10 Potentially Great Video Games That Were Dead On Arrival

4 €“ Daikatana

Almost a byword for €œunmitigated disaster€ within the gaming community, Daikatana is a title the once revered John Romero will never escape. Hyped up as the magnum opus of the man who helped bring us Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, players were promised something to revolutionise the whole genre. What they got after countless delays was a title so buggy plot essential NPCs could commit suicide by running into walls. What remains truly sad is the fact that, behind the massive coding errors and many problems, you could just about see what he had planned. Taking place across multiple eras, Daikatana featured a vast number of mystical and science fiction weapons, with a variety of locations and enemies not often seen in shooters of the time. The basic design elements themselves were also quite clever for the time, it was a classic shooter with RPG elements and squad based tactics. The two accompanying NPCs to carry out goals and hit certain targets, not unlike what the Mass Effect series would later accomplish. The real failure was in the execution, with overconfidence and development problems causing no end of issues right from the start. Romero himself initially set the goal of a seven month development cycle for this most ambitious of projects, missed it entirely, and was forced to repeatedly restart thanks to ever advancing technology. Infighting, departures and new engines followed; yet the Daikatana hype train only picked up speed. This lead to the tagline the game has become almost inseparable from €“ €œJohn Romero is going to make you his b*tch!€ While it will forever go down as a terrible mistake, with an even worse N64 port, at the time it was conceived Daikatana honestly seemed like a major leap forwards for the FPS genre. It's just unfortunate no one there seemed to be bring such ideas to fruition.