10 Ambitious Video Game Gimmicks That BOMBED

No entertainment medium moves as fast as video games, which are forever propelled forward by lightning-fast technical innovation and, yes, those gimmicks the industry attempts to force on us all for better or worse.

But to be clear, gimmicks aren't always a bad thing: the Wii's motion controls were a huge success and helped open up gaming to a far wider audience, while despite earlier failures VR has carved out a solid niche for itself in recent years.

And though the world at large is still wrapping their heads around what ray tracing is, it's so, so much more than a mere buzzword.

Hell, even some of the worst gimmicks are the furthest things from bombs - loot boxes continue to drain billions out of people's wallets every year, for example.

But what about those gaming gimmicks which, despite their oft-impressive technology and clear desire to innovate, flopped hard?

Whether a result of poorly designed hardware, bad timing, or a simple failure to shift units, these gaming gimmicks all died a most undignified death...

Tony Hawk: Ride was released in 2009 as a response to the hit skateboarding series' declining popularity, and in an attempt to capture the same market that gladly parted with heaps of cash for plastic Guitar Hero peripherals, bundled the game with a skateboard controller.

As far as daft gimmicks go it wasn't an inherently bad one, albeit executed with so little finesse as to suggest it was a desperate rush-job effort to revitalise the franchise.

Critics and players alike near-universally trashed Ride for its frustratingly fiddly and unresponsive peripheral, while the accompanying software simply didn't make for a fun or interesting game.

Executing even basic moves felt like a chore, and so there was nothing remotely intuitive about it. Activision's fatal misunderstanding, really, was thinking that the millions of people who played the Tony Hawk's series were all actually interested in doing it for real.

There's something to be said for foregoing the skinned knees and instead pulling off a 1080 spin from the comfort of your couch.

Instead, Tony Hawk: Ride wanted to charge players $120 for the "pleasure" of looking like an awkward goof in their living room - and not even delivering a basically fun time.

Despite the game bombing both with critics and at retail, Activision re-used Ride's peripheral one more time in their follow-up, Tony Hawk: Shred, which in an even greater feat of desperation introduced a snowboarding mode.

To add insult to injury, apathy was so high at this point that few critics even bothered to review it.