9 "Must-Have" Video Game Peripherals (That Instantly Flopped)

5. Skate Deck - PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/Nintendo Wii

Tony Hawk Ride
Activision

What it was: You can't fault Activision's thought process. Guitar Hero and it's numerous sequels had been snatched up like hot cakes in the mid-noughties, so how could the premise of a skating game with an actual (kinda) skateboard as the controller possibly flop?

Tony Hawk: Ride arrived in 2009 to show the publisher exactly how to turn skateboarding games into the antithesis of fun.

Why it flopped: For an entertainment product such as Ride, the quality and reliability of its gimmicky selling point - the controller - was crucial to its success. The bad news for Activision was that, outside of 'basic' tricks like ollies and manuals, getting the board to recognise more complex strings of stunts amounted to luck more than proper foot movement. That failure, combined with a hefty asking price and the strict requirement of having to use the peripheral to play resulted in the game's critical and commercial destruction.

The series never managed to recover from the debacle and Activision appears to have placed Tony's video game career on hold indefinitely for the forseeable future.

In this post: 
Power Glove
 
First Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.