12 Video Games Too Big To Fail (That Did Anyway)

1. Too Human

Why It Was "Too Big"

Too Human was an epic action RPG from developers Silicon Knights (Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain), with the publishing might of Microsoft Game Studios behind it.

Microsoft did a fantastic job hyping the game up as the next big thing for the RPG genre, and given their prior successes and their talking-up of a potential trilogy, it was easy to believe them.

Why It Failed Anyway

Too Human had a troubled development from the beginning, starting out life in 1999 as a PS1 game, before shifting to the GameCube in 2000, and sitting dormant for five years before it was revived from scratch on the Xbox.

As delay followed delay, the budget ballooned to an estimated $80 million, and it wasn't until nine years after original production began that the final game released.

Reviews were thoroughly mediocre, citing impressive world-building but lacklustre storytelling and frustrating gameplay, with much criticism centred on the combat.

The Damage

Too Human sold just 700,000 units, immediately killing any prospect of a trilogy, and if that wasn't bad enough, Silicon Knights was sued into bankruptcy by Epic Games following a dispute over their illegal use of Unreal Engine 3.

The company was consequently instructed to destroy any unsold copies of games they had developed using UE3, quite literally resulting in Too Human being obliterated from existence in every legal sense, save for the physical copies already on the market.

The game wasn't good, but damn, that's a cruel fate.