10 Video Games Made INTENTIONALLY Bad To Prove A Point
4. Surgeon Simulator
Bossa Studio's 2013 title Surgeon Simulator was the brainchild of four young developers taking part in a game jam. Game Jams are little events that occur under a constrained time period - usually revolving around a theme - that developers have to make a game within.
Surgeon Simulator was first crafted by Tom Jackson, Jack Good, Luke Williams and James Broadley within just 48 hours. The team said they used the idea of open heart surgery with infuriating, QWOP like controls over what is usually highly precise movements made them giggle enough to keep them all awake and focussed over the two days.
They emerged, not sure if the game was actually funny or if they were just sleep deprived. The overwhelming viral reception of the title in 2013 seemed to think it was the former.
When asked about why a game that was meant to be so hard and awkward to control sold so well, Bossa Studio's Junior Designer Luke Williams had this to say:
"If we pitched this, [publishers would] be like, 'No. There’s the door', and they’d laugh us out of it," reckons Williams. "It just doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t sell like a sellable product."
By a making a game that was purposefully bad, the team at Bossa managed to sell an awful lot of copies, and also managed to get four sleep deprived indie developers through two consecutive all-nighters.