10 Companies Who Made Their Name With Shoddy Licensed Games
8. THQ - Where's Waldo
For a time THQ were one of the largest developers/publishers in the world, building their fortune on the back of a host of huge licences that included WWE, Disney and UFC.
Opening their doors in 1991, the company quickly started churning out games based on The Ren and Stimpy show and Swamp Thing, utterly failing to dazzle 16-Bit gamers.
Their 32-Bit output wasn’t all that much better either. While the company eventually garnered some acclaim for publishing the excellent WCW/NWO games, which they parlayed into the WWE licence, they were still pumping out cr*p like A Bug’s Life, a bunch of Rugrats games and titles based on the Hot Wheels licence.
However, the company continued to grow and managed to release a number of good titles in addition to their licensed stuff. Unfortunately, the bubble was always fit to burst and THQ eventually filed for bankruptcy at the tail end of 2012.
The Worst Game - There is such a treasure trove of awfulness in the THQ back-catalogue, with practically all of the company's Disney output being particularly poor. However, nothing can top the utter pointlessness of their Where's Waldo game on the NES, which was one of the company's earliest efforts. Why spend a little on the books when you could spend a lot on a game that offered nothing extra and coupled that with poor graphics?