Big Budget Disasters on video games

[Spiral]

By Mike Smith

Waterworld. Hudson Hawk. Showgirls. The movie world is replete with examples of projects that swallowed up vast amounts of cash only to sink beneath the waves, vanish into Bruce Willis' past, or disappear into our darkest nightmares. So too is the world of videogames, and although there's no game failure that can quite match the sheer scale of the movie world's excesses, there's still no shortage of games so unsuccessful that they brought down companies, destroyed careers, and shattered dreams. Here are seven of our favorites.

Sims Online
Estimated budget: $25m

Although megapublisher Electronic Arts usually has a knack for delivering sales smashes, every time it's dipped its toe into the waters of massively multiplayer games since Ultima Online it's ended up badly burned. Its last effort, an online version of The Sims, should have been a smash hit, but, well, let's just say it underperformed a tad. Turns out the best way to make history's most successful videogame franchise into a massively multiplayer game is not in fact to remove most of the features players enjoy and then heap on a monthly fee. The Sims Online underperformed from day one, and although EA re-invented the game as "EA-Land" in February, it's currently marking time until the Grim Reaper comes to turn off the servers on August 1.


The Last Express
Estimated budget: $6m

Some games flop because they're over-hyped. Some games flop because they're terrible. Some flop because they just spent too much money. Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner's The Last Express made none of these mistakes, instead falling victim to a perfect storm of catastrophes, all beyond its control. It's still remembered as one of the finest adventure games ever made, but it was released in 1997, right as the gaming public was losing interest in the genre in favor of those new-fangled 3D shooters. The publisher's marketing department up and quit, leaving it with no ads, and a subsequent buyout meant the game vanished from stores soon after its release. Unsurprisingly, it sank without trace - but fortunately, courtesy of GameTap, it's now being distributed again. If you don't play any other games on this list - and, frankly, we wouldn't blame you if you didn't - play this one.


Ultima 9
Estimated budget: Unknown. Nine-year development cycles are not cheap.

Is there any PC role-playing game series that's as well-loved as the Ultima games? Created by the eccentric designer Richard "Lord British" Garriott, they dominated the genre for a full fifteen years, and remain close to the heart of many RPG aficionados. Garriott's good fortune came to a grinding halt with the 1999 release of Ultima IX: it was nine years in the making, required numerous redesigns and rewrites, and when it finally hit the streets it was a buggy, inconsistent mess with sky-high hardware requirements that excluded many fans. As if that wasn't bad enough, the coming of 3D action-adventures caused the designers to ditch the series' traditional deep, party-based combat and replace it with a system that owed more to Tomb Raider than Dungeons & Dragons. Assorted patches improved the game somewhat, but it wasn't enough to redeem it, and among many Ultima devotees its name is still not spoken. Garriott's latest project, an MMO named Tabula Rasa, is still up and running - but our hunch is that you'll see it appearing in next year's version of this article.



SHENMUE II
Estimated budget: $70m

Legendary Sega designer Yu Suzuki created classics like OutRun, Space Harrier and Virtua Fighter before turning his attention to the adventure genre in this spectacular epic. For years it stood as the most expensive video game ever made, and it was single-handedly responsible for selling at least seven of Sega's equally ill-fated Dreamcast consoles. Was it any good? Eh, depends on who you ask. Some heralded it as the greatest console RPG ever made. Others just couldn't dig its free-form storytelling and repetitive gameplay. It was originally intended to be a trilogy, but the series looks to have ground to a halt after its second episode. If you've ever wanted to drive a forklift round a Japanese town looking for sailors, give it a go.





The Getaway
Estimated budget: City-sized

Pop quiz: It's 2000, and you want to make a free-roaming driving game. Do you: a) start by hammering together a plot, a quick generic cityscape and a few gangster-type characters, or b) attempt to model 70 square miles of one of the world's busiest and most chaotic cities in exhaustive detail? If you answered mostly As, well done: you have what it takes to be a top games developer. If you answered mostly Bs, well done: you are probably already a top games developer, and you worked on The Getaway. The team trimmed back their ambitions to a "mere" ten square miles of central London, and it eventually saw the light of day in 2002 - a year after Grand Theft Auto 3's release, by which time everything The Getaway did had already been done, and better. Its sequel fared even worse, and a planned PS3 version was canned just days ago.