Executive Meddling/Video Games

You have to do what the bossman says sometimes or it's game over, man.


 * An extremely obscure pachinko game for the Famicom has five percent of the entire ROM file dedicated to an angry rant by one of the programmers, that, among other things, calls his boss an idiot, calls other bosses retards, complaining about the strange noises of the pachinko machines, selling a ROM with a phone number to call for interested parties. The full thing is available here.
 * Sonic X-Treme is notorious for its Executive Meddling. First, the main game and boss levels were broken up and given to two different teams, which ended up building them into essentially two completely different games. Then, the team making the boss levels were shown a demo of the then-in production NiGHTS Into Dreams game, further inspiring the team to deviate the levels from the main game and causing Nights creator Yuji Naka to threaten to leave on grounds of plagiarism. Then, when Sega of Japan came over to check up on progress, they loved the engine for the boss levels so much, they demanded that the entire game be made with it, despite the fact that the team was dangerously close to deadline and short on men due to arguments about the game's direction. It finally took the game's director coming down with pneumonia before the plug was finally pulled.
 * Oh, let's not forget how Sega replaced the entire voice cast of the Sonic the Hedgehog games with their Sonic X counterparts... without telling the original cast. Reportedly, Sonic's original voice actor Ryan Drummond actually had to call Sega to find out when he needed to be back in for recording for Shadow the Hedgehog before he found out about the switch.
 * It was a bit more awkward for Shadow's original voice actor, David Humphrey, who actually flew to LA with the intention of recording the game, only to discover he had been replaced when he showed up at the studio!
 * Or the fact that Sega decided that it was a good idea to release |Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 without thoroughly bug-testing it and not editing the manual to remove mentions of half-finished game mechanics they had taken out so that the game could be released around Christmas and make a profit. (Not that there weren't other problems with the game. But making it work right when you made the characters do something could have taken the sting off a little.) Say, didn't Sonic X-Treme have the same deadline problem?
 * And then there's the NiGHTS Into Dreams sequel Journey of Dreams, which Sonic Team originally wanted to develop on the Xbox 360, until Sega came butting in and decided that the game would be shoehorned onto the Wii with its brand-new motion controls. And the results show too...
 * Not to mention it would've gone on Wii anyway if Yuji Naka was still at Sonic Team; he's gone on record saying that the Wii is the perfect platform for Ni GHTS. The IR pointer would've been perfect had it not been implemented so bizarrely.
 * In an example of Executive Meddling backfiring, BMX XXX was originally intended to be yet another Dave Mirra product, until Acclaim decided to go for risque and controversial by adding nudity and crude sexual humor, which instantly put Mirra off of the project with a demand that his name not be used to advertise the game. Acclaim did it anyway, and was forced to stop via a court order. Just to add insult to injury, Toys 'R Us and Wal-Mart refused to carry it, combining with the game's already poor quality to render sales ineffectual. Needless to say, the poor sales contributed hugely to Acclaim's bankruptcy.
 * There are other theories about how this game came to be...
 * There've been way too many movie-based games reduced in quality due to a rush to release them in synch with the release of the actual movie, not to mention video games in general being rushed to meet the holiday shopping crunch. The most memorable has to be ET the Extraterrestrial, whose final fate in a New Mexico landfill and subsequent contribution to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 resulted from such a push. To be fair, they also produced several times too many cartridges even for a successful game. Did they honestly think everyone that owned the console would buy ET thrice?
 * Mega Man X had its share of Meddling. First, Keiji Inafune was forced to redesign the character of X because it was feared the drastic changes to the original Mega Man's looks would prevent fans from relating to him (the original concept would later evolve into Zero), and then the series was continued beyond X5, which Mr. Inafune had intended to be the definitive end to the X series, causing a bunch of irreconcilable Plot Holes as a result.
 * The villain of the first Zero game was supposed to be the real X. Meddling forced the change to One of the rare examples of positive meddling.
 * Than again, it's said Inafune originally planned to use the Zero series to explore Zero's past, using X5 to introduce the idea, and was forced to ditch that.
 * Zero 4 was writhe with meddling. Inafune intended for Zero 3 to be the finale, with every plot hole closed up but the execs demanded a fourth game, with a plot essentially being a Diablous Ex Machina in favor of Weil. In addition, the original fate of the Guardians was that they would be too busy fighting a three man war protecting the people of Neo Arcadia to be able to aid Zero. It was decided that they were to be killed off screen by Omega's blast despite having an obvious method of escaping safely.
 * It is believed that the American branch of Sony's videogame business had a policy of rejecting licenses for 2D-based titles on grounds of "low quality", as the head executive there wanted only 3D titles. This was, in fact, the case in the PS 1 era, and is part of the reason that Capcom made Mega Man Legends; Sony would only let them make the 2D Mega Man games they wanted if they made a 3D installment.
 * In addition to the "3D titles only" rule, Sony also has a standing rule that requires all games released in the United States to have an English voice track. Because of this, many popular low-budget games like half the Super Robot Wars franchise will never see the light of day in America. Sony seems to have lightened up on this recently though, with Yakuza 2 being in Japanese with subtitles, and no English voice work in sight.
 * Sony of America had this policy due to the antics of Bernie Stolar, a colossal jackass who refused to publish Japanese RPGs at all until Final Fantasy VII came out and made a lot of money. Then he was fired and went to Sega, and we know how well that turned out.
 * Hell, the anti-2D policy is still in slight effect to this day. Not as bad as it was in the 90s, but Sony will still implement it time to time. Rumor has it that this is one of the reasons the recent Xbox Live ports of Garou: Mark of the Wolves, The King of Fighters '98UM, 2K2UM and SNK's other 2D fighters never made it to the Play Station 3.
 * LittleBigPlanet is exempt from this, being a 3D sidescroller. Not all Sidescrollers are 2D.
 * It's actually more of a 2.5D sidescroller.
 * In the original Rogue Squadron, this trope is lampshaded by the Video Game Cheats "BLAMEUS," which gives you a pic of the game's producers.
 * Developers for The Sims 2 complained about how executives pressured the team to use more particle effects in the game so they could put that as a bullet point on the box. So, we got people walking around with green smoke coming out of their arms when low on hygiene, green smoke coming out of food that had gone bad, and so forth. Unrealistic it may be, it at least came in handy as a visual aid.
 * Ironically, many users find such effects "annoying" and there are multiple user-made hacks available to eliminate them.
 * Star Fox Adventures is the result of this trope. Originally, the game was to be called Dinosaur Planet and had no ties whatsoever with the Star Fox franchise. Krystal and a male fox were the main characters. But since Nintendo was behind schedule with a Star Fox sequel, they forced Rare into changing the plot and characters around. The male fox was axed, Krystal was aged up and became the Damsel in Distress, and Fox McCloud became the hero of a game that had little to do with what he does best: flying around in space and blasting bad guys. Suffice to say many fans of the franchise still hate this game -- even though it's not a bad game per se.
 * Well, Sabre, the character Fox replaced, is a reference to Sabrewulf (so he's a wolf) and Krystal was originally an orphaned cat back then. It was also supposed to be a Nintendo 64 game.
 * The end result from Inherit the Earth was defined by Executive Meddling. Originally intended to be a mature game, the publishers saw that the main character was a fox and forced the developers to cater to the 8-12 market at every turn (Because every Funny Animal story is kid-friendly, right?). Then refused to let the developers create a sequel.
 * The Sony PlayStation game Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro had the final level originally take place on the top of the World Trade Center. This is confirmed by the original level title, "Top Of The World", and dialogue spoken by Peter during the original cinematic prior to the final level. After the events of September 11th, 2001, the game was pulled from shelves (It had been released in North America in late August) & delayed in territories where it hadn't been released, and the level designers placed a bridge between the two towers to make the comparison to its real-life counterpart less obvious. Given the fact that Activision and Vicarious Games feared the content might be "insensitive" for families after the event, their meddling was obvious.
 * And pretty well justified, since it would've been far Too Soon.
 * The story goes that one of the designers of Full Throttle, a game about a biker who kicked the crap out of people and was investigating the brutal bludgeoning murder of an old man by a ruthless Corrupt Corporate Executive who had also ordered the old man's daughter killed, and had further framed him and his gang for the foul deed, had an idea where the lead goes on a peyote-fueled quasi-dream sequence that took place inside his own head. The executives at LucasArts said no, as that would be inappropriate material. That designer nonetheless held onto the seed of the idea, and eventually created Psychonauts.
 * Whether it was a more executive decision or not is unknown, but apparently the 'Meat Flag' muliplayer game mode for Gears of War 2 by Epic Games was renamed 'Submission' at the behest of the PR team at Microsoft.
 * The notorious The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. games on the Phillips CD-i system were a result of several years' worth of Executive Meddling. During the early nineties, just as Sega was coming out with the Sega CD/Mega CD, Nintendo decided to develop a CD-based add-on of their own for the Super Nintendo with Sony, one that would be able to play new, 32-bit CD-based games in addition to the original SNES library. A while into their co-operation, however, Nintendo realized that letting just anyone develop games for the CD add-on meant that Nintendo would lose their absolute control over the games released on their systems, so they decided to give Sony the cold shoulder and, completely by surprise, announced that they were going to work with Phillips on the CD add-on from there on. Nintendo's CD add-on never saw the light of day, and to compensate for their hard work, they gave Phillips the right to publish games based on four or five Nintendo characters. The worst part for Nintendo? Sony continued the project by themselves, creating the Sony PlayStation, which pushed Nintendo into a slump from which they didn't completely recover until the Wii.
 * Both this specific event and Executive Meddling in general have everything to do with Square's falling out with Nintendo, as well. Square was a huge supporter of the CD peripheral, had plans to use it, and loudly criticized Nintendo deciding to drop the project. Nintendo punished Square for its vocal criticism by refusing to allow expanded memory carts from some of their ambitious projects late in the SFC's life cycle, like Bahamut Lagoon or Rudra no Hihou. Further, the failure of the Sega CD and the inability of their own CD add-on to ever get off the ground convinced Nintendo that disc-based game systems were a dead end, leading to the cartridge-based N64 -- Square quickly realized the N64 and its cartridges weren't capable of running the games they wanted to make and went over to developing for Sony systems.
 * Tiberium was to be the second FPS set in the C&C universe. It had a solid, original concept at its heart: you play as a GDI Forward Battle Commander, actively leading your AI-controlled troops from the front lines. It had a terrific art style; everything in the game world had a realistic, hard sci-fi look to it. It had the fans of the series salivating with anticipation... and then was suddenly canceled with no reasoning cited other than "failing to meet quality standards." Shortly after the game's cancellation, several disillusioned developers of the game began posting on Gamasutra, and from these testimonies comes a rather depressing tale. It seems that the project was doomed by its leadership, or lack thereof. According to the posters at Gamasutra, many of the lead producers (and there were apparently several) were less experienced than many of their subordinates and were only recently promoted to their positions. There was much jockeying for power, with each producer trying to outdo or replace the work done by their predecessors (including gutting the FPS/RTS mechanic at its core). At least one poster claims these managers were actively trying to sabotage the project and thus save face rather than have a broken game released with their names attached. Even if only half of it is true, it's a fact that this game was in development for a good 5 years, getting nowhere, and no one seemed to want to save it.
 * From the same franchise, Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight was a huge victim of such meddling. The game originally started out as a multiplayer-only project, meant for quick, direct matches in cybercafes and for tournaments. It would be set in the tiberium universe, but the mechanics were revamped for its short-match multiplayer focus, and to be fair, they were good mechanics for the kind of gameplay they were going for. However, executives wanted them to shift the product and expand it into a full, story-integrated sequel to Tiberium Wars. Its progression system was ill-balanced for campaign play, and its mechanics did not give players the kind of single-player mission experience consistant with earlier titles in the series. This ended up giving it a Metacritic score of 64, which under the Four Point Scale is one of the lowest a major game can expect to get. The average user review was several times worse than that.
 * For its American release, the European game Fahrenheit (2005 video game) had its name changed to Indigo Prophecy to avoid confusion with the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 911, and to avoid the dreaded "Adults Only" rating, they excised the game's two sex scenes. Apparently, the cinematic, subdued sex is adults-only material, but opening the game with the main character hiding his tracks after unwittingly committing murder is just Rated "M" for Money!
 * Interestingly, the game's director has said on occasion that he actually likes Indigo Prophecy better as a title, and wishes every region carried it (not to mention the fact that the game continuously uses centigrade to signify temperature). As for the sex scenes compared to the violence...well that's a case of Values Dissonance.
 * The apparent reason for the game's story taking a nosedive into Crazyland is that the developers ran out of time and money before the could finish it the way they wanted.
 * Super Mario Bros. 2 came into being because Nintendo of America didn't think the original Japanese game of that name was different enough from the first one as well as considering it too hard for US audiences.
 * That should count as positive meddling. Super Mario Bros. 2 was certainly very different from the original Mario game and most of its sequels - no pipes leading to subterranean treasure rooms, no jumping-on-heads-to-kill-baddies mechanic, no power-up mushrooms - but it was still great. Shy-Guys, Bob-Ombs and Birdo, all originally SMB 2-specific characters, have since become staples of the Marioverse ensemble.
 * When the trailers for Resident Evil 5 featured a white man mowing down a sea of black Majini (zombies), cries of racism ensued, led by Newsweek game reviewer N'Gai Croal. Producer Jun Takeuchi and Capcom claimed not to be influenced by the moral panic, but the following trailer depicted racially diverse zombies, including Arab (if it's North Africa, fine) Majini, and later a new female African sidekick was unveiled.
 * In the actual game, you fight spear throwing savages, so at least you can't fault them for being overly sensitive. Strange, though, considering that no-one minds if you gun down insane Spaniards out for your blood yet insane Africans out for your blood cause a riot.
 * Tetris the Grand Master ACE, as well as the TGM series in general, was a major victim of Executive Meddling. Since mid-2005, Henk Rogers of The Tetris Company mandated that to be licensed, all Tetris games must have certain gameplay aspects, including infinite rotation and the (extremely complex and unwieldy) "Super Rotation System". As a result, what was supposed to be a console port of the most challenging commercial Tetris game ever made ended up in a Porting Disaster that required developers to completely rewrite the engine to accommodate the Super Rotation System, resulting in a much easier, watered-down game that lacked virtually all the staples of the TGM series, including the famed difficulty that made it so popular in the first place. Since then, Arika has yet to make another Tetris game.
 * And despite all of this, Arika is very stingy about fans making clones of their games to counteract the lack of a proper console TGM port. If you decide to upload a video of yourself playing the clones Heboris or Texmaster on YouTube, prepare to remove all references to TGM and either game's title unless you want Arika to have your video taken down. This video sums up Arika's and the TTC's meddling, and, as a Take That to said meddling, showcases a variety of Tetris clones in a catchy music video. Ironically, people playing Tetris clones have since then put "this fan game video will be flagged" in their videos' tags as a Shout-Out to that video and as a secret handshake to other fans looking for TGM videos.
 * It Gets Worse in May of 2009: Arika is now asking YouTube to wipe out videos of Lockjaw, another Tetris clone. Even if said videos are of people playing the "40 Lines" mode, which has almost NOTHING to do with Arika or TGM. Cue the Wall Banging!
 * Tomb Raider had some meddling in its early life. After the huge success of the first Tomb Raider game, producers wanted to make Lara Croft more appealing to the male demographic. Toby Gard, the game and character's creator, hated the idea of changing Lara just to appeal to the fans and he felt like he had less control over his creative ideas. His only other option Edios gave him was to port the first Tomb Raider game to the Nintendo64, which Toby did not agree with either. He wound up leaving Core in disgust, which may explain the series' decline over the PlayStation and early PlayStation 2 era.
 * And then he returned to aid in the development of Legend and Anniversary, both of which saw drastic modification in Lara's character from the previous games. Your mileage will vary regarding whether or not this has had a positive effect on the series, as well as regarding the "decline" seen in the PlayStation era.
 * Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was supposed to be the final game in the series, signified by Lara's supposed death in the collapsing tomb at the end of the game. Core Design was done with the series, but Edios still saw the series as a moneymaker and pushed Core to pump out another Tomb Raider game afterwards called Tomb Raider Chronicles. This may explain why the appearance of Larson and Pierre and the time period they appeared in with Lara confused many fans on the continuity.
 * Microsoft requires all Xbox 360 games to have a list of achievements for the players to unlock. This may explain why some achievements are a waste of time or are super easy to get. In addition, any out-of-the-box game has to have exactly 1000 gamer points. Add-on content can up this.
 * Ostensibly, this is a way for Microsoft to give gamers a permanent sense of achievement (no pun intended) in playing the games, though it's also become like leaderboards, where they matter mostly for bragging rights. Some games have well thought out Achievements that are unlocked when you complete a certain section of the game or reach a certain story event, some... don't. And then some games have intentionally ludicrous ones, such as the Achievement you get in The Simpsons Game... for pressing the 'Start' button (Though the game itself is an Affectionate Parody of the entire video game medium and industry.).
 * Or the game of Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which all of the achievements (worth 1000 gamepoints) can be completed in the first 15 minutes in the tutorial mission.
 * Some horribly cynical people have suggested that some developers put ridiculously easy achievements in games as a marketing tactic, as there's a small but obsessed group of gamers out there who will buy the game just for a quick boost to their gamerscore. If it's a crappy licensed game that'll sell like hot cakes with kids but otherwise hold no appeal to the "hardcore", then it might just be a worthwhile ploy.
 * When Sony announced Trophy support for the Play Station 3, there were cries that they'd be just like Achievements. Not so, cried Sony: trophies were entirely optional for the developer. Fast forward eight months, and Trophies are now required in all new Play Station 3 games. Although they lack gamer points, games that are released on the Xbox and Play Station 3 at the same time (or on the Xbox first) are exactly the same, requirements and all.
 * Play Station 3 versions tend to have a "Complete all achievements" achievement that the 360 Versions lack due to the way they work.
 * This is arguably for the better, as achievements give players "tangible" results for what they do, breathing new life into a game they'd have put down otherwise. Also, requirements for achievements sometimes reveal things that are rather clever/interesting that a player wouldn't have thought to do otherwise.
 * On the other side of the coin, most people do achievements just for the sake of getting them and then never play in the new style again or put the game back down.
 * Xenosaga had heavy meddling done to the series. Of note: Xenosaga II where Ziggy's back story was removed and made into a cell phone game that was only available in Japan. Not to mention the strange decision on Namco/Bandai of America's part to remove blood in Xenosaga III despite the previous games having had blood with the same T rating.
 * As many gamers and reviewers have noted, the title of Beyond Good and Evil has little to do with the actual game (in which good and evil are pretty obviously defined, and there's nary a dying god or abyss gazing also in sight). The title, however, was a result of meddling. The game was originally announced as "Project BG&E", with the "BG&E" standing for "Between Good and Evil". The title was originally meant to be a reference to the way a photograph can fall anywhere on the sliding scale of Character Alignments. The higher-ups didn't like it, and the Nietchze reference was shoehorned in.
 * The actual gameplay got meddled, too. The game was trapped in a mild Development Hell, and was originally intended to be much longer. It was intended to stretch to cover other planets, instead of the one (and the moon) in the final game. Concerns over development time cut the whole game short, so that the brand-new IP that no one knew how to handle could be released right alongside the highly-anticipated return of the Prince of Persia series.
 * Perfect Dark Zero started out on the Game Cube, then Microsoft bought Rareware from Nintendo in 2002 so they had to restart the development of the game for the Xbox. When they were almost done, Microsoft asked them to transfer Development to the Xbox 360, and they wanted it to be a launch title. So, Rare was rushed while they were making the game, and they had to have 700,000 discs ready before the Microsoft certification was complete, to meet the Xbox 360 launch date. Rare also did not have the full Development Kits for the 360, and the one they had was only capable of around 1/3rd of the 360's graphical capabilities. Overall, because of all of this it took Rare 5 years to make this game.
 * DJMAX games from DJMAX Portable Black Square onwards (save for DJMAX Technika) have an "auto-correct" feature that will hit the correct note for you if you hit the wrong button. It's speculated that Pentavision implemented this feature to avoid legal issues with Konami.
 * At some point after releasing Tales of Eternia, Namco (and after the merge, Bandai Namco) decided not to localize any other 2D Tales game. For that reason, many great Tales (series) games never got to America (except for Tales of Phantasia due to special reasons), such as Tales of Destiny 2, Tales of Rebirth, and Tales of Hearts. Tales of Eternia even got a PSP port in 2005, but despite the fact that said port was released in Europe no American version is in sight.
 * Of course Europe has never seen 80% of Tales games, all they have had is Tales of Phantasia on the GBA (very slow compared to the PS 1), Tales of Symphonia, its sequel, Dawn of the New World and Tales of Vesperia. Those "cameo" battles must leave a lot of people thinking "What the hell are they cameoing from?".
 * Tales of Vesperia itself is likely a major source of a lot of meddling, when the Play Station 3 version was announced, even BEFORE the European version for the 360 was released, with ABNORMALLY high amounts of new content, a lot of japanese fans decided to poke about the DVD and discovered traces of these "added" contents were present in the code already. Then there is the ingame remarks like this....and the new character having identifying marks all over the 360 source code. All fingers are pointing at Sony and Namco for this one.
 * Regarding Tales of Eternia, there's actually a different reason for that -- It was originally changed to "Tales of Destiny II" because of potential copyright infringements with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toy lines. Some have suspected this was the reason for the PSP port not getting an American release, but on the plus side, at least the PSP is region-free; and it's possible to get an English version.
 * For a game that was born from Executive Meddling, we have the Spyro the Dragon franchise in all its glory. In order to compete with the companies of Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, Sony realized that they needed to appeal to the "kids market" in gaming, considering most of the games in the late 90s for the PlayStation were teen and adult oriented. So with the aid of Universal Games and Insomniac, they created a game that was basically Sonic as a dragon. Funny thing is, Insomniac never had full rights to the franchise (and apparently, didn't want anything to do with it, as seen in Year Of the Dragon), in which it was sold off to Universal only and it became a Franchise Zombie. Well, after the release of A Hero's Tail, long runner Sierra bought the franchise, and gave it a severe Continuity Reboot (The whole Legend of Spyro series), which due to insufficient man power and funds, created a controversy of the quality of the games. Needless to say, Activision bought out Sierra and let them keep the franchise in hopes "to have promising results," which of course, costs Sierra its better, older franchises like King's Quest and Space Quest.
 * Sony America has a bad history of refusing to localize Video Game Remakes and Updated Rereleases unless they have a certain amount of new content added. Such was the case of the PSP version of Breath of Fire 3.
 * For those of you wondering how bad this is, there is a full English version of the game, but it was released only in Europe.
 * Back in 2001, there were Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, and Spy Fox remakes in development which looked promising. You know what the Humongous Entertainment executives did with them? The games were cancelled. The rights to the three series were sold off to Majesco, which eventually published them to commercial acclaim (dont' know about critical, as I have never seen critic's reviews of the games). In fact, Humongous wanted to sell all the franchises... but the MLB, MLS, NHL, NBA, and NFL did not let the Backyard Sports series get away.
 * A case of good Executive Meddling: Disney wanted to reinvent Mickey Mouse, so they asked Warren Spector to make a game with him in it. The result? Epic Mickey, which is quickly turning into Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
 * Of course, there is a negative example too. One highly-touted mechanic was Mickey changing appearance depending on his Karma Meter, changing him into the old-school prankster or the modern heroic Mickey if the player is bad or good respectively. Several test players were upset by early images of an angry-looking, rat-like "Scrapper" Mickey, and in order to not alienate them, Disney asked that Spector remove this aspect of the game.
 * Nintendo of America in the early 90s. For example, the original US release of Final Fantasy IV had several important scenes inexplicably removed, a falling blade trap changed to a falling metal ball trap (apparently it's ok to get squished to death, but not sliced in half); Final Fantasy VI had a couple of female summoned creatures' sprites altered to show less skin, and both games had religious references removed (changing "Holy" to "Pearl", etc.). In fact, the latter happened with pretty much everything Nintendo of America touched in that time period.
 * What about the porno magazine in Final Fantasy IV?
 * Mortal Kombat received a neutering from Nintendo of America as well. The SNES version of Mortal Kombat had the blood changed to sweat, and the fatalities were severely weakened (in one example, Johnny Cage punches his opponent's head off in the original version... in the SNES version... he delivers a hefty kick to the chest). The Sega Genesis port was technically inferior, but ended up being the most popular because it contained all the gore that made the point of the game in the first place. Realising this, Nintendo of America released Mortal Kombat 2 on the SNES in all its gory glory.
 * Just to show how times have changed, when Nintendo edited out MK's gore factor, they got a ton of angry letters not only from fans of the game, but their parents, decrying them for assuming the role of Moral Guardians.
 * Speaking of Mortal Kombat, while the game was still under their control, Midway Games was hellbent on turning it into a Franchise Zombie, eventually announcing plans for a new MK game every year. Likely, that led to the poor quality of both Mortal Kombat Armageddon and Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, and led to their bankruptcy and MK being sold to the more patient Warner Bros.
 * Mortal Kombat 9 has an example of executive meddling that turned out to be positive influence (through YMMV; some see it as unwanted/unnecessary character shilling) - Sony didn't want Kratos, who is a Guest Fighter in the game, to look weak, so he keeps his famous angry look on his face even when being at the receiving end of fatalities. It looks very cool.
 * The above Sonic-based examples are becoming just the tip of the iceberg, for those in the US and Europe: the recent (as of Jan 2010) cancellation of Phantasy Star Universe for the PC and PlayStation 2 is one of the many nails in the coffin for fans of the series. SEGA cited the lack of subscribers... after the PSU team did everything possible to ensure that the developers outside of Japan received no support, no updates, and so on...even their paychecks would likely have been slashed, if it were legal. This is similar to the PSO: Blue Burst closings two or three years prior, too...
 * For an example of how bad this got: First off, "adding new content" for the US/International server was months behind the Japanese server... when all of the content already existed on the game's disk. Secondly, Sega of Japan had to approve every thing Sega of America did with the server, including vital technical fixes. When the billing server went haywire in the middle of a major, limited-time event and started locking players out, Sega of America immediately put out a notice saying "don't worry, we'll fix the billing server and extend the event to make up for it!" because of course they'd get quick permission to fix such a huge issue, right? Wrong. Due to SoJ taking their time giving SoA the thumbs-up to take action, about a month went by (and the event ended) before fixing even began, and the fix was "just turn the billing server off and let anyone play for free." Only months later was the billing issue truly fixed and the promo event re-run so finally everyone got to play.
 * Turns out this is why the Dynasty Warriors (and in fact all of the KOEI Warriors games) have their infamous voice acting; the localizations have to be done on schedule regardless of quality, and the international subsidiaries need the permission of KOEI Japan to use the original voice acting; that hasn't been the case in America since Samurai Warriors in 2004, and Dynasty Warriors 3 before it.
 * According to recently-ousted creative leads Jason Ward and Vince Zampella, Activision demanded that Infinity Ward produce another Modern Warfare game. Given eighteen months to work on a title they didn't want to do in the first place, they made Modern Warfare 2. That was supposed to be the full title...until Activision forced "Call of Duty" onto the package to retain brand identity, despite Infinity Ward intending Modern Warfare to be a Spin Off. Depending on whose story you choose to believe, Zampella and West apparently started talking to other game developers (which Activision frowned upon), which caused their dismissal, or they were held in their offices by security and interrogated (along with their colleagues) because of their refusal to follow Activision's demands. Whatever the case may be, roughly three-quarters of IW's staff left the company afterwards (including most of the creative and writing team behind the Modern Warfare series) Activision is currently farming Call of Duty out to other developers they own to pump out at least one more Call of Duty game a year. What Activision did to Ward and Zampella to thank them for making them a product that had the single biggest opening weekend of any entertainment product ever defines Corrupt Corporate Executive.
 * If it weren't for those meddlin' executives we'd be short one poker playin' hobo.
 * To clarify, the series' creator wanted to make another Ace Attorney game, but with an entire new cast of characters. Capcom pressured the guy to keep Phoenix Wright in the game since they believed his name and image alone would sell a ton. The creator still wanted to go with his image of a new cast, but to make Capcom happy, he threw in Phoenix as a man who got disbarred from court and no longer practices law while newbie defense attorney Apollo Justice replaces Phoenix's role. The meddling may explain why only The Judge, Phoenix, and  appear in the game while everyone else from the series beforehand are mysteriously missing without any word on what happened to them.
 * Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker was subject to executive meddling both in Japan and in America: For Japan, it ended up having to edit the torture scene so Strangelove would use a device called "Laughing Rods" that would essentially tickle the victim in order to keep its rating in Japan, and future references to the torture were either omitted or just vaguely referenced for the same reason as well, to which Hideo Kojima expressed disappointment in his twitter account. This actually leads to an interesting role reversal, as the countries outside Japan actually get the Torture scene unedited. Countries outside of Japan also have similar cuts due to executives, although nowhere near as drastic. You know the Tortilla Chips, Lime Soda, Zero-Calorie Soda, Spicy/Great/Future Curry, and Men's Cologne recovery items as well as the Solid, Liquid, Solidus, and Super Magazines? Well, in the Japanese version, those were actually real life products (Namely Doritos, Mt. Dew, Pepsi NEX, Bon-Curry/Bon-Curry Gold, AXE Bodyspray, and various Japanese magazines, respectively), but their names were changed because of the strict trademark laws outside Japan.
 * Peace Walker actually has actual Executive Meddling in-game (or rather: Executive-Branch meddling). In both EVA's discussion tapes and Strangelove's Memories, it delves quite a bit into the Mercury Project that The Boss participated in. For one thing: things were going smoothly for the project up until the Department of Defense, primarily out of fear and an extreme sense of competition against Soviet Russia due to recent intelligence suggesting that they actually will send a man into space, had the Mercury team install a window into the spacecraft that she was going to be launched in at the last moment (well, close to it anyways if you get my drift), using the whole "She's been irradiated once, and thus she will be immune to the radiation in space" to justify their decision, to which Strangelove never bought since she knew due to her rational and logical nature that her being irradiated once would actually achieve the exact opposite effect. Turns out that the entire thing ended in complete disaster: While The Boss did end up seeing the Earth and ultimately spawned her will, the spacecraft due to their rushing the project to beat Yuri Gagarin into space ended up crashlanding far beyond the recovery point, nearly causing her death, and frying her a lot in the process, and she ended up in a coma for six whole months. This also meant that contrary to what The Boss stated in her final speech, she did not actually participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, as she was in a coma during that time. Also, thanks to the DOD's failure, Yuri Gagarin was officially the first man in space, even though The Boss beat him by a few seconds, and as a result, the DOD and everyone else in the military brass/government started hating on her despite the fact that the whole failure was their fault.
 * Conker's Bad Fur Day was a rather infamous example of executive meddling. Originally, the premise of the N64 Conker game was supposed to be vastly different: playing out to be very similar to something like Banjo-Kazooie, or in-series, Conker's Pocket Adventure. However, the executives at Rareware started to become fearful that fans may not like the platformer because it was too similar to Banjo-Kazooie, and after a very negative critique during the testing stages, Rare retooled the franchise causing it to be aimed at a more mature crowd, including sex references, alcoholic beverages, and lewd behavior -- which resulted in poor sales.
 * Actually, the poor sales had more to do with the dominance of the PlayStation and Nintendo's squeamishness than with Rare's retooling. The game was a critical success and has a cult following. A case of screwed by consumers?
 * In a straighter example of this, the Updated Rerelease, Conker: Live And Reloaded heavily censored a significantly larger portion of the game's foul language (As mentioned above, combined with the gore, the foul language was the entire point of the game, though by this point it had actually become less taboo).
 * Much like the Swat Kats example, Thrill Kill was canceled after being bought out by EA, due to its violent content. To further twist the knife, EA refuses to even sell the rights to the game to another company, because of the violence, essentially invoking moral guardianship over the game itself. Fortunately, they did allow the developers to keep the engine, which was used to create Wu Tang Shaolin Style.
 * The Xbox 360 itself suffered meddling from Microsoft during the manufacturing period in late 2005. Microsoft pressured builders to cut corners and skimp on parts in order to rush the console onto the market in time for the Christmas season and to get ahead of Sony when they had plans to release the Play Station 3 in 2006. This would bite Microsoft back hard a year or two later since the infamous Red Ring of Death plagued around 20%-30% of people who owned the console. The console had a poorly made heatsink, which caused the CPU to quickly fry and cause 3 red rings to light up by the power button to signify there was a hardware error. Microsoft had lost a ton of money replacing all the fried consoles and giving consumers an extended warranty on their new console.
 * The Witcher video game, under the hands of publisher Atari was heavily meddled to the point of unacceptable (even developer CD Projekt Red thinks so). The US version got a Blind Idiot Translation script, removed adult content and a DRM scheme that CD Projekt Red never intended to put in. Not until the Enchanced Edition and 1.5 patch released by the original developer was things fixed, it reworked the entire script, removed the DRM scheme and many other fixes to make the game the way it was intended to be.
 * Ever wonder why Toejam and Earl 1 & 2 were about Funk music while Toejam and Earl 3 was all about Hip Hop?
 * Originally, the villains for Homefront would have been the Chinese. However, due to fears of offending China (specifically, the Chinese Ministry of Culture), the villains were instead changed to North Unified Koreans.
 * This led to the game being banned in Korea, one of the most gaming-addicted nations on Earth. It's debatable whether this outbalances being legal in China.
 * Fans of the Streets of Rage series got together to create a remake that would faithfully include characters and elements from all three games, along with new gameplay concepts. The project started in 2003 and was finally finished in April of 2011, eight years later. During development, the developers supposedly contacted Sega about the project and were given the green light to proceed since the game wasn't being made for a profit. Days after the final version was released, Sega ordered a cease and desist on the developers, forcing them to yank the download link off their site. This mirrors a similar case years back where Square-Enix issued a stop on a fan who finished doing a remake of Chrono Trigger. Luckily, fans who had downloaded the Streets of Rage remake have uploaded the game to various sites for all to obtain.
 * Meta example: When the Sony PSP's firmware updated to 6.31, all instances of the PSP Action Replay vanished, it was removed from its homepage, and the AR devices themselves have been pulled from every distributor (such as Gamestop) that had supplied them.
 * The team that worked on Darkstalkers say that they'd love to make a Darkstalkers 4, but Capcom doesn't want to work on anything that isn't a Cash Cow Franchise (eg. Street Fighter).
 * Though more recently, Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono has been trying to drum up interest in a Darkstalkers sequel in order to prove to Capcom that it would be worth making.
 * According to internal sources, L.A. Noire was fraught with Executive Meddling when Rockstar joined Team Bondi to help get the game out of Development Hell. Rockstar executives would constantly veto Bondi's ideas, citing them as "insane". This battle for creative control poisoned relations between the two companies to the point that they essentially cut ties with one another. However, since the game was Saved From Development Hell and received positive reviews shortly after Rockstar's intervention, Your Mileage May Vary on whether this is a case of good or bad meddling.
 * From Rockstar's perspective, it worked out great as the game was a huge success & they retained the rights to the series, so they ended up with another Cash Cow Franchise. For Team Bondi, things didn't work out quite as well and the studio closed its doors mere months after the game was released.
 * There has been a lot of speculation that this is likely the primary reason behind the "trio of horror-news about Diablo III" (as Rock, Paper, Shotgun called it) on the part of Activision.
 * In Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, one of the newly added characters is Dr. Strange. Capcom notes that of all of the Marvel characters they have worked on, Dr. Strange was the only one that Marvel sent a list of specific things they had to do and what they couldn't do with the character. They even dictated what sort of hand gestures Dr. Strange had to do. While Capcom managed to get some changes in, citing technical difficulties, most of their creative decisions for Dr. Strange were overruled by Marvel. There is speculation that this has something to do with the upcoming Dr. Strange film.
 * During discussions of what characters went into Marvel vs Capcom 3, Marvel had the final say in what characters of theirs they didn't want in, such as Venom. The only exception is Shuma-Gorath, whom Marvel didn't want in, but Capcom protested, and they agreed he could be in but only as DLC.
 * Guy Cihi, voice and motion-capture actor for James Sunderland, the main character of Silent Hill 2, only authorized use of his performance to Konami for the original Playstation 2 version of the game and not the Xbox or PC versions. This ended up creating residuals that Konami owes to Cihi that, even after ten years, have not been paid. Even worse, the upcoming Silent Hill HD Collection for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 features new voice acting for the Updated Rerelease of the game entirely, as if to circumvent the problem. However, Cihi technically still has the rights to his motion-capture performance.
 * Oh, Tabula Rasa, how shall we count the ways? From the revamps of the game before to the total reset to the back-and-forth switch between free to play and subscription, with servers which wouldn't hold a connection for more than an hour... well, eventually, the whole multi-million dollar MMO, right when it was finally getting off its feet, shut down when NCSoft forged a resignation letter from Richard Garriott. (Evidently the Lord British Postulate applies to his career, now, too.) For added chutzpah, they revealed this particular claim while he was in space. Additional points: His space trip was being used to advertise the game!
 * Master of Orion 3 was considered hit extremely hard by this trope. There was an interior clash between two developers, one who worked on the two highly-successful games, and a new developer. Eventually, the old face was worked out of the equation of development, resulting in his work being destroyed. The new changes were designed to create more realism in the game, however resulting in Game Breaking Bugs and why you shouldn't design a game that at one point had over 100 GUIs. The development itself was best described as "doing taxes", but then things went downhill. DRM was introduced to combat piracy of the game, but was designed in such a manner than any CD drive that could burn CDs wouldn't read it, resulting in many legitimate users from not being able to play. Finally, the support for the game was bare bones, as most developers had moved on...resulting in bringing in employees with no knowledge of code to determine where bugs were occuring.
 * Postal III was affected badly by this. When Running With Scissors partnered with Akella for development and production, Akella immediately began meddling, forcing a Russian release to take priority over western release, demanding that the much touted Free Roam mode be axed (only allowing it to be put back in via patch after a lot of back and forth), and cutting corners every chance they got, most infamously refusing to let the ESRB rate the game, just to save money (this consequently meant they also refused to let it be sold via Steam). Running With Scissors has even apologized to the fans over this.
 * Porsche had to be removed from Forza Motorsport 4; in the middle of development, Electronic Arts, who basically holds the rights to use Porsche in their games, told Turn 10 (the developers) that they couldn't use Porsche in Forza 4, despite the cars being in Forza 3. Surprise surprise, EA was coming out with yet another Need for Speed game, featuring Porsche. Instead of featuring Porsche, Forza 4 uses Ruf cars, which are basically Porsches with bigger spoilers and some extra stuff bolted on to the engine; like what Saleen is to Ford's Mustangs. This resulted in the amount of Porsches effectively going down form a couple dozen down to a pathetic 3 cars, all of which are pretty much souped up 911 Turbos
 * Solatorobo spent ten years in Development Hell due to Namco Bandi insisting that, if Cyber Connect 2 wanted to release a Spiritual Sequel to Tail Concerto (which did not sell as well as they'd have liked), then they had to polish and refine the world and gameplay. Thankfully, Cyber Connect 2 has a bit of a reputation for Doing It for the Art, and the result truly shines, even if it is late.
 * Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords was meddled rather thoroughly by LucasArts. First they rushed the development to make a Christmas release date, meaning quite a lot of stuff (including 90% of the HK-50 story arc) got Dummied Out due to time constraints. Then it turned into straight-up Screwed by the Network when Obsidian offered to put together a patch to restore the missing content and LucasArts refused. Fortunately the modding community has managed to fix most of it.
 * The third game of the Star Wars Battlefront series, developed by Free Radical Designs was pretty far into its development cycle. A leaked trailer showcased impressive features at the time such as being able to jump into a fighter and fly from a ground battle into space, all in real time. At some point during development, the management at LucasArts changed hands. The new CEO, Darrel Rodriguez, made it a point to cut costs as much as possible, and Battlefront 3 was costing money. This ended up being another kick in the long series of such events that eventually led to Free Radical closing its doors.
 * Brutal Legend was affected by Executive Meddling quite badly. One of its publishers, Activision attempted to turn the game into a Guitar Hero sequel, among other things. Brutal Legend was treated so badly by Activision that Double Fine claimed that Activision was purposely sabotaging Brutal Legend in order to preserve its Guitar Hero franchise, which was on it's way out of popularity. As a result of this Tim Schafer estimated that the game was only one third as large as it was intended to be. Activision dropped Brutal Legend entirely, later being picked up by EA as publisher. EA didn't meddle with Brutal Legend's development at all, but they did only advertise the game's action elements, completely leaving out the RTS elements in advertising that make up the majority of the game, leading to some undeserved criticism regarding this.
 * Superman 64 is known for being extremely horrible and have glitches and bugs up the ass, but most of the problems didn't come from the developers themselves. The people that held the license, DC Comics and Warner Bros., kept interfering with the development on the game for "political reasons". They wouldn't allow Superman to have his powers naturally (making them have limited use instead of having it all the time and at will) nor did they allow Superman to attack people, so they limited his moves to just silly looking punches and granted invincibility to NPCs. The developers of the game were extremely frustrated by the higher ups meddling in their project and stated that the final product does not even come close to what they had originally envisioned the game to be.
 * Super Mario Galaxy had a story built around the game that didn't interfere with the gameplay and gave players an insight on Rosalina's history. Most players liked the concept. However, when the developers tried to do it again for Super Mario Galaxy 2, Shigeru Miyamoto himself stepped in and wanted the story aspect to be scrapped because he wanted the game to be more focused on the gameplay itself like the NES games had done. Who knows how the story in the Galaxy series would have progressed if the story was allowed to be developed.
 * After the success of Dragon Age Origins, Electronic Arts pushed BioWare to release Dragon Age II much sooner than the game's development team expected, in order to capitalize on its predecessor's success. The game's composer, Inon Zur, later admitted in an interview that the score was a rush job and that the game was pushed hard for a March 2011 release, while Bioware lead designer Brent Knowles (who had been with the company for over a decade) quit the company over the decision to rush development. There have also been rumors that the game was released in an "alpha" version, and that the game was a standalone title for a completely different concept that was repurposed as the sequel due to production problems.
 * It can be argued that EA is the king of this trope. They constantly buy developers and then force them to make their games with a short development cycle. The result: almost all the games end up doing poorly because the developers had no time to work out glitches/the game was much shorter/the quality was generally lower than previous installments. To rub salt in the wound, EA tends to end the franchise by either firing developers or reassigning them to other projects. So effectively, EA kills games.
 * So that's why it was a relief when EA decided to cancel its attempted hostile takeover of Take Two Interactive.