Video Games You Wish Were Never Made

Somebody approved every one of these, and some of them got a sequel pitch.

Entries
10
Category
Games
Updated
  1. A brightly lit sci-fi arena with only two folding chairs occupied in an otherwise empty stadium.

    10. Concord

    Firewalk Studios / Sony · 2024

    A $40 hero shooter dropped into a free-to-play market, peaking at about 700 players on Steam. Sony pulled the servers two weeks after launch, refunded everyone and closed the studio. The players who did show up mostly kept meeting each other.

  2. A cardboard box marked with a sticky note, coated in fourteen years of dust and cobwebs, sitting on a shelf beside a pair of dark sunglasses.

    09. Duke Nukem Forever

    3D Realms / Gearbox Software · 2011

    Announced in 1997, it became the industry's shorthand for vaporware and won Wired's vaporware award in 2001. Engine swaps and layoffs later, Gearbox shipped it 14 years on to Metacritic scores around 50. The jokes were older than some of the people playing it.

  3. A pulse rifle leaning against a steel corridor wall, a single typewriter key lying on the floor in a pool of green light.

    08. Aliens: Colonial Marines

    Gearbox Software / Sega · 2013

    Six years of outsourced development, a press demo that looked far better than the game, and a false-advertising lawsuit Sega settled for $1.25 million. In 2017 a modder found a one-word typo that was quietly lobotomizing the aliens. One word.

  4. A gold ring lying in a damp cave puddle next to a crashed laptop with a frozen loading bar.

    07. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

    Daedalic Entertainment · 2023

    A stealth game starring the least heroic hobbit-adjacent creature, so buggy one outlet could not finish it for review. Metacritic ranked it the worst game of 2023. Weeks later Daedalic shut its development team and canceled its next Tolkien game. Precious few saw that coming.

  5. A long ornate sword stuck in the floor of an empty office, three years of desk calendars piled beside it.

    06. Daikatana

    Ion Storm / Eidos · 2000

    Announced in 1997 with an ad about John Romero that we will not reprint, it slipped three years, switched engines and lost nearly its whole team. The required sidekicks walk into walls. Ion Storm projected 2.5 million sales; US sales were about 40,000.

  6. A green pointed cap resting on a 1990s CD-i console beside a jar of lamp oil and a bag of bombs on a shop counter.

    05. Link: The Faces of Evil

    Animation Magic / Philips · 1993

    Nintendo let Philips borrow Link for the CD-i and then stayed out of the room. Two Zelda games for about $600,000, with cutscenes so strange they became YouTube Poop source material for two decades. Nintendo has never mentioned them. Good instinct.

  7. A motorcycle sinking into a muddy road under a stormy sky, a cardboard open road map torn in half beside it.

    04. Ride to Hell: Retribution

    Eutechnyx / Deep Silver · 2013

    Announced in 2008 as an open-world biker epic, it vanished for five years and came back as a linear brawler held together with tape. Metacritic: 13 on PS3. Giant Bomb named it Worst Game of 2013, and reviewers had a lot to say about how it treats women. None of it good.

  8. A row of floating rings fading into thick green fog above a blocky gray city skyline.

    03. Superman 64

    Titus Interactive · 1999

    Superman, who can do anything, spends his game flying through rings in a city smothered by draw-distance fog the game calls Kryptonite fog. Licensing approvals ate the months meant for fixing the controls. Guinness logged it as the lowest-rated superhero game.

  9. A semi truck driving straight up the side of a steep mountain, defying physics, while a second truck sits motionless at a starting line.

    02. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

    Stellar Stone / GameMill Publishing · 2003

    No collision detection, a reverse gear that accelerates forever, and an opponent truck that never leaves the starting line. Metacritic: 6. Win, which is unavoidable, and the game congratulates you with a famous grammar error. You did win, technically.

  10. Dozens of dusty gray game cartridges spilling out of a dig pit in a New Mexico landfill, an excavator bucket overhead.

    01. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

    Atari (Howard Scott Warshaw) · 1982

    Atari paid $20 million or more for the license and gave Warshaw about five weeks to make the game. E.T. falls into pits, climbs out, falls back in. Millions of carts came back, and in 2014 diggers found them in a New Mexico landfill. It is the only game with a dig site.

Honorable mentions

  • A lone tour bus on a perfectly straight desert highway that runs to the horizon, a bug splattered on its windshield.

    Desert Bus

    Imagineering / Absolute Entertainment · 1995

    Penn and Teller's joke game: drive a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 mph in real time, eight hours, no pause, and it drifts right. Finishing earns one point. It never officially came out, then a charity marathon built on it raised millions for sick kids. Redeemed.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A small yellow cartoon bird figurine lying on its back beside a green pipe, a crumpled stack of cash next to it.

    Flappy Bird

    .Gears (Dong Nguyen) · 2013

    Its own creator wished it had never been made: at a reported $50,000 a day in ads, Nguyen pulled it in 2014 because the addiction weighed on him. In 2024 another company grabbed the lapsed trademark for a crypto-flavored revival he disowned. The bird keeps hitting the pipe.

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