Troubled Production/Real Life/Video Games


 * Action 52 is a peculiar case. All 52 games were shoved out over the course of three months, the programmers contracted to work on the thing (who were reportedly college students at the time according to a number of sources) having no real schedule to speak of. Combined with misguided marketing and pie-in-the-sky hubris far exceeding the producers' actual talents, the results speak for themselves.
 * Aliens: Colonial Marines was rife with various issues over its production. This ranged from Development Hell and Gearbox Software's utter mismanagement of the game's development (which also included outsourcing the game to various other developers before sloppily putting the final touches) to accusations of embezzlement and Gearbox's Randy Pitchford blaming gamers for not liking the game. It comes as little surprise that the final product looks nothing like what was promised in previews.
 * Daikatana, as chronicled in Knee Deep in a Dream. First, Ion Storm had some internal warring because the Daikatana team felt the development of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 was stealing resources and staff. Then, they tried to move from the old Quake engine to the Quake II one, a process much more complicated and time-consuming than they thought. During the development of the game, the staff changed completely three times and the game ended up delayed so much that when it came out, it was already outdated. The resulting product ended up being a complete bust and pretty much ended the fame and career of the then-fledging John Romero.
 * Similar issues came up as some of the reasons behind Duke Nukem Forever's infamous development, and instead of ruining a single man's career, the issues demolished DNF's development staff. The fourteen-year development hell that ensued was due to switching engines, 3D Realms founder George Broussard publicly insulting DNF's publisher, tons of changes beyond engine switches that would necessitate restarting the entire project, and more. DNF is truly spectacular, in that its production was so troubled that the staff had nothing worth publicly showing aside from a couple of screenshots. In the end, Gearbox Software took over production, and suddenly revealed the game would come out. Gearbox took the code and levels that 3D Realms had "finished"—which were largely conceptual and unrelated—and, in one year, completed the project that 3D Realms couldn't in fourteen.
 * Tattoo Assassins, Data East's (specifically, developed by the US-based Data East Pinball, now known as Stern Pinball) Mortal Kombat clone is definitely this. This site very much tells the story behind the troubled development of the game.
 * Jurassic Park: Trespasser: As explained in an online feature or this video about this infamous botched 1996 FPS, Trespasser had a host of design and logistical problems that caused its design team to severely scale it back from their initial goals. An ambitious plan to have friendly and hostile dinosaurs that reacted to you through a groundbreaking AI system was largely abandoned because the creatures couldn't decide what mood to pick (the AI was set to maximum hostility as a quick fix). The melee weapons didn't work (so they had all their mass removed, making almost all of them useless), textures were largely scaled back because of compatibility issues and there were serious issues with the game's physics system. A botched licensing deal (they couldn't use John Williams iconic music in the game, so they had to create their own), mismanagement between the game's design team, and a continuously-delayed release caused the game to be dead on arrival, and it was quickly forgotten.
 * Metroid Prime. Not counting that producer Shigeru Miyamoto asked to throw out basically everything during early stages, at a certain point, the Japanese crew was spending most of their year in America overseeing the game and Retro's staff was pulling all-nighters, working 80–100 hours a week neglecting family and nourishing on atomic fireball candy (a total of 72 gallons of them among the staff).
 * Which is just about normal schedule for the Japanese developers.
 * Splinter Cell: Conviction: It took almost four years from the time the game was announced (via an internal leak of images from the game in mid-2006) to its release because of several major gameplay shifts, including a halfway-finished product that was essentially thrown out midway through production. The original game, helmed by Ubisoft Montreal, featured Sam Fisher (now on the run from Third Echelon) as some type of homeless drifter sporting a beard, hoodie and makeshift weapons and devices, and the gameplay was intended to be a sandbox-type shooter where Sam would investigate various locales to get information (and memories) about his daughter. The game was seen as a serious departure from the franchise, and Ubisoft canned it midway through development over negative fan reaction and claims that its gameplay was too similar to the original Assassin's Creed. Several features were unceremoniously thrown out (including several abilities that enabled Sam to blend into his environment, move objects around and fight hand-to-hand against enemies), and the game's entire structure was revamped. Conviction would eventually be released in early 2010.
 * Gex, as discussed by one of the programmer here. The development team was inexperienced, overworked to the point of doing 12 to 16 hours a day, understaffed and rushed to finish the game for Christmas. A lot of content was cut due to time and manpower constraints, and the Lead Designer was fired after hiding an insulting message that included an employee's actual phone number.
 * The infamous E.T. The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600, which was so rushed that it ended up to be made just in six weeks. Considering that it was made basically by a single person, Howard Scott Warsaw, and that programming for 2600 was notoriously idiosyncratic, it's actually a minor miracle that the game is playable at all. The game was enormously hyped by the Atari's marketing department, so when it turned out to be So Okay It's Average, the failed hopes of the gamers led it to be an enormous flop and to its (somewhat undeserved) reputation of both being So Bad It's Horrible and almost singlehandedly causing The Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
 * Nevertheless, it did lead to the story that Atari secretly buried literally tons of unsold cartridges in a secure New Mexico landfill, considered for decades an urban legend until the actual burial site was discovered in 2015.
 * Atari's home port of Pac-Man was supposedly the demo version, made with great difficulty over six weeks due to the differences in underlying hardware. When the developer showed it to the suits, they said "OK, we're shipping this." It did well on the strength of the title but took a pounding in the media.
 * The Sega Saturn game Sonic X-Treme is perhaps the most tragic example of all, as unlike the other examples here, the game was never finished. The problems started when the design team decided to use the NIGHTS engine for the game, but Yuji Naka would have none of it and forbade them from using the engine, setting the developers back several weeks, then the publishers decided that they wanted to use the engine in the boss battles for the whole game, causing further delays, Chris Senn ended up doing most of the work himself, tirelessly working 20 hours a day until doctors told him he had 6 months to live, he then realized that there was no chance of finishing the game before the holiday season, so there was no choice but to pull the plug on the game.
 * L.A. Noire completely destroyed Team Bondi due to the lead designer having serious rage issues and treating it like his Magnum Opus. In order to get the game back on budget, they hired and chewed up nearly every budding game programmer and artist in Sydney and they were so hostile that publisher Rockstar publicly swore off ever working with them again.
 * Two developers claims this happened to the infamous Last Action Hero licensed game. After the planning stage, word from a lawyer came that Arnold Schwarzenegger did not want to be "associated with violence" due to his then-recent involvement in family-friendly comedies, and that the game could not feature him using firearms, completely ruining the original concept. This lead to the game being hastily retooled as the deadline was fixed with no chance for extension. Communications with the legal department was exceptionally slow, leading to the developers being clueless on even basic questions such as whether or not Arnold's character could punch, and the development of the PC version was ground to an halt after the graphic artist refused to do work because of an unrelated payment issue with the publisher.
 * The Sega Saturn game for Magic Knight Rayearth was initially listed as one of the first games for the system. It didn't show up until six months after support for the system came to an end. What caused this game from Working Designs to fall this far down? Numerous problems, including:
 * The usual need to translate and dub the voice bits from Japanese to English.
 * The computer holding the data for the game crashing, forcing them to rebuild pieces of it.
 * A fight between WD and Sega over what to name the main heroines (Sega had realized Rayearth was a good enough series to franchise to the States. However, as it was common at the time, they wanted to give them English names. Both Sega and WD had different names for the girls before they both threw their arms into the air and left them Hikaru, Umi and Fuu.)
 * And after it was all done, hen Sega head honcho Bernie Stolar's draconian policy against third party developers kicked in, leaving them high and dry until the Saturn was dead in the water.
 * The development of the partially crowdfunded Star Citizen project (which Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame is closely involved in) is among the most contested in recent years, with all sorts of drama and controversy surrounding it (and that's about as neutral as one can say about it). Whichever camp one is regarding the matter however, time will tell what the final results will bring.
 * Game Over. The project suffered the most ludicrous mission creep possible. Then they stopped publishing its status, but changed ToS so that there will no refunds any more. After that, you can as well throw money into a wishing well.
 * Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry (formerly known simply as Raven's Cry) encountered several troubles over its years-long Development Hell, including being shuffled among various developers and publishers over its production. By the time it was finally released in 2015, it was rife with bugs and unpolished if not incomplete content, which its Updated Rerelease that same year never ever corrects.