8 Video Games That Utterly Failed To Live Up To The Hype

The marketing behind this game was an easy home run for Atari. They could have literally yelled from their offices to kids on the street "Do you want to play Pac-Man at home" and they'd have a mob swarming the place within a minute. Pac-Man fever was rampant back in the heady days of the arcade, with the little yellow dot munching pellets and coins from punters with wanton abandon.

So sure were they that the title would be a smash hit, Atari did the most logical thing possible....in that they completely half-arsed it and ordered one man, Todd Frye to complete the job in just SIX MONTHS. Atari then went away rubbing its hands and ordered that 1 million copies of the game be manufactured as they were confident it would shift this stockpile in weeks.

And they were right. It sold like hotcakes! However, it turns out that the reason these cakes were steaming was that they were piles of absolute hot garbage. Todd went on record to state how he had to work around not only a tight schedule but also hardware so inferior he couldn't actually get all the ghosts to appear on the screen at once, hence why the game flickers as it loads different aspects to avoid keeling over and dying.

Critics and fans hated this game, seeing it as a poor knock-off that utterly failed to live up to the hype, and if Atari were paying attention to this reaction rather than the sales, they might have not been so keen to make a little title called E.T which would end up sinking the entire industry.