10 Video Games That Lied Straight To Your Face
4. Aliens: Colonial Marines' E3 Demo And Typo
Ah, Aliens: Colonial Marines. Iconic for one of the most disastrous releases in gaming history. The story began in 2006 when Sega bought the rights for an Alien game. Sega let Gearbox create a game for them, who in turn outsourced much of the project to focus on Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever. Bad move.
Five years later, 2011’s E3 showed a demo of Colonial Marines running on the highest specs possible, which was nowhere near how the game looked or played on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Despite this, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford confirmed that this demo was actual gameplay.
After six years in development, the game came out to much negativity. There were significant graphical downgrades to what the demo presented, not to mention a clunky story and horrific AI (not in a good way). Thanks to Pitchford’s comments, SEGA had to settle for $1.25m against a false advertising lawsuit.
Yet this isn’t where the story ends! In 2018, a modder found a typo in the game’s code; it was one letter in the line responsible for all the Aliens’ AI. Removing that one letter improved the extraterrestrials' behavioural patterns tenfold. Who knew the game itself was holding out on us all this time?