are there games where the devs were surprised that their game became popular for other reasons what they were intending?
what games became famous for completely different reasons from what the devs was actually intending?
Added by one dev, without permission from Rare, over six weeks.
That’s so badass.
I love when developers sneak in features behind the director’s/producer’s back. I read somewhere that Miyamoto didn’t want Mario Galaxy to have any story to it, but some developer snuck in the Rosalina story book sections. (Pretty sure that’s how the story goes anyway… my memory isn’t the best.)
I heard somewhere that the Wind Waker devs somehow snuck the game's entire art style past Miyamoto until fairly late in development as well
I'm starting to think this Miyamoto guy doesn't pay attention to his games.
For real, plus imagine the balls to do something behind Miyamoto’s back. If he was pissed about it good luck getting another job in the industry. If you’d do it to him you’d do it to anyone would be the thinking among game directors.
In a similar vein the old Spiderman 2 game that had one dev add the really good web swinging too by himself which then became the gold standard everyone still talks about.
Who is this man, I owe him my life
Same applies to Halo, which didn't have a multiplayer component until last minute. It was almost cut from the game because they lacked the resources, but a couple people on the team fought for it and were talked with saving it and they managed to pull it off just in time for the game to ship out for production.
Same with Quake, the multiplayer was a last minute decision too and it was a big success.
That doesn’t sound right about Quake. Doom multiplayer was huge at LANs, Carmack developed a ton of new multiplayer tech for the quake world release. The first previews of the game were all multiplayer demos too. It was planned to be a big focus from the start.
Tribes. The unintended skiing mechanic completely changed the nature of the game. Speeding it up about 1000% in the process.
Best online shooter ever made. Shazbot!
God, talk about the absolute state of my LIFE in my early teens. I hear that flag captured jingle in my freaking dreams, man. GREAT times. And don't forget the plethora of amazing, free fan mods that the game itself auto-installed for you as you joined servers with them. Way ahead of it's time -- for another timeline where we got fun player modding promoted instead of the sterile "only play how we want" matchmaking fps games of today.
I struggle to understand why the "everybody has a jetpack and needs to work together because none of the weapons shoot straight" genre somehow peaked with Tribes 2 in 2001 and never went anywhere. I fucking loved that game. What is its spiritual successor?
The vehicles, the repair mechanics, the way it encouraged teamwork with spotting lasers, how cool it was to be down in a hole somewhere and to have a mortar drop at your feet from the sky and blow you to smithereens... Amazingly before its time.
Tribes 3 is currently in Early Access. I've tried the Demo a few months back and though there is still a lot missing to make it a fully fleshed Tribes, it felt really good to play and looks promising. Haven't really been following it since though
Yeah the dev story of that is disastrous tbh.
The lead dev initially wanted it not to be a fast paced game and only play in small arenas. Only through loads of community feedback was the current game made to be as fast paced as a Tribes should be.
That's why all the maps are slightly too small to support that playstyle. They were never designed to be.
Was awesome too that they just leaned into it and turned it into a core mechanic
Glitch. Not the game actually but the company.
A game developer called Tiny Speck developed a shitty MMO game that was released in September 2011 and unreleased a couple months later before being completely scrapped at the end of 2012. However instead of shutting down they realized they had a different product to launch. While creating the game they developed their own internal communication tool to keep track of development conversations and files.
Shortly after scrapping the game they launched their new product, Slack and by the end of 2014 were valued at over $1B.
That is so cool how have I never heard this , I use Slack every day!
"If a player was being disruptive, disrespectful, rude, flooding[clarification needed], or cursing constantly, the player character could be taken to a black room with a single, low light lamp. The user would be accompanied by one or many staff members trying to calm them down and if that did not work, the avatar could be locked down to a chair and the player booted off for an amount of time, called a Time Out."
This game sounds absolutely wild, imagine being disappeared by an in game gestapo for cursing! Dystopian as fuck
A lot of early days MMO would have systems like that.
In NexusTK, you would get « jailed » for breaking in game rules. Depending on what you did, you had to talk to a rock and copy text or click through pop-ups for a duration of time. You would then be released from the jail. The game had an achievement system (that was called a legend) that was public and would pretty much retrace you whole experience playing the game. If you had been jailed, you would have a « branding » saying when and why you had been jailed for, and it would pretty much be a death sentence for your character as none of the clans and player ran subclasses would want anything to do with you.
I had a fairly high level character that I played for probably several thousand hours spread across many years. I got jailed for cursing on the game message board, and that was pretty much the end.
Gunz was like this mediocre multiplayer shooter + melee hybrid until people found all these bugs that made it an incredibly technical(all the crazy animation cancels for movement, shoot with shotgun and block with sword at same time, etc. ) game. Many people loved it and put up with them greedy monetizations for many years.
Gunz..now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
my wrists hurt just thinking about butterflying
Teenage me was amazed by these guys flying around with swords destroying everyone.
My plan was to just run around and shoot. I lost lol.
I'm so happy to see Gunz referenced here. What a great game for all it's bugs...
Super Metroid for the same reasons. Some of the speedrun techs feel almost intentional with how satisfying they are.
I guess the author of ShangriLa Frontier played that game then, because it sounds pretty much like the enthusiast "trash games" described in the manga: Becoming interesting not for what they are intended to be, but for the interesting ways they are broken.
Oh wow what a call back. I LOVED the level of technical difficulty it took to do all those moves. Butterflying and a few other moves are so ingrained in my muscle memory that I'm pretty sure I could still do them.
Warcraft III was a popular (and awesome) game in its own right, but a custom map created in WC3's map editor eclipsed the main game and popularized a new game genre.
Ah yes, the original Dota client known as "Warcraft III". Strange name for a game client though
/s I guess
And probably lead to its own genres design. MOBAs killed rts. I don’t dislike mobas they can be great but really miss good rts
Well you're in luck because Homeworld 3 just came out and it's shit
I fuckin know so bummed. I thought it looked amazing until I watched some reviews.
I still have the original copies of homeworld 1 & 2 in their cases, so sad after waiting all this time that it's a poor addition to what has been an epic journey.
I heard the new terminator rts was pretty good. I haven't played it though.
Can you explain?
WC3 custom maps had many different community mods that completely changed the game. One such game mode was defense of the ancients (DOTA) which began the MOBA genre and is now the most profitable and popular esport genre with DOTA2 and League of Legends.
This is actually why they enforced a TOS change with reforged. They didn't want to miss the gravy train like they did with DOTA so now they just blanket claim all customs games
they kinda shoot themselves in the foot because anyone with skills will prefer using something else and avoid all their work stolen by a multi-billionaire game company
It actually does more when you think about it. Because it shows in paper that they want control again.
If they hadn't been blunt about it, they'd have been able to do what valve did and pay folk for their work
Which makes me sad, because there was initially supposed to be a Heroes of the Storm arcade mode. That lil' Moba is an absolute playground of game assets ready to be mashed together, and some of the weekly 'brawls' they did actually did cool stuff like dodgeball, coop PvE, Basketball (well, 5v5 Azmodunk), and other cool stuff that shows what players would have been able to create.
Alas, they had a problem. As you said, Blizz really wanted control.
Their problem was what happened if one of their players decided they wanted to make a Mickey Mouse map with James Bond music -- suddenly, Blizzard's lawyers are getting calls from Disney and Metro-Goldwyn, and Blizz can't retort because oh shit, we said we owned what our players made.
They'd rather kill a potential game mode than risk players creating the next MOBA phenomenon with their assets.
I'd really really like to know one day if this is what they intended when they went to see their lawyers to write it up if they said
A) Please make sure nobody create a new game genre using our game
or B) Please make sure we get all the money if somebody create a new game genre using our game
And in B) case nobody told them the logical consequences.
Remind me a lot of university who lose potential researchers because they claim 100% of any proceeds of students using their tools/ressources etc in their student agreement.
Which just drives away all the talent. If Blizzard wanted the money, they should have been proactive in securing rights to DotA by enticing Icefrog with a pretty paycheck. Instead, S2 Games did that at first, they got him to allow Heroes of Newerth to use DotA characters and abilities until Valve put real money down and bought the rights to DotA. In the meantime, Blizzard was just sitting around with its thumb up its ass doing nothing, wondering why these companies gave a shit about the explosively popular arcade map being playing on their game.
So now they ensure that anyone with talent and a desire to be paid for the work they do won't bother with their game. That'll absolutely work out for them. Now Blizzard can fully claim a whole lot of nothing.
And then Blizzard circled back to make their own MOBA with HOTS.
Ironically, it's based on the Starcraft 2 engine and not WC3 lol.
Also new content is permanently canceled 😞
I loved HotS but Blizz were so late with its release, the genre was already pretty over saturated.
They also just fucking bailed on it so early.
Subnautica - "We didn't plan on making a horror game..."
In hindsight it's obvious that the deep dark ocean is the perfect setting for a horror game. It is horrifying by nature.
SOMA
What a great game. Horrifying in it's setting, visuals and story.
That game scares the piss out of me and yet I still keep trying to play it. I succeed for a little bit and then have to go play Minecraft (and avoid the water) to forget about it for a while.
I quit the game twice, because the thought of diving into a deep cave chock full of giant eel seemed rather unappealing to me. The third time I forced myself to push on and found the biome rather manageable after a while. Of course, the next biome was about twice as scary and again I had to force myself.
I did this a couple of times, and eventually I got jaded enough to push through. The prawn suit helped a great deal. Made me feel invincible, at least until... well.
I still can hear the crabsquid in my nightmares, though.
The prawn suit helped a great deal. Made me feel invincible, at least until... well.
One of the great aspects of this game is how well it does exactly this throughout the experience. It'll give you moments where you get a big tech upgrade and feel like you can take on anything before promptly ripping that sense of safety away. My personal favorite example being when you get the Seamoth and start to venture out in to the deeper waters.
"Multiple leviathan class lifeforms detected ahead. Are you sure what you're doing is worth it?"
Playing it for the first time currently, number of times I've sat on the ocean floor, rotating my seamoth frantically looking for whatever made "that" noise, before noping the hell out of there back to the shallows.
I think the devs and players both at first glance completely underestimated the potential of fear of deep water and the things lurking there.
But like, it's not just the deep water.
They made a giant tentacled monster that eats you and you can constantly hear it roaring when your a hundred meters away. They made a creature that just warps you out of your submarine. And a crab squid monstrosity who makes creepy noises and then uses an EMP on you.
Oh, and also an even bigger lava monster that chomps on the giant tentacle monster.
The took the deep water and filled it with every nightmare they could imagine. They didn't underestimate anything. They hired inters, made them look into the deep waters and tell then what horrors they imagined, and then the made those horrors and put them in the deep water.
I mean, Subnautica is very clearly designed to be unsettling.
The deep dark down deep dark, the music, the eerie environments, and the masterful use of sound design are all far too deliberate to be a case of "oops all horror game."
I maintain that although it's scary, it's not a horror game. Terror, maybe, but not horror.
Toby Fox: "I want to make a game, but I should make a practice game before I go on to the real thing. We'll call this practice project Undertale, I'll make a nice sound track to go with, and- -and 500k copies sold within the first month, Undertale music is being used in every meme compilation on the planet, Megalovania is being played for the pope, and Masahiro Sakurai invited me to play Smash Brothers with him."
One of Toby Fox’s inspirations was a game series called Touhou Project. Those games were all created by one man, who started development and released 5 games while he was in college. He never wanted to make games and he only did it because he wanted to make game music and couldn’t find anyone to partner with.
ZUN's music is incredible, great for concentration! I did not know this origin, thank you!
I can't believe U.N. Owen was her!
Also, just a random fun fact, Toby once went to a random Melee tourney, got put on stream with another low level player and he just kinda did Falcon NAirs in place because he was too nervous to try much else. He mentioned this on the Scar and Toph show.
Same thing happened with Moon Studios. They were working on a 3d first person shooter/rts multiplayer game but decided they need some experience so they went to make 2d single player platformer instead. That's how we got Ori and the Blind Forest, and its sequel.
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Naturally, when they realized they have something amazing on their hands, it turned into a main project. Ori's sequel wouldn't have happened if the first game wasn't well received.
Their new game "No Rest for the Wicked" is a completely different genre, gameplay, and graphics, but their signature art direction is definitely there.
I know Megalovania is an amazing track, but Spider Dance absolutely SLAPS!
Toby Fox had a fever dream one day and just decided to make a game based on it, that game was Deltarune
Megalovania is reused Homestuck music as well. Not even written for Undertale!
Edit: Apparently it's even older than that, it was for an Earthbound hack competition in 2008. It was just waiting for the right project to go completely and rightfully viral
Toby fox is such a cool name
He also got his mpreg song into a Pokémon game.
StarCraft and its expansion brood war were sold for the unique space opera narrative and fun multiplayer lan.
Within a few years, to Blizzard's complete blindsided shock, it became the basis of a major esport, played at fastest speed in 1v1s in ways the devs had no idea could be done.
Sc1 is the reason eSports exist nowadays and why Koreans are so good at those type of games.
Honestly one of my proudest moments was showing up at my Korean friend's base with a half dozen zerglings early in the game. The room went quiet for like 2 seconds, with only the hum of the computers and the sound of his workers getting chewed up, and he was like "how'd you get here so fast?"
Bro I thought you played competitive, you should've expected 5 minute zerglings.
'Im in ur baes, killing ur d00ds'
Crackdown - Was meant to be the next big thing for Xbox, made by a guy who helped create GTA and had the backing of Microsoft too, so much so that they added another incentive to buy the game, access to the Halo 3 beta. The joke ended up being "wow we got a free game with our beta key" type thing.
And Crackdown is an awesome game too, shame the sequels never bottled the same magic. Maybe if Crackdown 3 had Halo Infinite beta keys in every copy it would have sold more.
Combos in Street Fighter II were a happy accident. Changed an entire genre.
This deserves more upvotes, it redefined the genre by accident
It’s extremely fitting because unintentional glitches/exploits are central to the gameplay & meta of a lot of fighting games.
I think Fortnite might be the obvious example of this.
I miss the original idea of Fortnite as a survival zombie game with heavy base building.
the OG survive the storm mode was so awesome
Yeah, I recently started playing it and except for flingers, the game is awesome
Which is funny because the original idea is fantastic - 3rd person shooter tower defense/basebuilding game with waves of zombies?? Sign me up!
But then the battle royale Genre blew up, and they switched, and suddenly by taking a more comic-ish approach with the base building mechanics allowing for shenanigans, they completely outflanked the games that made it popular. PUBG was one and the other was DayZ I think?
Dayz was never/isn't a battle Royale.
I still remember seeing the original ads for it. I remember thinking, “Looks neat, but I’ll never play it.”
And it only took them 2 months to make battle royale lol
Consider that the vastly successful Golden Eye multiplayer Mode was also slapped on last minute without being originally intended.
Such stories are surprisingly common.
Diablo was also originally intended to be turn based, and as I understand under the hood the combat is calculated as turns, only now each frame is a turn.
On Diablo, I remember watching a video of one of the lead devs (I think it was part of that game postmortem video series) where he said at one point he was the only guy left in the team against switching from turn-based to real-time, and he finally budged, but said redoing it would take a shitload of time… and then he sat down the same evening to start doing it, as you said, frame (or couple of them) as a turn, and it just worked almost right away, he was done with the overhaul in the morning.
I was a founder. Played STW a ton, then dropped it when BR came out.
I used to work at a partner company for Epic. STW started out as a design concept just to show what their engine was capable of but ended up taking off from there, leading into BR.
Still mad about that bait and switch.
Yeah, I literally paid for Fortnite's OG mode only to have them take my money and not deliver
Crysis. It was a pretty interesting shooter on its own, and had a compelling story. But it just became known as a meme benchmark to test your build on for a decade after it released.
I don't think it was a huge surprise. I remember the developers at the time talking about how no modern systems would be able to run it on max settings - sorta future-proofing it.
Plus they were trying to pull an Unreal and make their engine the big money maker. A decent number of games were made on it (I know that Star Citizen is still being built on Crysis :p) though Unreal & Unity now seem to have a near duopoly on 3-d games now.
The story I’ve heard was that they designed it around the projected max specs for the next generation of hardware. The problem was that the next generation turned out to be the first generation of multicore hardware.
It was basically the same thing with GTA IV. There probably wasn't a rig on the planet in 2008 which could playably run IV on PC with every slider cranked up; it was clearly intended to be future-proof. But, like Crysis, they assumed that the future would be single-core, which really handicapped IV going forward.
I've heard this too. They assumed future hardware would focus on minimal cpu cores but we went in the opposite direction. Multiple cpu cores, further divided by hyper threading.
How have I been playing star citizen this long and never know this beautiful fact
I think Metal Gear Rising Revengeance started to become more popular some years later after it release because of the memes lol
Also, grossly misunderstanding the whole purpose of Senator Armstrong as the main bad guy.
Standard "Guy misunderstands the boss's dream" villain?
Senator Armstrong is just fun and charismatic. Playing into it is a very low-stakes situation.
Saucy Jack. It is a great game
Tbh, the game was popular on release, if a little niche. The conviction with which the voice actors in the English dub deliver their lines is what made it memeable. It’s over the top “so bad it’s good” cheesy bullshit, where you can chop enemies into tiny pieces, literally.
Now there’s a pretty meme. Exquisite.
Press F to pay respects
(Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare)
Arma 2 spawned so many zombie survival games because of the day z mod
Far Cry used to be just a tech demo. For the cry engine. But people liked it so much it became a game.
Monopoly is a good classic example. The game was meant to be a negative commentary on capitalism. Then it ended becoming a massive hit with people more or less thinking it was glorifying it
The great thing about Monopoly is that almost everyone plays with a set of house rules that make the game more fair, and are effectively socialist aspects of the game.
If you play by the original rules, the game typically plays out with one person quickly taking over everything and generating a huge wealth gap.
Not doing the auction if you don't want to buy the area. I wasn't aware of that rule until recently. I'm over 30.
I knew because I played the SNES game. By myself. Man I was a lonely kid.
When I was at my grandparents, one of my only outlets for fun was a monopoly set. I played an eight player game by myself, giving each token a personality and play style. I had board movement(not needing to count each space) and basic rent memorized by the end of that summer.
And it then takes hours to finish the game while that person grinds everyone else down. It is an utterly miserable game to play properly, but many people have fond memories of those times they didn't play it properly and also like the cute pieces.
Most house rules make the game drag on for hours.
I plan to never introduce my kid to Monopoly. There are so many better board games today.
A great house rule for Monopoly is the rule there are no house rules. It keeps the game moving.
Happy birthday champ, you're finally five! I got you this game called settlers of Catan, now give me your sheep and prepare to lose.
I keep thinking about that video of a child playing Monopoly with their parents while crying and screaming "I hate taxes!"
Good early life lesson, I guess.
EA's battlefront 2. Big, multilayer star wars shooter? No, it became the poster child for predatory microtransactions.
What happened though? I got into Battlefront 2 too late and everything was unlockable except a few skins...what were they selling?
I could be wrong, but I believe a lot of the “heroes” were locked, each one requiring something like 40 hours game time to unlock. Then requiring an additional ~300 hours to level to “heroic”.
Or you could just pay real money. It was a blatant strategy to push people towards spending more money on the game.
The comment from EA’s Reddit account defending this is the most downvoted comment in Reddit history with over 667k downvotes.
Not just pay money, but pay money for loot boxes with random amounts of this in-game currency. I believe someone made a post saying they had bought $80 of loot boxes and STILL didn’t have enough in-game currency to unlock Vader
Yeah it's a really good game now. It was just really rough when they were trying to monetize it to death.
And by consequence, that game is now tainted and they could have made more money if they didn’t try to capitalise on what mobile gaming does.
Note to OP: there is a difference between "famous" and "popular.". This game got notoriety.
Overwatch went from being known as a cool multilayer hero shooter with interesting world building.
To being known for its "fan animations"
And all the stuff that happened when it went to overwatch 2
If you're gonna blame anything for those fan animations, it's Elizabeth from Bioshock.
Elizabeth walked so overwatch could run.
She wasn't doing much walking in those animations
Or after them.
I still remember Ken Levine seething for months because he saw Elizabeth as his digital daughter and everyone was just making porn of her lmao
I feel like if overwatch 2 had just been a major update then the game would have been received so much better
I love that the answer to every single “What game…” question in this subreddit is Overwatch.
I think that was 100% intentional though, since design phase.
But they probably didnt expect it to be nr1 on pornhub lol
Duke Nukem Forever, a game that was famed as vaporware for 14 years.
This game went from:
2D run and gun side scroller (1996)
Quake 2/Goldeneye style FPS (1997 - 1998)
Half Life killer FPS (1998 - 2002)
DOOM 3/Half Life killer FPS (2003 - 2007)
Halo killer (2007 - 2009) (3DR goes bankrupt)
Salvaged Halo killer (2010 - 2011) (finished by Tryptech, funded by Gearbox Software)
Only one I ever played was the first one. That and Crystal Caves were both great games put out by Apogee.
You only played Duke Nuken 1? Damn, you missed out with Duke Nukem 3D, it's one of the greatest there was.
Didn't Among Us become so popular during the pandemic that the devs cancelled its sequel to focus on the first game, or something?
Speaking of the pandemic, Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold like crazy, because it was also a way for people to meet during lockdown.
Basically, the devs were surprised that Among Us had sold way, way more than they anticipated, and announced a sequel. While I'm sure it'd be nice to make bank off of it, the official statement I read was that the game's code is quite difficult to work with, and they wanted to do right by their new community by being able to give them a slew of content without having to modify code that was held together by bubblegum and prayer.
A few days later, the devs announced its cancelation. They said that after some thought, they realized that they had caught lightning in a bottle, and they should just buckle down and modify the original game, because Among Us may not even be popular by the time the sequel dropped. Thus, they went to work, and continued fiddling with their original, pain in the ass code… all without raising the price, or demanding more money for the eagerly awaited DLC.
Respect.
Flappy Bird is possibly the patron saint of unintended video game fame.
Not entirely the positive spin but No Man's Sky - famous for being almost nothing like what was originally advertised.
And then famous for being a great comeback story of developers not abandoning a game but instead working to bring it closer to the original vision. Same with Cyberpunk 2077.
And for "free", in the respect that they have never charged for any of the upgrades or "dlc" and while there is an ingame store, there is no irl currency microtransactions but simply ingame currency you earn by actually playing the game (Quicksilver). So no pay to win and no microtransactions that unbalance the game.
Really looking forward to seeing what Light No Fire is all about!
Rimworld. It a colony simulator with a sort of self generating story. But it's known for warcrimes.
You say warcrime, I say taking creative steps to ensure the feeding of my vampire child soldiers that use toxic waste weapons for protecting my pigman-ghoul slave spacedrug plantation.
and also we are just helping the organ market, those greedy raiders don't need to hog two lungs, they would only devalue without my intervention
Assassin's Creed III's ship combat was so popular that Ubisoft basically made two other games to ride on that popularity.
Final Fantasy I.
Not the bankrupt story which Sakaguchi said it was false. But in fact Sakaguchi thought it wouldn't sell, so he tacked on the work final so if it didn't sell he will quit the game industry.
We now have 16 mainline versions and countless spinoffs.
Portal 2 deliberately only has one tiny cake joke because the devs didn’t like them
I honestly believe that is for the best. I can't stand sequels that attempt to capitalize too much on attributes of the first. Just make a good sequel.
I believe Goat Simulator was one
Skyrim's memes have become almost as famous as the game itself
Toaplan made a solid, well playing horizontal shmup in the arcades, and then brought it to the Genesis with an equally solid port. Along the way, they gave it a cinematic opening that wasn't in the arcade version. That opening and it's awkward use of English became what many people remember about the game... because not many forget the first time they read, "All your base are belong to us" when watching the opening to Zero Wing.
RE 8. Capcom wanted people to buy the game.
But after the trailer, people wanted to play the game alright, but not for the reason capcom wanted.
Capcom eventually knew and just marketed the 9'6 goth vampire momma, and that was that
Considering how she drinks Ethans blood I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing all along, they just might not have expected the extreme reaction.
Literally the 2nd scene she’s in has Ethan be raised up (via chains in his hands, this poor guy) letting the player get a fantastic look down her cleavage.
They knew.
Capcom is hardly known for their subtlety. It's worked very well for them over the years.
RE games have long history of being horny on main, it's just that this time they actually made the kind of horny people could get behind.
A large portion of the reaction to Lady D is straight men finally getting a dose of what makes straight women love hot vampire men. The reaction was ravenous, and for the self-aware it was a big "I get it now" moment. Absolutely hilarious to watch (and I say this as an avid Lady D enjoyer).
Assassins creed Unity
It got extremely famous due to it being practically unplayable on launch day. The videos and meme compilations about its bugs took over youtube.
Some bugs were funny but some bugs made players lose dozens of hours of progress.
A lot of people passed on it for years to come due to how unplayable it was. Sad thing really because the game is to me very decent. It was one of the last ACs that followed the style from the OGs. It also has the coolest AC Teaser trailer with an awesome soundtrack to it
Also became famous again after the Notre Dame fire. They used high res 3d scans that Ubisoft captured in actual reconstruction efforts.
Unity’s aesthetic has to be my favourite out of all the AC games tbh. I love so many of the robe options lol
Fortnite was supposed to be a fort building, zombie defense/survival game.
Smash Brothers Melee for having included a mechanic that was not intended in the slightest: Wave Dashing.
It was so not intentional that it has not been in the series ever since. It absolutely WARPED everything the game stood for.
There are good reasons for it, but there's also good reasons it has not been replicated in the series ever since. Melee is quite unique in the smash brothers fandom. Again, for good reason, but some things are best left as happy accidents, once.
I can say, in its defense (Wave Dashing) is that the very first person who discovered it must have felt like an actual wizard.
Hard thing to replicate in games, especially intentionally. A real oddity that's perhaps more charismatic because of it being such an oddity. Maybe oddities have an edge in the field of charisma. Who knows.
Just to clarify, Sakurai knew about Wave Dashing and left it in intentionally. He just didn't think people would get so good at it that it would become as strong of an option as it did. In an advice column on the old Japanese Melee website he even told a Luigi player he should learn it because Luigi's was especially good.
oh wow I actually never knew this and I gotta admit that's super fascinating. So maybe it wasn't so unintentional as per leaving it in, but it did seem unintentional as an unanticipated result from the coding, but that he knew of it and wanted to leave it is pretty cool to learn.
Edit: just leaving an edit here mentioning that talking about this made me fire up Ultimate again and god damn, why is Smash (up to and including Ultimate) so fucking GOOD? It's always that one game every Nintendo generation that, if I sell off games or whatnot to get other shit, the Smash games are always the ones I never get rid of. It never feels unfun to play those games. Sakurai is the shit. A true G.
A lot of casuals think this but as another poster has said a lot of the tech in melee was intentional by the devs. L cancelling in addition was intentional.
Now we're they aware of shield dropping, laser lands, shine cancelling etc? Impossible to know (though I doubt it) but they were definitely aware of the mechanics that made it possible.
But the larger point is correct, sakurai clearly never wanted a technical, competitive game. Nintendos attitude towards competitive play in smash is self evident, and a lot of design decisions that they made in brawl are seemingly anti competitive (tripping). Though in recent years with ultimate they seem to be a little more in tune with the hardcore players with ultimate, fighter pack 2 notwithstanding
Superman 64.
Famously awful. Despite there being a pretty wide selection of really terrible games, it seems to be the meme of choice, effectively cementing itself in everyone’s minds for the foreseeable future.
I think it's because of the IP attached. A ton of unknowing parents/grandparents grabbed it from the bargain bin because they recognized Superman. That's how I got it.
Also the IP likely meant that more copies were made than if it were an equally bad game with an original IP.
Minecraft was suppose to be a 6 month project.
The original “GTA” started off as a simple driving game called “Race ‘n’ Chase.” But as the developers worked on it, they realized the real fun was in causing chaos and breaking the law. So, they shifted the focus to criminal activities and open-world mayhem, which is what the series is now famous for.
Assassins Creed 3 - the sailing mechanic was such a small part of the game, but got so popular that it then went on to be one of the core concepts of Black Flag, and influenced Skull and Bones
The original Gwent, had that whole "monster hunter"/ find find your adopted daughter sidequest. That ended up being pretty fun and had a lot of good DLC after..
I'm pretty sure Triple Triad had a similar long af sidequest about sorceresses and time compression stuff.
E.T. on the Atari.
All of Bethesda’s games are famous for their bugs
I believe Thomas Was Alone is one of these. It was a little platformer with basic shapes that had different abilities. Then there is a narrator that talks about all the shapes' thoughts and talking and emotions and by the end you're really invested in this story of a block trying to escape.
Halo was pretty different during development before Microsoft bought the studio and the project moved from PC to XBox.
Cod zombies maybe?
Cod was already popular then some devs in their free time made it an Easter egg and it blew up.
The PETA pokemon game was likely played ironically by most gamers.
Minecraft was an indie styled written hobby project during the late 2000s before skyrocketing to popularity and becoming a more "official" game
the early minecon conventions were a lot smaller scale than what we had today
Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Pizza Tower is a love letter to a lot of particular things from the 2000s. Cartoons like Ren n Stimpy/Cow n Chicken, Youtube poop, Wario Land and so on, yet it got struck by a terminal disease called 'content farm-itis' and now is popular with 8 year olds for some reason despite the target audience being a bit different
Imagine spending 4 years on making a game just for it to be called zoomer bait
FF Origins Stranger of Paradise, the writer surprised the game popular because of the meme esp with Jack Garland "Chaos".
Half life ----> counterstrike.
Changed the childhood of many many many children!
Universal execs: hey this Atari thing is really taking off could be good for a tie in with that hit Spielberg movie. Let's do it what could go wrong.
Three years later: 💀💀💀
Limbo of the Lost is now infamous because of the sheer amount of plagiarised material that was used in the game, to the point where this is how most people know of this otherwise forgettable game.
I never heard of the game
I highly recommend checking out Mandaloregaming's video on it, or reading thedarkid's LP from LP Archive.
It's an utterly bonkers adventure game, it being like 80% plagiarized is just the tip of its fever dream iceberg.
Driver
Diablo(1) was supposed to be a turn-based game. They made a small script overnight, that turned it into an ARPG. It revolutionized the ARPG gameplay, we see today.
Golden Eye multiplayer was not intended to be in the game until last minute, and they didn't expect to revolutionize split screen fps