9 Video Game Titles Which Lied To You
This time, it really is 'final'. Promise!
What's in a name? When you're trying to sell a product, quite a lot as it happens. That's why most video games tend to favour titles that either obey the rule of cool, or say exactly what's in the tin. Preferably both.
True, some of the industry's most heralded franchises have pretty strange names, nearly all the result of continuing the canon of a legacy mistranslation, but for the most part, game names are clear, direct, and leave the player in no doubt about what they're buying. Sonic the Hedgehog - a game in which you're a hedgehog called Sonic. Tomb Raider: you can bet you'll be raiding some tombs. Firewatch. Any guesses what that entails?
Sequelitis can lead to some slight mistruths - Tomb Raider II, for example, doesn't have any - but in those cases, the nominative dissonance is understood as a product of success. After all, Donkey Kong Country 3 doesn't feature its titular gorilla but it could hardly have been renamed 'Kiddy Kong Country' now could it?
There are a handful of games, however, whether through promotional bluster or development inconstance, which outright lie to the player through their names. Or maybe because there wasn't a primatologist on staff.
9. Daytona USA
You'd presume Daytona Beach, FL, and quite specifically, the Daytona International Speedway, would be the perfect setting for an arcade racer called Daytona USA. And you'd be quite correct. Pity then, that SEGA's rubber-burning coin-op has absolutely nothing to do with the eponymous city and circuit.
Well, mostly. When SEGA USA's Tom Petit, inspired by NASCAR's enduring North American success, suggested it as a model for an arcade Ridge Racer killer, SEGA AM2 set about intricately replicating the world famous Daytona 500 course. Satellite imagery was obtained for the purpose - not as simple as a Google Maps search in 1993 - to craft a showpiece track as realistic as the day's arcade boards could allow. Director Toshihiro Nagoshi even flew out to Florida, where he walked a lap of the actual track to better understand its camber.
The efforts for accuracy were entirely in vain. To keep costs down, SEGA declined on a license with NASCAR, resulting in a racing game featuring a highly authentic but entirely unofficial version of Daytona's famous circuit, the, er, 'Three-Seven Speedway'.