There is some interesting history to the “Sword Quest” series including the contest that awarded valuable epic loot to one lucky player per game. This included the fabled “Crown of Life” valued at over $25k (back then!) from the never released “Waterworld” that was confirmed as created but never awarded, leaving rumors that the Atari CEO kept it.
Back in the day after arriving home from school one afternoon I remember my mother saying oh! Honey I bought you a new Atari cartridge(that’s what she called them) I reached inside the bag and pulled out a game,it said Journey Escape! what is this Mom? she loved the band Journey,the game I cannot even describe it, you basically flew around the universe in that ship on one of their album covers searching the universe for the missing band members,or something to that effect,it was played once & never again.
You were just bad at the game (Wipeout). With practice I was able to get through all but the last couple tracks fairly easily, but those last few races were insanely difficult. And once you found the “zone”, the game was pure awesome that none of the sequels or imitators (that I’ve played) were able to duplicate. I still own a PS1 and drag it out once in a while to play this.
It is a very tough decision between E.T. and Pac-Man for my canidate. Both were highly anticipated games that turned out to be complete duds. These two games aren’t the only bad games that Atari produced, and maybe not even the worst in terms of how bad the game play is, but both are symbolic of the Atari attitude back then (we can put shit on a cartridge and it will sell is close to an actual quote that I have heard) that led to the downfall of the company. There may be worse games out there (as others have said E.T. was at least playable and beatable), but the none of the other turds they produced were more highly anticipated or had a bigger fall.
I’m going to nominate Atari 2600 Pac-Man. The game was supposed to retail at $40-50, and I remember numerous stores that didn’t have anything to do with video games planning on stocking it. Grocery stores, drug stores, hell the freakin local BEER DISTRIBUTOR was ordering copies of it for sale. A few days before the game came out, if you had reserved a guaranteed copy you could have sold your rights for $100 or (rumor had it) more. A few days after it came out you’d be hard pressed to find someone to give you $10 for it. There have been worse games (unplayable, incomplete, bug filled messes), but there is NO bigger dud in the history of video games. Not Daikatana, not Duke Nukem forever, not Black & White, not Spore, could be considered as big of a failure or had as far of a fall from grace. The above games were highly anticipated for sure, but for the most part only by people who were already heavy gamers. Pac-Man was something your mom played. Your girlfriend, your teacher, your people who didn’t like any form of video game had played and liked Pac-Man. And now it was coming home. This was going to be the biggest thing ever. And then…
:eek::smack::mad:
Sort of surprised Sonic 2006 isn’t on that list, but eh…
I can’t say. I’ve played some turds, but nothing genuinely broken enough to really cut it. I went with ET because from videos of people playing it it looks awful, and considering what a big title it could’ve been there should’ve been much more oversight and support for the development. I can’t say that it was worse than the General Custer game or whatever, but when you combine how bad it was, with the low bar for games of the time, and the fact that they had every reason to have the confidence to give the game proper backing and talent makes it a particularly egregious example of licensed games gone wrong.
I realized you probably didn’t mean 2600 titles a bit after making that post… :smack:
I’ve played some horrible abortions of PC games, especially when it was going through growing pains in the late 80s and 90s. Quite possibly one of the worst, which was sold as a budget title in retail stores, was some piece of crap where you had to shoot Gaddafi. My stepdad at the time managed an Electronics Boutique, and he’d sweep up all the deleted merchandise that would get marked down to 1 cent; this was one of his scores.
IIRC, your cannon just moved back and forth automatically at the bottom of the screen, and a still low-res digitized picture of Gaddafi sat at the top of the screen. Push a button, launch a projectile to hit the picture. It was like a retail version of one of those crappy “interactive” banner ads that were all over the place 6 or 7 years ago.
DNF was more like another well known abbreviation for me. So damn hard that I couldn’t even finish the demo!
ET was terrible, but I’d like to nominate “Sneak’n Peek” for the Atari 2600. I actually owned this game, purchased at a grocery store in '82 or '83.
It was a hide-and-seek simulations. One person would wander through a house, composed of a few rooms, each of which contained a few spots where he could hide. The other player had to turn away or leave the room. He would then come back and try to find the first player. Here’s the thing, though…there was no on-screen indication of where the person had hid. He was completely invisible. Therefore, finding him was a matter of pure luck.
It’s also necessary to consider some of the various product-placement games. I’m thinking here of “Chase the Chuck Wagon,” “Kool-Aid Man,” “Tooth Protectors” by Johnson & Johnson.
I agree about the color of Pac-man for the 2600, and I guess I don’t have an opinion one way or another about the rest of the look, but I actually liked the sound. Especially the sound when you ate a monster. I can remember it now after not having played it in decades, whereas i’ve played Baby Pac Man a few months ago and can’t remember the sound of chomping.
Just in case you haven’t heard of it I’d like to link The Angry Video Game Nerd who semi-regularly reviews truly bad video games (warning: bad language in some videos).
Superman 64 and Custer’s Revenge (plus other bizarre lewd games).
I voted “Other”.