8 Video Games That Escaped Development Hell (But Shouldn’t Have)

Time In Development Hell: 9 Years

Too Human – an ambitious adventure game based around Norse mythology – started development in 1999 for the PS1, and ended up being released in 2008 for the Xbox 360. Quite an epic trek then, so it’s no wonder the end result is a bit messed up.

The game was a originally designed to be a multi-disc epic for the PlayStation, before Nintendo managed to lure the development team over to the GameCube instead. The team soon became busy on other projects though, so Too Human took a backseat for a few years and by the time they returned to it the GameCube was already old hat. The project jumped ship again to Xbox 360, where it was pegged for release in 2006.

It took until 2008 for Too Human to drag itself across the finish line, and at the cost of your average summer blockbuster. It wasn’t the ground-breaking third person action game it had been built up as, and it played like a boring version of Devil May Cry. It got weirder too, when a lawsuit meant the developer had to destroy all unsold copies of the game in a dispute over the graphics engine, adding copious shakers of salt to an already fatal wound.