Today we give you eight games that everyone thought would sell millions of copies. Unfortunately for them, they did not, they actually did quite poorly. Some didn’t sell so well because they were bad games, and some were games that were ahead of their time. So enjoy, and what other games should we have included on this list?
Tim Schafer is responsible for the first game on the list with Psychonauts. This game was definitely ahead of its time, since it’s release it has become one of the more influential games of its era.
The people behind APB: All Points Bulletin were prepared for the game to make millions. Unfortunately for them it fell flat, the games suffered from poor management as they supposedly ignored negative comments from beta-testers, why have a beta test if you’re just going to ignore it.
Tim Shafer’s Grim Fandango may have performed poorly in terms of sales, but they created one of the most memorable characters from this era of gaming. The game sold up to 500,000 copies, which wasn’t what the publisher was hoping for.
Brütal Legend released in 2009, and had Jack Black voicing its protagonist. This Tim Shafer game was, once again, praised by critics, unfortunately that didn’t translate into sales. One thing that we can learn from this is that Tim Shafer is one of the biggest unappreciated developers in gaming today, in terms of sales.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial didn’t perform poorly because it was ahead of its time, it performed poorly because it was a pretty bad game. There’s a reason that they buried most of the copies in the desert, because that’s where they deserved to be.
Daikatana suffered from delays, which caused it to be released against much better games. This FPS would have done amazingly well if it had come out when it was initially expected to. When it finally hit shelves it was up against Quake III, which was just a far superior game.
Nintendo’s EarthBound received very little attention from critics, it didn’t help that the game also had graphics that, at the time, were considered too cartoonish for your average gamer. This all resulted in only 420,000 copies of the game sold, which doesn’t really cut it when you’re expecting so many more sales.
Duke Nukem Forever is on this list for a couple reasons, its release was delayed for over a decade, and the game was just a bumbling mess of misogyny and beer swilling. It released in an era where that wouldn’t fly anymore, if it had been released when it was originally supposed to release it would have fared so much better.
