9 Video Game Demos That Totally Lied To You

1. Halo 2 (E3 2003)

And finally, we have the most legendarily misleading gameplay demo of all time: Bungie's infamous E3 2003 reveal of Halo 2.

The demo showed off an (at the time) unprecedented level of visual detail and cinematic seamlessness for the Xbox, but because the developer eventually realised they couldn't get it to run satisfactorily on the console, the entire graphics engine was scrapped following E3.

The final game looked nowhere near as impressive, and the expansive Earth city level featured in the demo didn't even appear in the end product. Lead designer Chris Butcher said of the trailer, "We were building stuff that just couldn't be played, in any engine...If you look at the level with the Flood, inside the quarantine area - that is the remaining 20 per cent of a gargantuan, sprawling level that was meticulously built and hand-constructed, but that could never, ever have shipped in any engine."

343 Industries did in fact flirt with releasing the demo as part of the Master Chief Collection, but due to the demo running on some pretty strict rails and effectively being held together by a number of invisible technical workarounds, they decided against it.

Halo 2 was a damn fine game all things considered, but the restructuring of the game's engine placed a considerable strain on production, and contributed to its campaign being significantly scaled back. Hence that infuriating cliffhanger ending.

Which of these deceptive video game demos infuriated you the most? Shout it out in the comments!