early demo of the game gives you some idea of what could have been [Music] ah the scripted spline path not taken [Applause] if you've never played infamous well you should consider playing infamous it's good released in 2009 for the ps3 infamous is an open world game where you play as a bike messenger named cole who develops electricity based superpowers what's happening to me cole uses said powers which get more powerful and varied as the game progresses to blast his foes with bowel shaking bolts of high voltage and to skim around the fictional empire city like peter parker would if instead of a spider he'd been bitten by a radioactive michael faraday infamous also gave you the choice whether to use those powers for good or evil in a karma system that let you make huge moral choices that impacted the citizenry of empire city or just forced civilians to turn valves because you don't want to get a load of boiling tar in your face [Music] where was this power when i played through half-life the action-packed infamous nearly turned out to be a radically different game however chris zimmerman co-founder of developer sucker punch has stated that for a whole half a year at the start of development infamous was going to draw heavily on a totally different kind of game a different series of games in fact this series that's right infamous was going to be an animal crossing sort of game you're probably wondering how and whether it involved sending 50 000 volts of electricity through tom nook according to zimmerman infamous was originally going to explore the alter-ego life of someone with superpowers in a quote superhero version of animal crossing because to begin with the infamous protagonist wasn't a bike messenger by day they were a property developer ah property developer who sends 50 000 volts of electricity through tom nook no no in fact early infamous gameplay would involve roaming the city finding criminals and helping citizens all complimented by light zoning work in a 2017 sucker punch retrospective zimmermann said your alter ego was a property developer deciding where to put the pet shops and tiki bars the citizens were demanding sounds awesome right unsurprisingly the idea of an infamous where instead of having non-stop parkour electricity fights you spend your time lobbying the council for planning permission didn't get all that far [Music] admitting that the first draft of infamous wasn't so awesome after all chris zimmerman says quote after six months of experimentation we gave up on property development and focused on superhero action to which the only response we can muster is i think i know how i could have saved you six months there chris that said the more we think about a superhero version of animal crossing the more fun it sounds oh how about one where you play thor and when tom nook shows up you send 50 000 volts of electricity now all the people in here are working on what dma hopes will be its new blockbuster it's a game called grand theft auto it's got to be finished by the end of june so they're involved in some pretty hard work in here it's all about a car chase through the streets of a fictional probably american city here are some of the maps they've been working on before rockstar north was rockstar north it was dma design and before grand theft auto was grand theft auto it was race and chase back in 1995 dundee-based developer dma cooked up some design documents that laid out what race and chase would be and at first blush it didn't seem so completely different from the final game that kicked off the huge franchise we know today for example under action it read players will be able to drive cars and possibly other vehicles such as boats helicopters or lorries cars can be stolen raced collided crashed and have to be navigated about a large map and in the gameplay section one segment read pedestrians will be wandering about all of the time they can be run over by cars types of pedestrian could include school children and lollipop lady dogs and those are the only examples listed yep wow specific as you might know already school children and lollipop ladies were never put into grand theft auto but that was not the only change indeed this early version of gta had a much bigger difference that was entirely at odds with the finished game and indeed the philosophy of the whole series which is to say in race and chase you could play as the cops originally the game was envisioned as a cops and robbers style game where players could choose which side of the law they preferred to represent before long however race and chase ran into a significant problem and that was that nobody wanted to play as the cops why because it was extremely boring at least compared with the mayhem it was possible to unleash as a criminal so over several years of what creative director gary penn later described as messy development the game we now recognize as grand theft auto eventually came together for all that work though the fun of the finished game was partly down to a bug in an early version penn says the glitch was in the behavior of police cars whose screwy route finding meant that they kept trying to drive through the player with the result that your car got continually rammed by the cops turns out that was a lot less boring than them trying to pull you over in a safe and controlled manner so the cops slamming their cars into you stayed in just one long-running gta tradition established in the very first game along with the bikes being nigh on undrivable and being on the cusp of doing something cool only to have the game's physics make it not quite work [Music] classic oh no it's gonna be one of those days conker's bad fur day is a notoriously gross game full of vomiting [Music] and extreme violence in other words not exactly one for kids or even most adults but what gives because this foul-mouthed rodent could be found in 1997's diddy kong racing which is exactly a game for kids how come he was allowed onto the starting grid hey well because originally conker's standalone game was very very different to the one we ended up with originally called conker's quest the game was revealed in the summer of 1997 alongside developer rare's other upcoming release banjo-kazooie there was a lot of excited chatter about conker's quest the game likened to the almighty mario 64 but with buck teeth and ign even said the game has the amazing ability to make gamers feel as if they're playing through disney's movie version of bambi but after this first showing conker's quest all but disappeared from the public eye until the final product came out and [Music] yeah i don't remember that happening in bambi although i never watched the director's cut so behind the scenes rare was still forging ahead with the cutesy version known by 1998 as 12 tales conquer 64. in 2015 rare dug out an early build of this version and showed off what would have been some areas of this game alongside the adorable themed hats conker got to wear for each of them rare also showed a much more twee version of berry the chipmunk as a playable character who was intended to have different abilities to conquer much like how donkey kong's pals had different skills in donkey kong 64. cute so to put it in words the later version of conker would prefer what the happened well rare looked around and saw the huge number of 3d platformers appearing on the market like spyro croc and even its own game banjo-kazooie rare got a little worried that conker would get overshadowed and forgotten about like so many other 90s platforming mascots like mr nuts don't remember mr nuts exactly so red decided to switch up the tone of the game to make conkers stand out in the crowd of animal mascot platformers and well sonic had never got drunk in any of his games and urinated all over the floor so rare waved goodbye to the cute squirrel and all his little hats and welcomed in the randy rodent in need of an aspirin by turning conker into a parody of their own games rare created something unlike any other platformer seen before it didn't sell well at first mainly thanks to limited marketing by nintendo who were understandably worried that kids might pick up the cartoony game but in the years since it has become a cult classic due to its uniquely crass humor and has definitely never been forgotten i am the great mighty pooh and i'm going to throw my at you but then again you're not likely to forget a game that has a giant singing in it are you these people work with disney now you should open the storage device there may be something inside to help against those bandits all right we got guns over here wow that looks like he could do some damage borderlands is one of those games that makes a strong first impression which is all the more remarkable when you bear in mind the game begins with a wisecracking comedy robot welcome to firestone i am cl4ptp you may call me by my locally designated name claptrap hmm how many more hours of this did you say there were the real reason it makes such an impression though is its extremely distinctive visual style a cartoony cel-shaded aesthetic that along with an anarchic sense of humor gives borderlands a vibe that at launch certainly separated it from the herd of semi-shooters that were in the works at the end of the naughties but twas not always the case let's travel back now to 2007 and sorry for saying twas just then when the game was first revealed that cel-shaded look was nowhere to be seen instead the game had a much more realistic visual style that portrayed a gritty frontier where scavengers vied for survival if the bandits don't get you the wildlife will you won't last long here not without help not without guns while the fundamentals of the game never changed an open world rpg shooter crammed to the rafters with lootable guns the game's now iconic visual style was only changed at the 11th hour in a drastic overhaul by developer gearbox that aimed to separate borderlands from what was turning into a worryingly large crowd of rival shooters the tactic very probably worked as it feels unlikely that the game would have been as big of a hit or spawned so many sequels without that eye-grabbing aesthetic that makes borderlands look like a shooter that got squished between the pages of a graphic novel that's not to say that the graphical u-turn went over entirely smoothly though according to a gamespot report in 2010 following the last minute revamp the game's original art director quit the industry entirely disenchanted with the way in which all her work was discarded and ben hibbon the director of a 2006 short film called code hunters said in an interview quoted in forbes the borderlands now famous visuals were down to gearbox reproducing the style of his film without his help or consent hmm awkward you got anything on everybody claptrap me out i'm dancing i'm dancing right so those were seven great games that very very nearly very very nearly turned out to be kind of boring can you think of any other examples if so do us a favor and pop them in the comments and you never know we might make a commenter edition of this video and if you did enjoy this then boy have i got good news for you because that we've made this videos like this hundreds of times hundreds of times but there's hundreds of them there's two here but there's hundreds of them okay so seek them out and subscribe as well thanks bye

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 320,955

Rating: 4.9284911 out of 5

Keywords: Ellen Rose, Luke Westaway, Outside Xtra

Id: IDJwVNVeX6o

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Dawnawaken92]

Yup. Halo was originally just supposed be like halo wars.