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Games deliberately sabotaged during development

S

saunderez

Member
There was the whole Spintires thing where the dev had a dispute with his publisher and thought a good way of resolving it was to put timebombs in the game to make it crash regularly and remove beta branches so everyone was forced to download the update.

Publisher ended up with control of the dev account and pushed out a non broken version of the game eventually.
 
ItsTheNew

ItsTheNew

I believe any game made before 1997 is "essentially cave man art."
Don Mattrick and Time Splitters Future Perfect

I always remember when we were finishing Timesplitters: Future Perfect, getting a visit from Don Mattrick to basically tell us that it didn’t matter whether we made the game any good or not.

We were saying we wanted a couple of extra weeks just to put in some final bits of polish. We realized that the multiplayer had not quite enough attention compared to the previous game and we wanted to finish it off properly.

And Don Mattrick flew in and explained that if we did that then it’s going to move fifty million dollars out of EA’s financial year and it’s going to hit their share price and actually that’s more important than whether our game is any good.

That was my first experience of finding out that your interests aren’t really aligned with publishers’ interests.
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http://www.playstationlifestyle.net...k-theres-any-chance-well-see-timesplitters-4/
 
S

Samikaze

Member
rackham said:
Whoever voiced Corvo in Dishonored 2 tried their hardest to fuck that game.
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The same guy who voiced Garret in the original Thief games.
The games that helped inspire Dishonored.
Corvo was like the new Garret.

He didn't rock the normal sarcasm and charm of Garret, but it was a fun nostalgia point.
 
K

KingBroly

Banned
SinCityAssassin said:
It does not, again this thread is about active opposition or hinderance to the completion or success of a game, it's not about what you PERCEIVE to be the active sabotage of a game.

Superman 64 corporate politics counts, Square Enix trying to back out of a game deal counts, the whole mess with Sega Saturn counts.

Paper Mario and Other M changing direction does not count.
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Well...Sakamoto picked the English VA for Samus personally, and he doesn't speak one lick of English. He also called for a literal localization of the script, which he wrote himself. Doesn't get more boneheaded than that
 
IISANDERII

IISANDERII

Member
Call of Duty MW3. Bobbie Kotick didn't want to pay the devs what was agreed upon so he fired them. The talent drain was immense and the franchise has been in a tailspin since.
 
K

KratosEnergyDrink

Member
The Real Abed said:
Miyamoto destroyed Paper Mario because he didn’t want another straight RPG. Which is exactly what the fans want but never get. We get shitty Sticker Star and Color Splash instead of the proper Thousand Year Door sequel we truly want. (And I actually loved Super Paper Mario and will probably replay it when I finish TTYD again.)
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Color Splash is a great and very polished game. Better than any of its predecessors. Obviously.
 
D

Disgraced

Member
Danjin44 said:
Ride to Hell Retribution.

This only explanation I can think of why this was sooooo bad. It wasn't just bad because of low budget, bad voice acting, it was really sexists, bad sound track, crap gameplay and just very ugly game. I really want to know what the hell happened during development.
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Just looking at the product itself, it has some ambitiousness about it. Add to that the rumor it was at one point meant to be an open world title, my theory is the dev wanted it to be the game that made them something more than the makers of 007 Racing and Hot Wheels: Beat That. But somebody there was misguided. Mistaken. A classic story in the games industry.
 
ArtHands

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Bioware fucking over their own Mass Effect 3 Wii U port (by announcing a Mass Effect bundle at a cheaper price than ME3 Wii U) so they have an excuse to not support Nintendo platform
 
drotahorror

drotahorror

Member
*this is just a conspiracy made up by me.

I feel like Driveclub's launch (basically the online functions) was sabotaged internally. It could have been someone paid by Microsoft, it could have been done just for the maliciousness. I don't know if I believe what I'm saying honestly, but it's crossed my mind a few times. I can't really remember my reasoning at the time of it happening unfortunately.
 
Pokemaniac

Pokemaniac

Member
The Real Abed said:
Miyamoto destroyed Paper Mario because he didn’t want another straight RPG. Which is exactly what the fans want but never get. We get shitty Sticker Star and Color Splash instead of the proper Thousand Year Door sequel we truly want. (And I actually loved Super Paper Mario and will probably replay it when I finish TTYD again.)

I love Miyamoto but he’s ridiculous. Does he still head the straight Mario series or did he turn that over like Zelda? Because the normal Mario series seems to get better and better with it’s gimmicks. But Paper Mario just gets worse and worse. (And I’m not a fan of what’s happened to M&L either but I suspect that’s not Miyamoto?)
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You can make a good argument for Sticker Star being sabotaged (though, without a good point of reference for the original prototype, it's possible that some of the problems could have already existed at that point), but Color Splash is its own beast. Color Splash was clearly an attempt at fixing Sticker Star where they completely failed to address the core issues, and instead just put band-aids over them and hoped everything would work out.
 
P

PeakPointMatrix

Member
Sega cut the Sonic 06 team in half during crunch time in order to begin development on Secret Rings.
L Thammy said:
There was this group that paid developers to fuck up the games they worked one. One, I think it was SimCopter or some Lego thing, spawned shirtless guys who would gather around helicopters and get cut up. I'm 90% sure I'm getting part of the story wrong.

EDIT:
Okay, let me get Wikipedia to handle it:
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Is...

Is this the actual footage of it?
 
P

Primus

Member
Derek Smart sabotaged the initial release of Battlecruiser 3000AD due to major conflicts with his publisher, Take Two, to the point where he had his own codebase that he kept separate from Take Two's, in order to work on his own vision even while being funded by Take Two.

Oh, did I forget to mention that we were working on two code versions? Well, we were. Theirs and mine. Theirs, they were chopping up in order to make their Christmas release. Mine I was working on according to my specs.
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Derek insists to this day that all the onus of blame is on Take Two and not him.
 
J

jmartoine

Member
chronic_archaic said:
Destiny had to have it's assets repurposed and it's release delayed by a year due to Joseph Staten leaving as lead writer in early 2014 after higher ups wanted a complete rewrite of the story and focus on MMO esque things instead of it's overall narrative that was similar to Mass Effect. The game was slated for late 2013 as a Xbox 360 exclusive before all this happened.
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Half true. Destiny was never going to be a 360 exclusive, hell it was originally shown off at E3 2013 for the PS4 before the reboot happened.

The Jason Schreier article details it pretty well, that in 2013 Joe Staten and a few others showed a "rough cut" of the story to the upper-management/ board and they didn't like the direction it was going in/ were confused by it and so the game was rebooted in a year which led to the delay.

Question has to be asked, where were management during development? How did they let the game get into a state where they were so unhappy they wanted a complete reboot a year out from release. Then again if rumours are true something similar has happened with D2, and Bungie have a bad track record from the Halo series.
 
SinCityAssassin

SinCityAssassin

Member
KingBroly said:
Well...Sakamoto picked the English VA for Samus personally, and he doesn't speak one lick of English. He also called for a literal localization of the script, which he wrote himself. Doesn't get more boneheaded than that
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But objectively was that him actively trying to sabotage the game, or just him being a bad decision maker. Cause again, that's what the thread calls for. An active and conscious array of decisions and actions made to hinder or outright destroy a game's development and chance of success in the market. Not what you as a fan presume is sabotaging, but outright intent.
 
B

Bjoern the Smexy

Member
KingBroly said:
Well...Sakamoto picked the English VA for Samus personally, and he doesn't speak one lick of English. He also called for a literal localization of the script, which he wrote himself. Doesn't get more boneheaded than that
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That's not sabotage, though.
That's "just" a general fuck-up by the director. He didn't hinder anyone during development. He had a clear vision of how the game was supposed to look and feel like.
He merely didn't realize that most of his vision was straight-up bad.
 
T

TheGameshark

Member
IISANDERII said:
Call of Duty MW3. Bobbie Kotick didn't want to pay the devs what was agreed upon so he fired them. The talent drain was immense and the franchise has been in a tailspin since.
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Damn didn't know this. I just figured if was a few guys that left tbh. Would explain why Infinity ward's quality fell off the face of the earth.
 
M

MaverickHunterX

Member
Mr Fahrenheit said:
The Deadpool one will never not be funny. Imagine working on a game and being told that you should shoot for a 6 or lower. I don't remember much in the way of specific sabotage, but I imagine when your bosses are telling you that there's not much hope of help from the top.
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Context, please? I ask because I loved the game.

Would the story of the 2010 Splatterhouse remake count as this?
 
Jetboxx

Jetboxx

Member
Korigama said:
Dead or Alive 4 was originally on track to be a fighter suited to competitive play while still in development, but Itagaki altered the gameplay for the final version so that would no longer be the case.
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Still better than so-called Dead or Alive 5.
 
M

Mr. Phellps

Member
Square Enix had changed its mind, and no longer liked the Nordic style of this spin-off game, so a last-minute style change was attempted.[2] The game had been such a well-guarded secret, and had been through so many changes, that most employees did not know they had been working on a Final Fantasy game until very late in development.[7] Grin attempted to change the art style to fit more with traditional Final Fantasy games, but still did not receive any positive feedback. In response, Grin sent Square Enix an image of one of the latter's own games, Final Fantasy XII, and were told that it does not look like a game in Final Fantasy's style.[2][17] Following that exchange, Grin came to the conclusion that there was no longer any way to satisfy the publisher.
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lmao
Professional as fuck, Squenix.
 
S

Syril

Member
MaverickHunterX said:
Context, please? I ask because I loved the game.

Would the story of the 2010 Splatterhouse remake count as this?
Click to expand...

The link doesn't work anymore but the quote from another thread was

Yup exactly. We had a couple of weeks were we crunched pretty aggressively on Deadpool. Having activision cut aand cut and CUT just took its tole on so many of us. For a studio to demand that we do mandatory overtime for a project and then keep cutting so much time and money from it was ridiculous. At about halfway into development we were told that we weren't even aiming very high in terms of score.

Can you imagine working on a game where your higher ups say "yeah we're shooting for a 64 or lower" and then have them give you mandatory overtime?
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This is funny because the budget for it was $100 million.
 
R

Ralemont

not me
JCHandsom said:
Wow, that's another really big one. And Alpha Protocol too? Man, Pillars and Kickstarts was the perfect way out for those guys.
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Nah, Alpha Protocol was just Obsidian's incompetence. They had no clear vision and didn't know what game to make, so they made an action-RPG hybrid that sucks at both, at least outside of its story beats.
 
N

Nairume

Banned
Ralemont said:
Nah, Alpha Protocol was just Obsidian's incompetence. They had no clear vision and didn't know what game to make, so they made an action-RPG hybrid that sucks at both, at least outside of its story beats.
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It does sound like Sega really did sit on it and kept them from doing more QA on it before it got released.

Granted, that extra time would have maybe smoothed out some of the game's jank problems, but it wouldn't have likely fixed the more inherent ones.
 
C

CronoShot

Member
Paper Mario Sticker Star at one time had partners (a chain chomp partner was shown) and was going to be more of a traditional Paper Mario, but Miyamoto put a stop to it and turned it into...well, yeah.

Moleman.jpg
 
1

13ruce

Banned
Verano said:
Nintendo games with the hand holding...i hate it...im not a kid plus i like to be challenged. One game comes to mind is Paper Mario Sticker Star. I wanted to play a classic mario rpg but Nintendo was like nope fuck you here's stickers...enjoy! 😒
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That was Miyamoto luckily for us it seems like Koizumi likes stories and he is the lead producer of Mario now. He was director of the Mario Galaxy games.

But i think Miyamoto had no say in Color Splash altho that game is miles better than Sticker Star for sure.

Miyamoto is more for Simple stories instead of "complicated/big" ones.
 
D

Deadpool_X

Banned
WB doesn't like Superman games, do they? Factor 5 was working on a Superman game for WB during the 360 and ps3 days, and they had the funding pulled out from under them, bankrupting the company, insuring we never again got an awesome Star Wars Rogue Squadron game. *sigh*
 
D

DiipuSurotu

Banned
Final Fantasy 1

Hironobu Sakaguchi had intended to make a role-playing game (RPG) for a long time, but his employer Square refused to give him permission as it expected low sales of such a product.[7] However, when the RPG Dragon Quest was released and proved to be a hit in Japan, the company reconsidered its stance on the genre and approved Sakaguchi's vision of an RPG inspired by Ultima and Wizardry.[7] Only three of his colleagues volunteered to join this project headed by him because he was thought of as a "rough boss" in spite of his unsuccessful creations.[8]
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”Hiromichi Tanaka was heading the other team in Square, and they had about 20 people. That's how I knew we really weren't popular.
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The lack of faith in Sakaguchi's team, as well as its unpopularity within the company, motivated the staff members to give their best.[9]
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”Initially, only 200,000 copies of the game were going to be shipped. At that time, manufacturing the ROM took two to three months, so your initial shipment equalled the number of copies that you could potentially sell.

”So I argued within the company, and pleaded: ‘If we only make this many, there's no chance of a sequel – please make it 400,000'. But the costs were high, so as a company all they could think was ‘that's a lot of money!' despite having this great game. So the reason it became such a hit was thanks to Square's management taking a chance – for which I'm really grateful."
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C

Choppasmith

Member
As I recall, SNK was pretty ticked at Capcom when developing SvC Chaos. They were still recovering and reforming after their bankruptcy when developing the game. They asked Capcom to have more time to develop the game (their "each company can make their own vs game"deal had a time limit) because they were still restructuring and Capcom refused.
 
P

Poppy

Member
shawnbuddy said:
There was a crowdfunded porn game, Breeding Season, where one developer literally stripped his art assets out of the game, killing it. Guru Larry had a video about it.
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wasnt this a flash game at one point, seems like something i saw a million updates for on e621
 
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