10 Video Games That Languished In Development For Years

2. Prey (2006)

LA Noire Development Time
2K Games

Development Time: 11 Years (1995-2006) & 11 Years (2006-2017)

3D Realms began development on Prey back in 1995 during the same time the company was developing their in-house engine. Prey was intended to be their engine's flagship title, but a year into development, the work done on the title was dumped when the project lead left the company.

A new team was put together to work on Prey, but after five more years of development resulting in multiple iterations of what the game was being development into, it hit another snag. In 2001, all of the previous work was, once again, abandoned, and a new vision was established for development of the game, which had technically already been in development for seven years.

The company continued to work on Prey for an additional five years before it was finally released in July 2006 for the Xbox 360. Prey was well received, which led to the development of a sequel. That development process began almost immediately, and as you can guess, it took a while to create.

Fans had to wait for another console generation to pop up before Prey 2 could finally be played. The game's rights passed to Bethesda, and it was finally released as a series reboot in 2017 after eleven years of development, but after the first game's delay, nobody was surprised the sequel took as long as it did.

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Jonathan is a graphic artist, illustrator, writer, and game designer. Jonathan retired from the U.S. Army in 2017 and enjoys researching and writing about history, science, theology, and many other subjects. He writes for ScreenRant, CBR, NerdBastards, Listverse, Ranker, WhatCulture, and many other sites online. You can check out his latest on Twitter: @TalkingBull or on his blog: jonathanhkantor.com