10 Biggest Video Game Flops Of All Time

4. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was highly anticipated by fans of the arcade version, primarily because it was the first home console version of the game to be released at that point. Finally, fans would no longer have to venture to a nearby arcade and pump countless quarters into the machine in an effort to top their high score. For this reason, it was expected to generate a record profit for Atari.

Imagine, then, the horror fans of this classic must have felt when they popped the cartridge into their Atari and saw how ugly this Pac-Man was. It was a noticeable downgrade from the arcade version, the limitations of the console stripping away many of the technical features prominent in the original. Essentially, the Atari version turned the game so many fell in love with into a shell of its former self. It shared the core game design of the original, but everything else felt wrong.

Pac-Man was initially very successful, and still remains the highest selling game for the Atari 2600, but it didn’t take long for gamers to realize how terrible it was, and returns started hitting retailers at an increasingly rate as sales took a nosedive. With excess copies of the game on their hands, Atari ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and confidence in the company waned as a result. It took years for Atari to recover and earn back the trust of consumers, proving that even the best intentions can have lasting consequences.