10 Video Games Cancelled For The WORST Reasons

In a market oversaturated in cookie-cutter first-person shooters (flavoured with one of three distinct cordials - World War 2, Modern Military Versus Middle-Eastern Generic Baddies, and Slightly Futuristic So All The UI Is Glowing Teal), you'd think that any variety would be welcomed with open arms.

Enter Timesplitters, the only game series that allows you to play as a gang of monkeys armed with bricks fighting minigun-toting humanoid ducks. A game series whose storyline involves you fighting off a zombie invasion one minute, and a robot uprising the next. Variety? Check. Big check.

Yet that variety would be its downfall. This was, after all, a time of realistic, gritty first-person shooters, and so Free Radical threw its big bets on Haze, the internet-proclaimed "Halo-killer" (which was, rather ironically, criticised for being "too generic").

Timesplitters 4 was regarded as simply too varied to market properly. With so many unique characters and storyline leaps, publishers considered it as too risky to take on (with publishers moving yet more towards needing a clearly-defined demographic, a niche, to sell to).

I guess "you know all the people that still buy military shooters? Literally everyone else" isn't a good enough market suggestion...