Dork Age/Video Games

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is widely believed to have gone through a dork age between 2007 and 2008. Once a Mecca for gamers the event was made invitation-only and attendance dropped from 60,000 down to a low of 5,000. As a result E3 went from being the ultimate expo in the video games to a low key event. It didn't help that the E for All trade show meant to replace it turned out to be a dud. Also to make things worse the announcements and game demo's E3 is know for were rather lacking in comparison to previous years. Fortunately the event has since been reopened to the gaming audience and recent E3's have been much more well received.
Nintendo fans try not to remember the Virtual Boy, an allegedly portable clunker of a gaming platform that was supposed to deliver the cutting edge of 3-D virtual reality gameplay but instead gave us eye strain, neck strain, and hideous graphics in only two colors: Red and black. To add insult to injury, damn few of the games put out for it (there were less than 20 in all) made any use of 3-D and could just as easily have been produced for a better gaming platform. Gumpei Yokoi, the victim of executive meddling, ended up Kicked Upstairs before quitting Nintendo (the only game for the system that gets a pass is Virtual Boy Wario Land, which managed to be genuinely fun despite the headache-inducing graphics).
Nintendo fans also have the Zelda CD-i games to forget about, due to this and general unplayablity. Well, it hasn't been forgotten by YouTube, by way of So Bad It's Good-ness and by extension, YouTube Poop. Hotel Mario had the same case as well.
The early Nintendo 64 era was something of a Dork Age for Nintendo. The overly long development of the N64 caused some Super NES gamers to jump ship to PlayStation, and the decision to use expensive proprietary cartridges instead of discs caused developers to jump ship, too (most infamously Square Soft, whose Final Fantasy series was a Nintendo mainstay until Final Fantasy VII). While Nintendo's first-party games on the N64 were as awesome as ever, there simply weren't enough of them to go around. The system launched with two games total, and it only had about one new release a month. So if you were tired of playing Super Mario 64 for the umpteenth time, your choices in early 1997 were Pilotwings and Cruis'n USA. That was pretty much it. The Nintendo 64 gained something of a reputation for releasing three unique and groundbreaking games a year, and absolutely nothing else.
- This wasn't helped by Nintendo's historic lack of support for third parties; one big selling point of the N64 hardware was custom microcode, but Nintendo never released information on how to use it, fearing it would be copied by their rivals. Among other groin-punches, they also patented using the N64 pad's C-buttons to control an in-game camera, meaning every non-Nintendo game had a shitty camera system, and continued in their usual habit of meddling with in-game content to be more 'family friendly'; for example, forcing Perfect Dark's 'Adrenaline Pills' to become 'Combat Boosts', and Duke Nukem's steroids powerup to become 'Vitamin X'.
The Silent Hill franchise is notorious for its horribly Broken Base, but most fans will agree that the series peaked with Silent Hill 2, and the existence of a franchise Dork Age is nearly-unanimous. The general summation of this is a reverence for "Team Silent" and a mistrust of the games in which this development team was not involved. The general consensus is that Silent Hill 4: The Room is where the slide began, however, even though it was the last of the "Team Silent" entries. The recent Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has broken the fanbase further, between those convinced that the series remains mired in suck, and those who believe this new entry was fresh and compelling enough to possibly signal a revival of the franchise.
Twisted Metal 3 and 4 were developed by 989 Studios rather than series' original developers, Singletrac. When the former staff members of Singletrac formed Incognito to develop the newer games in the franchise, it elected to wipe the events of those two titles from continuity.
While it is true Warcraft fans are quick to hate almost any new development, the Burning Crusade's plot deserves a mention for the sheer amount of frustrating and blatant retconning and character changes.
- Wrath of the Lich King is seen as one as well, but due to gameplay-based reasons rather than story-based reasons.
- With Cataclysm both of these are now being stated as Golden Ages and the current expansion is the Dork Age. There are already people people claiming the next expansion is a Dork Age for having Pandas, and proclaimed to be great expansion because of the Pandas.
A variant: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge ended in such an impenetrably baffling fashion (The last part of the game takes place in the maintenance tunnels of an amusement park, and the undead antagonist turns out to be Guybrush's brother in a mask, and the whole escapade was All Just a Dream - Or Was It a Dream?) that its sequel, The Curse of Monkey Island, retconned the previous game's final confrontation into something a bit easier to follow. However, status quo wasn't necessarily restored because Monkey Island 2's ending was bad - it's more that after Ron Gilbert left the series, no one knew where he was planning to go with this revelation, and he has no intention of telling anybody.
- It's far more likely that it was just the final absurd twist in a game full of them than any sort of deep statement about the characters.
The makers of the MMO Star Wars Galaxies decided it wasn't successful enough, so they came up with the New Game Experience, which involved massive changes to the game mechanics, combat system, character classes, and pretty much everything else, in the hope of attracting a whole new demographic. The result was an existing player base that was thoroughly (and vocally) pissed off, a new player base that never materialised, and a huge drop in subscriptions (not officially admitted, but confirmed by user-written in-game surveying tools before the company caught on and disabled the tools). Other MMOs have dome similar things on a less spectacular scale, but SWG's NGE is the infamous example everyone points to.
- One of the major reasons for this is that the developers changed the way one becomes a Jedi. Originally, players had to find holocrons and master whatever class tree it said to master, then the player may luck out and become a Jedi, or would receive another holocron. This, naturally, would be a grind. The New Game Experience let players start as a Jedi. Not only did this mean that everyone picked to be a Jedi and avoiding every other class, it also futzed with the canon and royally pissed off those people unlucky enough to have had to master every class to become a Jedi. You had many thousands of Jedi when there were no Jedi other than Yoda and Luke at the time it takes place in the official storyline.
- Just how bad is it? A new Star Wars MMO handled by Knights of the Old Republic developer BioWare and set in the KoToR timeline has since been announced.
In Final Fantasy XI, the Chains of Promathia expansion is considered to be a Dork Age by many, many, many players. Reasons included; grueling boss fights that required very specific party combinations and a fair amount of luck to win, storylines that were left hanging between updates, Notorious Monsters that were amazingly gimmicky with incredibly low drop rates for gear AND pop items for further Notorious Monsters. The era was also known for the infamous "Ranger Nerf" that, while somewhat justified in the fact that the Ranger job was severely overpowered compared to other jobs, went way too far and made it into one of the weakest jobs in the game. (This nerf was partially countered years later after Samurai became the new over-powered pet-job of the Dev Team.) Combined with the first unbeatable boss of the game, the Jailer of Love which was then nerfed to make way for the new unbeatable boss Absolute Virtue, quite a lot of mid to end-game players left FFXI to play World of Warcraft. Not that Chains of Promethia was completely terrible; the mission storyline is among the longest and most interesting in the game (and better than some of the storylines of the main games), created systems and fights that are still popular years later like Limbus, ENMs, Bahamut, and Ouryu, and included many in-depth optional side quests such as Adventuring Fellows. (Your own personal NPC.) Changes to the mission fights were made to help players, such as making the fights easier, removing the experience penalty if they fall during battles, rewarding players with experience if they help people with the battles, and easing the restrictions of special items that help to make the battles easier- but these were made after the next expansion, Treasures of Aht Urhgan, when most players will agree that the Dork Age ended with a vengeance with a completely new philosophy in game design. (That it shouldn't be terrible to do things in the game.) Many people look fondly at the Chains of Promathia expansion, mainly because time has passed and people don't quite remember the original controller throwing difficulty of the unnerfed missions, or they had only played the missions after they had been nerfed. Also, not losing thousands upon thousands of XP to the then unnerfed Jailer of Love and the still-to-this-day unnerfed Absolute Virtue may well help to keep those glasses rose-colored.
The Leisure Suit Larry series entered a Dork Age with the games starring Larry Lovage (Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust).
- Worth noting that Al Lowe, the series' creator, isn't involved with either of them. Judging by his site, he'd be more than happy to give them advice, and is also more than happy he wasn't involved when the games bombed.
In the late 1990s, Konami farmed out the development of the Contra series to Hungarian developer Appaloosa, resulting in the creation of the series' two PlayStation installments Contra: Legacy of War (which also saw release on the Sega Saturn) in 1996, and C: The Contra Adventure in 1998. Both games were critically panned when they came out and Konami even canceled plans to localize the first of the two titles in Japan after the negative reception it received, which makes one wonder why they would give Appaloosa a second chance.
- Made all the worse by the fact that Legacy of War was relying on a 3D glasses gimmick for sales. We're talking '50s B-Movie red/blue cardboard glasses here. Oh, and massively derailing existing characters and canon, considering these followed on from Contra: Hard Corps, one of the more story-heavy Contra games, it did not go well.
  - It should be noted that both games are explicitly exiled from the Contra canon.
Backyard Sports, with the games from 2006 onward. There have been numerous character changes and removed characters, and the announcers are incredibly boring.
King of Fighters fans generally look at the period of time Eolith was handling the games (KOF 2001 and 2002) as a Dork Age. The way 2001 plays is in general more glitchy and gimmicky than any other incarnation of the series, and is in general a mess. The music for these games has been compared to the sounds of robots farting among other things and Eolith introduced a few of their own character designs. When SNK reclaimed the wheel as SNK Playmore, among the first things they did was to wipe several elements from 2001 right out of the canon, including a whole character (also a blatant Captain Ersatz of Tetsuo) and one death.
- To give 2002 some credit, it's still one of the most played versions in the series competitively, and even after the release of 2002: Unlimited Match you'll still see some original 02 tournies being played. Now, 2001 on the other hand? Uh...
Street Fighter actually inverted this. When the Street Fighter III series came out, many people were turned off by all the changes and many dropped the series altogether. As time has passed however, many looked back and were able to view the SF III series, specifically the third iteration 3rd Strike, much more favorably.
Deus Ex Invisible War was Warren Spector's entry into a Dork Age, and immediately lost his accumulated industry and fan respect. He's managed to bounce back some, which is better than other developer/producers have been able to do (anyone remember John Romero?) but still hasn't regained his former stature. Because of lingering rancor, Thief 3 received less fair critical reviews than it deserved, and Spector hasn't been invited to return for Thief 4, currently in pre-production.
- He may have found a rehabilitation of his image in the unlikely vessel of a Mickey Mouse game, though its mixed reception (and Spector's claims that negative reviewers "misunderstood" the game) didn't make for the reputation resurrection that was hoped for.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is widely considered the weakest of the franchise, centering mostly around a Replacement Scrappy and featuring an ending that had a Cthulhu-like effect on most gamers' sanity. Whether or not it came perilously close to killing off the entire franchise, however, is debatable given that the game was still a critical and commercial success. The widespread belief that Hideo Kojima made it bad on purpose because he wanted to quit making games is also perpetuated by MGS2's Broken Base - Hideo has repeatedly insisted on stepping down as director, only to return time and again of his own volition to and turn out a spectacular effort like Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker.
- A non-canonical example could be the game, Metal Gear 2: Snake's Revenge, an American follow-up to the original Metal Gear game for the NES. The game not only completely changed Snake's character and his relationship to the franchise but also took the game that introduced the concept of *stealth* gameplay and turned it into a generic shoot-em-up.
Sonic the Hedgehog's history from November 2005 to January 2007 might be this with the releases of Shadow the Hedgehog, |Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 and the GBA port of the original Sonic game. Shadow's game was a spin-off that aimed for the Darker and Edgier crowd, with So Bad It's Good results. Sonic '06 was hyped to be the Blue Blur's big comeback, but instead turned out to be a glitchy mess topped off with yet another unintentionally hilarious and convoluted storyline. Thankfully, the game's events are not part of Sonic canon and we never have to speak of it again.
The Sega Saturn period was the dark ages for Sega in the West, along with the late Genesis era. In Japan it is a well-known and loved console but in the West it is considered a failure due to poor marketing, a lack of exports, no Sonic the Hedgehog main games, and fierce competition. The Sega Dreamcast out shined the Saturn, but in the end it faded too in the West.. In Japan it went on until around 2007.
- SEGA's dark age as a whole really began with the Sega 32X. While the Sega CD could be considered just as bad, it's more of an Ensemble Darkhorse nowadays due to a few gems (Sonic CD, Snatcher, Lunar) among massive amounts of shovelware, but the 32X really kicked off Sega's mismanagment in the west. Then the Saturn's surprise launch came along with Sonic Xtreme stuck in Development Hell, and then Sega hired Bernie Stolar...yeah, things didn't really go well for them at all until they went third-party, considering the Dreamcast was Too Good to Last.
While Warhammer40000-based games made by Relic Entertainment (Dawn of War 1 & 2, Space Marine, etc.) have been generally well-received, the Dawn of War expansion that was farmed out to Iron Lore has received nothing but rancor. Canonically, the storyline of the previous expansion was a rousing success for the Spess Muhreens, while the campaign of the Obvious Beta that was Soulstorm is considered an embarrassing defeat that is spoken of only with great reluctance.
Sony had a little dork age in the mid-late 2000s, though they've appeared to have grown out of it recently. It started with the PSP, which, while being a success, never lived up to its expectations and was massively trounced by the inferior-seeming Nintendo DS. Then came the Play Station 3's launch at five hundred and ninety nine U.S. dollars, its strange Dada Ads, a controller that lacked rumble functionality, and limited exclusive games (most which turned out to be mediocre, anyway). It got so bad that Sony actually lost all its profits from the PlayStation and PlayStation 2's success. The Play Station 3 eventually tossed away its growing pains around 2008 and is now finally catching up to the Wii and Xbox360's sales -- and with the PlayStation 2 still selling after eleven years on the market, Sony could finally regain trust.
The Tony Hawks Pro Skater franchise fell into one hard with its final two games, RIDE and SHRED, which attempted to revive the franchise by using a skateboard-shaped motion controller to simulate boarding movement. This failed to address any of the problems the series had been going through, and introduced several new ones. Both games failed as a result, and the Hawk franchise appears to be down for the count for good.
- About to be revived by Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD.
  - This seems Hilarious in Hindsight, as HD was also of poor quality, and the follow-up Pro Skater 5 proved to be the worst entry in the franchise by a country mile. It wasn't until 2020s Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 remake the franchise could finally be said to have left the Dork Age.
There are ten years between Black Isle's Fallout 2 and Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3. There are two Fallout games between them--Microforte's Fallout Tactics and Interplay's In Name Only Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Tactics was a competent game that had severe issues with staying within the established continuity (in a world where World War III was brought on by a crippling energy crisis, many bases of have full drums of fuel just lying around more than a hundred years later, etc.); the same cannot be said of Brotherhood. Bethesda has proclaimed Tactics to Broad Strokes canon, while Brotherhood is full-on Canon Discontinuity.
The Need for Speed franchise had one. While some fans claim the entire Underground era to be Fanon Discontinuity, most generally point to Carbon in 2006 as the beginning of the series' downward slide (especially coming on the heels of Most Wanted, generally regarded as one of the series' high points), and ProStreet and Undercover in the ensuing years as the nadir of NFS' dork age. In any event, it ended with the release of the very well-received Shift in 2009 and Hot Pursuit in 2010, which brought the series back to its focus on exotic cars and away from the burned-out "tuner" culture.
There was a time where, to save on bandwidth costs, the site for hosting custom content for Garry's Mod forced its users to download addons via torrents rather than getting them directly off the site. It lasted for about two months.
The Valis series had lain dormant since the early 1990s, until its reputation was stained in 2006 by a series of H-Games titled Valis X, which Telenet Japan published in a desperate and failed attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
If E3 2012 has shown us anything so far, it's that the industry is still in the growing pains of the Dork Age. All the usual buzzwords are being bandied about: grim, gritty, edgy, and--worst of all--"realistic."
Devil May Cry had its own Dork Age with the Alternate Continuity/Reboot DmC: Devil May Cry releasing in 2013. The game was intended to rebrand the franchise, as Capcom felt that the series' image was too cheesy. As well as being pushed as the future franchise, appearing in mainline games and cameos, the new look was to apply to the film, which had been in Development Hell for closing in a decade. After the game's tepid reception, with much fan ire directed at the new look and characterisations, and the franchise returned to its original roots.