I listed a bunch of games earlier, but a couple people have mentioned that I absolutely agree should have been finished, most obviously Sonic Xtreme. It's quite sad that game never released, Sega badly needed it. I could also have mentioned Propeller Arena (DC), but I didn't think of it, in part probably because the full game did eventually leak...
And Strangehold reportedly cost 30m to make.
$30 million... yeah, they lost a lot on that game for sure. Too bad.
They went from being known for making high quality arcade experiences to blowing everything on doing the complete opposite of that.
Yeah, I agree. Midway and Atari Games (Midway Games West), who they had purchased in '96, were great arcade developers, but never managed to adjust to home consoles quite as well. Midway's decline across the '00s was sad to watch, they used to be a pretty good publisher and even in the later years had a few good games here and there. But they just couldn't adjust. Midway went from being one of the larger third parties, which it was in the late '90s, to a lower-midtier one in the mid '00s; a catastrophic collapse! And then of course they went from there to out of business a few years later.
I don't know if keeping the arcade division could have helped, because arcade games were, of course, fading badly at that point everywhere other than Japan, but what they did try didn't work often enough. (I like some of Midway's 6th gen games and hate some others, but either way, they weren't nearly the company they had been before.) They just couldn't adjust and lost popularity and sales, and then the cost increases last generation destroyed them when their bets didn't pay off, This is Vegas and Stranglehold probably worst of all. Too bad. Maybe they should have continued to focus on making games as they had before, with that arcade style? I don't know if the market wanted that, though. They were definitely in a tough spot, being the biggest remaining American arcade game developer at a time when arcades in the US were dying out.
Yeah, I think that's the best take away, actually. It was likely a combination of things that lead to the ultimate split. I still think the CD-Rom part is a bit of chicken and the egg in terms of how it affected FFVII's design, however.
The main take away, however, should be that FF64 never was seriously considered.
And you know this how? Do we have interviews or quotes from Square proving that they never considered supporting the N64? I don't remember there being any. Square turned on Nintendo in 1996, when they released their first PS1 game (Tobal No. 1), announced FFVII would be PS1-exclusive, and encouraged other Japanese third parties to support Sony as well. But the N64 project didn't start in 1996, it started years earlier. FFVII started out in '94 as a SNES game, but I'm sure they considered it as an N64 game, before deciding to go with Sony instead. The choice of SGI for that techdemo can't be a coincidence, and even if it was a troubled relationship, Square had almost exclusively supported Nintendo up to that point.
I do agree that other reasons were key to why Square broke with Nintendo -- it wasn't only the CD issue, but also some stuff about Mario RPG maybe, personality clashes, etc -- but it was one of the major reasons. Maybe Square would still have left even if the N64 used CDs, though, it is entirely possible with how bad the Square-Nintendo relationship was getting... but who knows, that one's hard to guess at.
I'm still pissed off about Bomberman 3DS.
Fuck Konami.
Yeah. And on the note of Hudson, I'm sure the game wouldn't have been that great, but it IS kind of sad that Bonk: Brink of Extinction went down with the closure as well.
