10 Disastrous Video Games That Lost Their Creators Millions

4. Daikatana

I remember when I first heard about the mysterious Daikatana. The great John Romero (of Doom fame) was to be at the helm of this first person shooter, which took players on a time-travelling romp through ancient Greece, the Dark Ages, near-future San Francisco and distant-future Japan. It sounded incredible, promising to take the FPS genre to new technical and gameplay frontiers. Like every FPS fan at the time, however, I was to be disappointed, as the final product was a flop, and the most memorable thing about the game was its insane development story. Romero was treated like a king while the game was being made, working from a $1m a month office at the top of a Dallas skyscraper, living a lavish rockstar lifestyle, and even being allowed to bring his girlfriend, pro gamer Stevie Case, onto the development team. Everything about the making of the game went wrong, from the weird 'John Romero's About To Make You His Bitch' marketing campaign, to the engine change some way into development. Eventually, publisher Eidos lost patience with the developer, Ion Storm, and bought them out in 1999 to get more control over the project, after having already pumped $44 million into development. The end result was a mess, and the game sold a disappointing 200,000 copies. Daikatana made a huge loss and became known as one of the epic industry failures of all time.