10 More Video Games Cancelled For Ridiculous Reasons
1. Two Team Members Were Almost Crunched To Death - Sonic X-Treme
Sonic X-treme began development in 1994 and was intended to be both the first ever 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game and the first original Sonic game on the Sega Saturn.
Despite the obvious appeal of such an ambitious project, setbacks were numerous, from political divisions within the Sega Technical Institute to the challenges of developing for 3D, to the Saturn being a difficult platform to program for.
To meet the intense deadline imposed upon the team by Sega of Japan, programmer Chris Coffin cancelled his apartment lease and moved into the office, working 16-20 hours per day to finish the game.
Four months before Sonic X-treme's December 1996 deadline, Coffin contracted severe pneumonia and designer Chris Senn became so ill with exhaustion, having lost considerable weight, that he was told by a doctor he could be dead within six months.
And so, two months before the deadline, producer Mike Wallis pulled the plug on the game, citing the inability to get it finished with two of the most pivotal talents out of commission.
Now of course, no video game is worth the health or, worse, the lives of the people creating it, though this really just speaks to how absurd crunch culture truly was back in the '90s, let alone today.
It's only ridiculous because it clearly didn't have to be this way, but Sega was so desperate for a lucrative Christmas 1996 release that they encouraged their employees to damn-near kill themselves.
Had a realistic release target had been set, perhaps mid-1997, then Coffin and Senn would've had a much better time, and fans would've actually gotten the damn game. And all it would've taken was Sega executives making slightly less that quarter.