Fallen Creator/Video Games


 * One of the more tragic examples -- Gunpei Yokoi was a creative genius at Nintendo that was making successes even before Shigeru Miyamoto became the public face of the company. On top of being the inventor of the D-pad that all gaming controllers use to this day, he created the Game & Watch series that broke Nintendo into home video games, and later replicated this with the Game Boy. Serving as a producer, he also oversaw the creation of Metroid, Kid Icarus, Fire Emblem, and Dr. Mario. Then he made the Virtual Boy. The high-profile disaster of a system was discontinued within a year, by which time he had become persona non grata at Nintendo. Nintendo was notoriously cruel to the poor guy, too. After the Virtual Boy debacle, they made him man the booth at a trade show, which in Japanese corporate culture is considered entry-level work, and thus a severe insult to someone of Yokoi's stature. He eventually resigned and began development on the Japan-only handheld system, the WonderSwan, which did go on to be a reasonable challenger to the Game Boy's domination in Japan. But sadly he didn't live to see it as he died suddenly in a traffic accident in 1997. After his death, Nintendo paid tribute to him and still recognize him to this day as an important figure in the company's history... and are kind enough to his departed soul to just forget the Virtual Boy ever happened.
 * It's worth pointing out that unlike most folks on this page, Yokoi was always held in high esteem by fans, even after he fell from favor with the Nintendo execs.
 * Also worth pointing out that Yokoi was forced to release the Virtual Boy in its current "prototype" stage by Nintendo, who were bent on releasing new hardware in between the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 to avoid a lull. So the responsibility for the failure of the Virtual Boy lands strictly on the hands of Nintendo, who were quite busy blaming Yokoi for the failure at the time.
 * John Romero was a revolutionary. He helped design the ultraviolent masterpiece Doom, and earned such respect there is a whole genre based on the Trope Codifier: First Person Shooters. But, when the sodomy-threatening publicity for Daikatana came along, and the game's release date was changed so much for what turned out to be a game so bad it is frequently described as one of the worst games ever, nothing has been the same. He lost his prestige, his company, his girlfriend, and even his hair.
 * Recently though, he fell on his sword, apologized for how bad Daikatana was and accepted the blame for both the ad campaign and his overblown ego.
 * American McGee began as a level designer of the first two Doom and Quake installments, and later gave us his own grim take on a certain Lewis Carroll classic and became an overnight superstar with even talks of movie deals for the property. Since then, he's never been anywhere near as popular, with his subsequent works being mostly ignored (Scrapland got a lukewarm reception from players and critics, and Bad Day L.A. was a pure trainwreck). American McGee's Grimm got a small amount of press and has done reasonably well on GameTap, but still has yet to achieve the critical or commercial success that Alice had, which might explain why he chose to create a sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, which has received reviews ranging from fairly positive to lukewarm, although it can hardly be credited as a full return to form.
 * In the '80s and through the mid-'90s, Lucas Arts became famous for their ground-breaking adventure games, starting several franchises including Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, several one-offs such as Full Throttle, turning Sam and Max Freelance Police from an indie comic hit to a household name, and even making Indiana Jones games that were actually good. Sometime around the mid-90s, however, there was a management shift as Star Wars games finally started coming out through their studio. Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer along with many other key creative staff were either let go or had left themselves (Gilbert left in 1992), several big games flopped, numerous other games were canceled, and slowly but surely, LucasArts converted into a Star Wars factory... which wouldn't have been a problem since some of these games were still memorable, but these eventually slid in quality and sales as well, with only out-sourced projects like Knights of the Old Republic managing to sell. This also suffered from severe Executive Meddling (such as the obviously rushed sequel to KOTOR) and apparently numerous other secretive cancellations, including the long-awaited Knights of the Old Republic 3 that was never officially announced but had apparently started internal development (as shown in Rogue Leaders: The Story Of Lucas Arts). They had also continued to lay off more and more internal staff until they were down to just one remaining team. This team was promptly fired after The Force Unleashed went gold, finally leaving Lucas Arts as nothing but a licensing house.
 * Lucas Arts seems to be finally turning around. Along with putting real force behind their Knights of the Old Republic MMO, they've had an aboutface regarding their old adventure game IPs and out of the blue announced and released Tales of Monkey Island, a new series licensed to Telltale Games (where much of the old Lucas Arts staff went), The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (a remake of the first game), and just a day before the release of Tales, announced plans to start bringing out their older games to Steam. They've even said that assuming the Monkey Island games sell well, they're hoping to give some of their heavy hitters like Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and Day of the Tentacle the remake or revival treatment. Everyone in the world promptly soiled their pants in shock.
 * Rare began as a small company that made various games, its first being Jetpac for the ZX Spectrum. Soon after, it produced a few more games for various consoles like Battletoads, various movie-licensed games (like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) and R.C. Pro-Am. Starting with Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct for the Super Nintendo, Rare had become a successful Nintendo developer at its peak in the Nintendo 64 era, creating GoldenEye, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64, and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Enter the Game Cube era, and Rare created Star Fox Adventures, which is considered the black sheep of the Star FOX series, if not completely without merit (To their defense, Adventures was the result of Nintendo doing some Executive Meddling on what was to be Dinosaur Planet at the time). In the middle of production of Star Fox Adventures, Microsoft acquired Rare, moving it from being a successful Nintendo developer into a poster child for Microsoft. As a Microsoft developer, Rare created for the Xbox Grabbed by the Ghoulies, which is known as Rare's biggest flop, and a remake of Conker. It got a little better into the Xbox 360 era, with Kameo: Elements of Power (a game they'd started working on before their fall) and Viva Pinata, and revived Banjo-Kazooie with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (albeit with mixed results, and fairly low sales), but not to their former glory.
 * And now they've rebranded themselves as a developer for Kinect games in the style of Wii Sports. This part and the new 'casual' oriented marketing has not gone down well.
 * Hell, even their old Spectrum days were made of this trope. Back then they were known as Ultimate Play The Game (initially Ashby Computer Graphics -- it was a weird thing), and their earlier works were all acknowledged as massive landmarks in gaming -- the aforementioned Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf (possibly the biggest selling game on the Speccy) and the seminal Knight Lore, which introduced isometric graphics (well, Ant Attack did isometric first, but Knight Lore was what everything subsequent ripped off) to the machine. Then came Filmation II. Nightshade and Gunfright were both pretty much toss, and the name was sold to U.S. Gold. Unfortunately. Martianoids and Bubbler were Ultimate games in name only, and the company soon dissappeared, until the team behind Ultimate rebranded themselves as Rare...
 * Speaking of GoldenEye, the team who did that left Rare shortly after it was done to start Free Radical Design. Their first title was Time Splitters, which was lauded for continuing what GoldenEye started, but was met with some critique, like the lack of story. Their follow-up was Timesplitters 2, which rectified all the problems of the first game and overall polished it. The game was a huge success and still to this day has a hardcore cult following. After that came the very underrated Second Sight. But their next title would be the third Timesplitters game. This one faced some problems, seeing as it was trying to be a bit more of a standard FPS similar to Halo, instead of the more classic GoldenEye feeling of 1 and 2, but was still a huge hit. Their next title would be Haze, a game that was bashed to hell by critics and led to Free Radical announcing bankruptcy in the end of 2009 and laying off most of their employees (by locking them out of the building with no prior announcement), but the core members became Crytek UK.
 * Another victim of this is Silicon Knights, who was coincidentally another former Nintendo dev . The creators of the first Legacy of Kain game, the acclaimed Game Cube Survival Horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and well-done Metal Gear Solid remake The Twin Snakes, their next game, Too Human, languished in Development Hell. From jumping from three different consoles to an incredibly bloated budget($60 Million!) to a series of Frivolous Lawsuits between Epic Games, the finished product received mediocre reviews and rather bad sales, which pretty much put a damper on that trilogy they planned. They have rarely made anything since then, with their latest game X-Men: Destiny being quite a stinker. Most would, however, like a return to the world of Eternal Darkness, with the release of the Wii U on the horizon, and the fact they don't have the same problem as Rare. They may be able to Win Back the Crowd...
 * Someone felt a need to remind you of a sad story of Shiny Entertainment, who went from - among things - the first two Earthworm Jim games, the MDK series, Sacrifice to movie tie-ins of The Matrix and The Golden Compass. Their final fate was to be merged with The Collective (which did only licensed games up to that point) into Double Helix Games, whose Silent Hill Homecoming and Front Mission Evolved are generally considered decent but not great (they did spawn a stinker in the form of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra inbewteen these two though, so it's kinda safe to say that they have yet to fully recover).
 * Ditto for Interplay, Shiny's publisher up to Sacrifice. Back then, they owned a good number of successful franchises including said Shiny games, Fallout, Descent, Baldur's Gate among a buncha other things. Then in the 2000's, they mucked up with Fallout (see They Just Didn't Care for more details). The end result? Interplay went bankrupt, and only managed to save its ass by selling the Fallout franchise to Bethesda Softworks. Nowadays, they are only putting up games on the Virtual Console, and not much is heard of their planned sequel games.
 * Interplay's descent into the shit began when they became publicly traded in 1998 and reported losses after the release of Descent 3 and Free Space 2. Then a different company managed to buy a majority share of Interplay's stock in 2001. That company was Titus Software, headed by a pair of French hacks by the names of Eric and Herve Caen. Brian Fargo then left Interplay to the wolves. After the acquisition Titus as a company went belly up because of their over expansion and shut down in 2004 while racking up huge debts because of owed back pay and redundancy to wholly owned development studios. Herve Caen named himself the new CEO of Interplay but their sky high debts ensured that they had no resources to produce new games. Herve Caen is still CEO of Interplay and the court battle between Interplay and Bethesda over Fallout licensing and the lack of progress on the Fallout MMO Project V13 shows that Caen is still a talentless hack who can't produce results.
 * Free Space 2's lackluster commercial faring probably didn't do it any favors either, nor did the 2002 breakup of Volition and Interplay. The mediocre sales of the series arguably killed the space sim market built by the Wing Commander and Star Wars: X-Wing series, which not even the Microsoft juggernaut could revive with Starlancer and Freelancer (produced by the company Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts created after leaving Origin, following WC4).
 * Titus Software itself used to be a good company in the late eighties and early nineties, with titles such as Crazy Cars 2 and the Prehistorik series. Then, it went downhill. Before the Interplay buyout above, happened the infamous Superman 64, and also the Porting Disasters of Prince of Persia 2 on the SNES and Carmageddon 64.
 * Sonic Team. Sonic the Hedgehog used to be a worldwide icon and the only real challenge to Mario's domination of platform games. The Sega Genesis entries in the series are still considered great games. Then Sonic went 3D. For most fans and critics, most of the 3D Sonic games have a bad camera, broken controls, and too many characters, and Sonic Team has lost its old glory to them. It started with the two Sonic Adventures, which were worthy additions to the series despite being plagued by fundamental problems. Sonic Heroes marked the teetering edge of the abyss, Shadow the Hedgehog was made on the way down, and Sonic 2006 was the echoing crash of the series finally hitting rock bottom. Since then, the franchise has been making significant progress at climbing back up, but it still struggles with the basics like camera controls, physics, glitches, and fair level design. It also doesn't help that Sonic Team can't seem to resist putting a weird gimmick into gameplay. Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations have improved their reputation a bit by now, presenting creative and ambitious game ideas in the series' trademark rough and fractured frame.
 * That last line is a bit of an understatement. Colors won back a sizable portion of the disillusioned fanbase and Generations is doing pretty well for itself as well. There was also Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing; while a Mario Kart clone (well, more like Mario Kart meets OutRun), the racing gameplay was actually praised by many to be better than that of Mario Kart and the game was both a commercial and critical success. If Sega keeps on their current track, they'll be back to form very soon.
 * Brad McQuaid, the original lead developer for EverQuest. McQuaid got most of the credit for the initial success of Everquest 1. When his company, Verant Interactive, was absorbed by Sony, McQuaid was dropped. At this point, he had the implicit loyalty of Everquest fans. He began ostentatiously working on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, with people waiting anxiously. The end result? A game so high-end that most computers couldn't handle it, almost no high-end content, and all the flaws of the old-school EQ with few of the good points. His name is now reviled by the same people who once exalted him. And just for kicks? Vanguard was also bought out by Sony.
 * Being still independent more than 20 years after its foundation is no small feat but Team 17, the studio that was one of the top Amiga developers in the 1990s, capable of trying with several genres, has since the early 2000s churned out just Worms games and a few Lemmings ports. Finally, in 2009, they released something different... unfortunately, it was the very aptly-titled Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust. Later the same year, they released the revival of their own Alien Breed but, while overall decent, it turned out pretty bland. Worms Reloaded, released in Summer 2010, fared much better. Then they decided to leave the retail market and concentrate on smaller productions for digital distribution. During 2011, they have released two more episodes of Alien Breed in the space of two months, two more Worms ports, several expansions packs for Worms Reloaded, an Updated Rerelease of the 3D episodes of Worms, and even a Worms golf game. Oh, and they are working on ''Worms Social" for Facebook. Unfortunately, they seem capable of just rehashing their old successes by now.
 * George Broussard was a pioneer of the shareware model of distribution with Scott Miller and their company Apogee (later 3D Realms); he saw his breakthrough in 1996 with Duke Nukem 3D, which was an incredible success. The he announced Duke Nukem Forever... and the rest is (sad) history. Given how he managed the whole fiasco, only the most ardent fans still believe in him.
 * It may not be his work anymore, but thanks to the efforts of Gearbox and Randy Pitchford, his dream is still alive. There may be a happy ending for Broussard yet.
 * But, alas, it was not to be - Duke Nukem Forever is currently hovering in the mid-40 percent range on GameRankings for the Xbox 360 and, most unfortunately, PC versions. The game is being derided as being several years too late, looking and playing dated. The script is also being called overly crude and even hypocritical - an early scene in the game has Duke turning down a suit of Halo-style power armour with derision, except he is now only able to carry two weapons and has a regenerating health bar... exactly like Halo.
 * Bill Roper was praised as the genius behind Diablo and Diablo 2. He quit Blizzard Entertainment due to what many suspected was a conflict about the direction of Diablo 3, taking most of the Diablo staff with him. He founded Flagship Studios and went to work on Hellgate:London, a game that was expected to be so successful that things like separate executables for single player and multiplayer (to prevent hacking), a comic, a series of statues with a price tag approaching four figures and a whole separate free game (Mythos) created just to test the network infrastructure seemed appropriate. The actual game was rushed out the door after a very long development cycle and was a massive flop due to underdeveloped content and an insane amount of bugs. The company later went bankrupt.
 * He then went to work with Cryptic Studios, but the collaboration was amidst a period of serious difficulties for the developer and lasted less than two years. After a period of hiatus, it seems he's going to work with a branch of Disney Interactive that will deal with Marvel Comics' properties.
 * Core Design was a respected developer in the first half of the 1990s, especially on the Amiga (Bubba 'N' Stix, Banshee, Chuck Rock, Rick Dangerous, and more); they were also capable with the Sega CD (Soulstar, Thunderhawk). In 1996, they hit big with Tomb Raider and also produced Fighting Force and Project Eden in the following years. However, Tomb Raider had entered the new millennium already under Sequelitis, until the flop of Angel of Darkness. The series was handed over to Crystal Dynamics, the studio sold over to Rebellion (but without its brand); it was finally closed in late 2009 after their last game, the abysmal Rogue Warrior, making such demise akin to a mercy killing.
 * Video game writer Masato Kato had a hand in a number of beloved classics in the 90s, including the NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy (the series primarily responsible for popularizing cutscenes and story in action games), Chrono Trigger (one of the most beloved and highly acclaimed RPGs of all time), portions of Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears, and Chrono Trigger's controversial sequels, Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross. General consensus is that his projects as of the last decade (including an MMORPG and several low-budget DS games) have been almost unilaterally underwhelming and forgettable.
 * Mythic Entertainment was once a force in the field of MMORPGs thanks to Dark Age of Camelot; it was even given back its name by Electronic Arts (who had renamed it EA Mythic upon purchase in 2006) prior to the release of their supposed next big thing and World of Warcraft-killer, Warhammer Online. Unfortunately, the good launch of the game couldn't cover its rushed release and, worse, new contents often added new problems while old ones were never fixed properly; many argue if there ever was a precise direction in the project from the start. The number of players quickly dropped, Mythic's CEO resigned, and the company has been reduced to a division of BioWare, with much of WO's staff diverted to The Old Republic. WO is still there, but only a few servers are still active, two or three Game Directors have been alternated in a few months, European servers and support have been completely shut down, and Realm VS Realm, which should be one if its strong points, has been reduced to just 24 players for every side due to bad engine performance.
 * Hironobu Sakaguchi is universally known as the father of the Final Fantasy series. As either director or producer of the first ten games in the series, he had a long string of successes behind them...then in 2001, he directed Final Fantasy the Spirits Within. The film bombed horribly and cost Squaresoft over a hundred million dollars, bankrupted "Square Pictures", and sent the parent company into chaos. A couple years later Sakaguchi stepped down as executive vice-president of Square, and eventually founded his own gaming company, Mistwalker. While many expected great things from Mistwalker, in particular, a Final Fantasy killer, the company's initial two offerings were a pair of Xbox360 games: Blue Dragon, a Dragon Quest clone with moderate financial success and a tepid critical reaction, and Lost Odyssey, a traditional turn-based adventure met with slightly weaker sales and the general response of being either a wonderful homage to JRPGs of the past or "It's the Same, Now It Sucks". Their third offering, ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat bombed in Japan and failed to find a distributor overseas. Blue Dragon spawned a few portable sequels and was promoted with an anime, but the lack of a console sequel left even the fans that franchise had feeling burned. Mistwalker has continued to see projects cancelled or barely make an impact, let alone the impact that the Final Fantasy series continues to have, and Sakaguchi blogs a lot, but remained relatively out of the spotlight. More recently, Mistwalker and Nintendo announced a joint project for the Wii, The Last Story, which many in the press speculated was a dig at Sakaguchi's other franchise, though Sakaguchi acted perplexed that there was any similarity. The game sold reasonably well for a Wii title in Japan and was announced for a PAL release in 2012 and as such became a centerpiece of the Operation Rainfall campaign to release it in North America.
 * Square Enix as a whole has shifted from being a universally lauded RPG house (from the olden days before they merged) to being considered something of an industry joke and often the first negative stereotype used to describe JRPGs by the Western press. While they can still get good reviews on some of their bigger projects and even the critically divisive Final Fantasy XIII still outsold its better-received Western competition, just saying the name Square Enix causes people to cringe. The developers of Final Fantasy XIII even openly discussed the problems of the game in industry publications and apologized for some the problems. The complete disaster that was the launch of Final Fantasy XIV has not helped, nor have the countless delays of Final Fantasy Versus XIII, nor have the numerous spin-offs with the Final Fantasy name on them, nor have the careless acquisitions of Taito and Eidos which have led to disasterous financial reports in the last several years. When you've got editorials like this one from major news outlets describing the reaction to new iterations of your biggest franchise, and people can actually make a living selling merchandise hating your stuff, it's time to admit you've hit George Lucas status. Ironically, despite all of this, Dragon Quest is probably doing the best it ever has outside Japan - critically and commercially.
 * Really, Dragon Quest is only one of two Square Enix franchises that continues to get consistently strong reviews, the other being Kingdom Hearts - and that series is infamous for suffering from a massive Kudzu Plot, despite the good gameplay.
 * Despite this, Square Enix thinks Dragon Quest is "dead in the West", and ultimately Nintendo publishes the series now. Leaving Square Enix with only one of their two successful franchises outside of Japan.
 * You can pinpoint the exact moment Square Enix started going down the road towards becoming a Fallen Creator. It was the release of the multi-million dollar failure that is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which led to the resignations for several people within Square and lead to Yoichi Wada's rise to CEO of Squaresoft (and later Square Enix) in December of 2000. His tenure at the top can be, at best, described as nothing short than a complete disaster.
 * Richard "Lord British" Garriot, father of the Ultima series, fell into this after the last iterations of the series felt short for many of his fans. He then spent eight years developing Tabula Rasa as his personal project, which, after released, lasted a little more than a year online before being shut down. It didn't help that, while the game was failing, he seemed more interested in spending a large chunk of his personal fortune for his space trip in Autumn 2008. Now he is dedicated to doing Poker games for Facebook.
 * Manfred Trenz was responsible for many beloved Commodore64 classics such as the Turrican series, Great Giana Sisters and Katakis, but his success practically died with the system. Rendering Ranger, a fine SNES game he worked on, was inexplicably published only in Japan. An attempt to revive Turrican in 3D failed. He formed his own studio, Denaris Entertainement Software, which then proceeded to make many medium-changing masterpieces such as Crazy Frog Racers. He's apparently working on a sequel to Katakis, but it is stuck in Development Hell.
 * Atari was the top video game manufacturer in The Golden Age of Video Games, with the Atari 2600 cranking out hits of arcade ports and original games. Then came the disastrous E.T. video game and the horrid port of Pac-Man, leading up to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Atari was never able to recover fully after that--not with the Atari 5200's wonky controller, the Atari 7800 being drowned out by the NES, and the Atari Lynx falling behind the Game Boy. It was finally the overhyped "64-bit" Atari Jaguar, and its even worse add-on, the Jaguar CD, that sent Atari to bankruptcy. A few years later, the Atari brand was bought by toy giant Hasbro, and currently the name is used by numerous companies and only for marketing: most notably, the current Atari in videogaming is in fact French company Infogrames.
 * David Crane was arguably the first game developer to become a household name -- or at least the first that anybody outside the hardcore gaming community had heard of -- largely thanks to being the lead developer behind a number of well-loved Atari 2600 games, most notably the smash hit Pitfall. After he left Activision however, Crane's career suffered its own pitfall. He and other former Activision employees formed Absolute Entertainment but, with few exceptions (most notably A Boy and His Blob), the company churned out a series of bad and/or licensed games, mostly based on The Simpsons, along with David Crane's Amazing Tennis (which most critics agreed was only amazing in how bad it was); he also collaborated to the infamous Night Trap. Absolute collapsed in 1995 and, while he has never left the game industry (he has made a rather successful career out of advergaming), Crane has been under the radar since then.
 * Eric Chahi, after making his Magnum Opus Another World in 1991, steadily fell from grace. Much like John Romero, overzealous perfectionism killed Heart Of Darkness (released in 1998, it actually sold very well - around 1.5 million copies - but long development lead to bankruptcy) and his career as a game artist. He left the game industry for several years but came back in 2006 with the digitally distributed Updated Rerelease of Another World, and managed to have Ubisoft produce a project which has concretized in From Dust.
 * This happened with Tetris of all things. Henk Rogers, the man originally responsible for exporting Tetris out from the former Soviet Union, decided sometime around late 2005 to standardize Tetris games in what originally seemed to be an attempt to avoid Damn You, Muscle Memory! in future releases via Executive Meddling. Unfortunately, the resulting revised Tetris Guideline was based entirely on Tetris Worlds, a version that wasn't all that popular (or good) to begin with, and was so overly restrictive that it basically forced future games to be snowclones of Worlds. In addition, The Tetris Company has a tendency to send out cease-and-desist letters for anything unlicensed even vaguely resembling Tetris, even for game elements which the US Supreme Court has ruled cannot be covered by copyright (Lotus v. Borland), while the Tetris Guideline was a licensing requirement, which meant the only games which dared to defy the Tetris Guideline were Fan Remakes and frequently hit by C&D's. This quickly resulted in a Porting Disaster of Tetris the Grand Master ACE because the staff had to rewrite a ton of stuff to match the behavior of Tetris Worlds (and replacing various staples of the Tetris the Grand Master series in the process). The Tetris Company and Rogers have been declining on the PR front ever since. It doesn't help that Rogers loves to brag about how rich he's gotten from Tetris basically every time he makes a media appearance, accidentally furthering his own image as a Corrupt Corporate Executive.
 * Capcom sadly seems to be headed down this route. First they already had a reputation for Capcom Sequel Stagnation, as evidenced by their Trope Namers status. Then in 2010, Keiji Inafune quit, probably the first major blow. 2011: Capcom cancels Mega Man Universe. Fans seem slightly irked but ultimately shrug and say "Meh, we still have Mega Man Legends 3." Then they say the demo will cost a couple bucks and the game's release will be dependent on the demo selling enough copies. Fans start getting annoyed. Then Capcom cancels Legends 3 outright without even releasing the demo. Cue massive Internet Counterattack including pages of profanity-laden messages directed at Capcom, posted on Capcom's own site no less.
 * It Got Worse two days after the announcement. Capcom has now announced Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, which has much wanted fan favorites such as Strider Hiryu and Ghost Rider. Despite this, instead of rejoicing, there were even more complaints about Legends 3s cancellation and how Capcom just milks the cow of MvC3s success. It left that much of a bad taste in the fans' eyes.
 * It got even worse than that when Capcom accidentally leaked the remaining 8, previously unknown characters for the Updated Rerelease, with still no Mega Man in any form in sight. Cue the Internet Counterattack of many, many Capcom fans' screaming Ruined FOREVER for both the franchise and Capcom as a whole.
 * Lest we not forget their handling of the Ace Attorney series outside of Japan. The first three Ace Attorney games were critically & fan loved successes when they were given re-releases for the Nintendo DS console. THEN came the time for the first DS-only game, Apollo Justice which Capcom meddled with by forcing Shu Takumi into writing in previous main character Phoenix Wright into the game, resulting in a game that, while alright, argueably almost made the titular character into part of the supporting cast. Translation issues also started springing up: while the U.S. got the series released in chronological order, the European market had to wait for 1 1/2 years for the third game Trials & Tribulations to come out... to the point that the AA game that Europe got after Justice For All was Apollo Justice (though they eventually got all four games). Then came when a spin-off series came about starring fan-favorite Miles Edgeworth, Ace Attorney Investigations. AAI only got an English release with non-English speaking fans out in the cold. Then when the time came for the release of the latest game, Gyakuten Kenji 2 (or Ace Attorney Investigations 2), Capcom outright stated that there was not going to be an international release of the game in any form. When pressed, excuses were given that the DS is "already failing since the release of the 3DS" and that "the expected income probably wouldn't make up for the translation costs and that Okamiden had already outsold the previous game" (which it only did since, as mentioned, AAI was only released in Japanese and English-speaking countries). Representitives have stated that "they'll keep the door open though," which only seems to be a weak token act. So let's review: no Ace Attorney Investigations 2 because Capcom thinks the DS is dying and no Legends 3 because the 3DS is having a rocky start for a console. Anyone else smell the bullshit here?
 * And recently, the controversy over Street Fighter X Tekken. The gems garnered some hatred. The inclusion of Bad Boxart Mega Man reopened the old wounds, ESPECIALLY when he and Pac Man were slated as PlayStation 3 exclusives. Then when it was finally released people noted that a key feature, co-op online multiplayer, was not included in the Xbox 360 version, with Capcom stating they have no intentions of fixing it. Then they announced a Play Station Vita port of the game...with 12 extra characters up to and including fan favourites such as Lei and Elena. Then they announced said characters would be released as DLC around when the Vita version comes out: around Autumn/Fall. That's a near 6 to 7 month wait. And then hackers discovered that said DLC haracters were infact on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 version's discs (INCLUDING the formerly exclusive Mega Man and Pac Man). All of them complete and ready to go, locked out til Fall just because of the Vita version, which opened up a nice big can of controversy for Capcom to dig in to. It didn't help that Capcom asked fans to report hackers who used the DLC characters online
 * Signs of fallen creatordome could be seen in the early 2000's. Making the second DMC that no one likes to talk about without Hideki Kamiya's permission, forcing Shinji Mikami to make P.N.03, a game he didn't care about, Eventually firing Clover Studios due to creative disputes are just a few of these thing. Though YMMV on if this sticks, as some feel the whole thing is a bit too overblown for some people.
 * And now, their recent game Dragon's Dogma was positively reviewed by critics and can be seen as a step in the right direction, however it's doubtful that it will help restore their former status.
 * Data Design Interactive has had a very, very, very bad reputation in the more recent years, with crap-tacular shovelware titles like NinjaBread Man, Anubis II, and Action Girlz Racing. All of them use the same engine, are plagued with atrocious controls, and are very generic and uncreative. However, what most people don't realize is one of their older titles has a small cult following to it - Lego Rock Raiders. It was a real-time strategy game that had you searching through many caverns to find things like ore, energy crystals, and lost rock raiders. Despite looking fairly rushed, the game did reasonably well and even has its own fan-forum. It's amazing to think it was made by the same people who brought us masterpieces like the ones mentioned above.
 * Sega is probably the shining example of the fall of a modern console maker. With the Mega Drive (the Genesis in the US), Sega experienced its golden age and proved to be a powerful competitor to Nintendo, and the system held up well even against the Super NES. However, the first signs of its fall started with the release of the Sega Saturn. Due to numerous boneheaded marketing decisions such as releasing the system four months earlier than scheduled, and alienating third party developers and major retailers, the system flopped against the Nintendo64 and Sony Playstation. Sega's true fall wouldn't come until the release of the Dreamcast, however. While the launch was hugely successfull, sales dropped quickly and the release of the PlayStation 2 killed the Dreamcast (it was discontinued in early 2001, just 18 months after the American launch) and any hopes of anybody taking a Sega console seriously again. Since then Sega has not made a new console system and has been relegated as a third party game developer. It now produces games and franchises that were once Sega exclusives for its former competitors, Sony and Nintendo.
 * Notable, however, is the fact that the Dreamcast and Saturn are fondly remembered despite their failure and Sega has never been known to actively insult their fans like many of the creators here. Gamers are still glad they're around -- they just don't expect anything particularly groundbreaking from them anymore.
 * Trip Hawkins was the founder and CEO of what would become a giant in the video game industry, and contributed heavily to some of their most succesful early games such as MULE and the first edition of John Madden Football. In 1991, he left Electronic Arts to form The 3DO Company, which would create the console of the same name. After the console bombed due to its ridiculous pricing, the company went third party and had some early success with the Army Men series, Battle Tanx and the acquisition of the lucrative Might and Magic IP. However, 3DO's habit of releasing buggy and unfinished products and churning out bad sequels and spin-offs at an insanely fast rate long with numerous other bad decisions lead them to crash and burn spectacularly, ending with the company filling for bankruptcy in 2003. After that, he founded the Casual Game developer Digital Chocolate and while it is doing decently well, it's still a far cry from EA's dominance and he owes the Federal Bank more than 20 millions dollars due to avoiding paying taxes after the fall of 3DO.
 * Those of us from the mid-90s DOS gaming scene are likely familiar with Abuse as a brilliantly simple and fast platform shooter with a then-innovative control scheme (keyboard+mouse). After that, though, developer Crack Dot Com sat down to produce the sequel, Golgotha, which was intended to be an RTS with the ability to jump into vehicles on the fly. Development costs spiraled, dot.com era spending ran rampant, deadlines were missed, and internal tension led to the project and the company collapsing in 1998, just two years after Abuse was released.
 * THQ was once a fairly respectable second tier publisher, with ownership of respected developers like Volition and Relic that gave us hits like Red Faction, Company of Heroes, Homeworld, and more. THQ also made a very healthy profit developing licensed children's games. However, poor management and boneheaded business decisions have caused the company to sink more and more. In order to emulate publishing giants Activision and EA, THQ began buying up huge numbers of licenses and game developers without giving a second thought to how profitable their investments would actually be. Also, several high profile flops like Red Faction Armageddon, Homefront (not to be confused with the aforementioned Homeworld), and the ill-advised HD version of the uDraw tablet device bit into the company's dwindling cash reserves. As of 2012, THQ has shut down its children's game department, dissolved or sold off many of its development studios, laid off over two hundred workers, and has a 70 cent share price, down from a peak of $30 per share. The company is so financially weak that Nasdaq is threatening to remove the company from their stock index.
 * The late March 2012 announcement that the Warhammer40000 MMOG project has been shifted to a mostly single player game due to the high development costs is a further sign of THQ's current state.
 * While we're on the subject of video game publishers, we have Electronic Arts (EA) which publishes noteworthy titles such as EA Sports, Battlefield, The Sims, Medal of Honor, Command & Conquer, Dead Space, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. However, recently they have come under fire from several sources after buying BioWare and releasing Dragon Age II, which many hated for it's linearity (everything you do makes things worse) and divergence from the gameplay structure of the first game. EA's guilt in this? Certain implications that they rushed the game while it was on early beta. This was made worse with draconian DRM, including the Origin service, which lacks the features available on Steam, runs poorly, and periodically scans the user's hard drive as well as removing all future EA games from it, forcing you to use the service. To top it all, Mass Effect 3's Gainax Ending. Ever since people started reaching the end, accusations have been flying about EA rushing Bioware, leading to a incomprehensible, plothole-ridden, and just depressing ending. This has cause stock prices for EA to drop and the company to receive the "2012 Worst Company in America Golden Poo Award". And that was after they were previously known for killing off Pandemic, Bullfrog, Westwood and Maxis completely.