10 Video Games That Punished You For Buying Them
9. Don't Buy This
When a game's title straight up tells you not to buy it, you can't fault anyone else when you fork over your hard-earned moolah for a disk full of near-literal crap.
Case in point, we have Don't Buy This - a 1985 collection of, to quote the box art, "five of the worst games ever."
Publisher Firebird decided to take the very worst games submitted to them for consideration and bundle them into an anthology on the ZX Spectrum, priced at around £2.50 - admittedly only about a tenner in 2024 money.
All the same, anyone miffed by the end result being nothing more than a low-effort collection of the naffest games imaginable couldn't really complain to Firebird, who not only used the games' awfulness as a marketing hook, but even encouraged players to pirate the anthology instead.
Hilariously, Don't Buy This pulled off a reverse-psychology coup by becoming a major commercial success for Firebird, making it slightly baffling that a planned sequel - with working titles including Don't Buy This 2, Don't Buy This Again, and Don't Buy This Either - never materialised.