Every console in history has at least one title that totally embodies both everything the hardware was capable of, and what we all loved about it. From 1972s Magnavox Odyssey and the beginning of the first generation of gaming, to modern day multi-purpose mega-consoles, every one has had a game that fans will play until dawn rolls around and their hands cramp up. On the flip side, whilst 40 years of games consoles has produced some truly memorable games, there have been more than a few titles that designers, producers and fans alike would sooner forget. For every Super Mario there's a Hudson Hawk. Who? Exactly. Sometimes, in an industry always looking to the next generation, a game can be so bad that it becomes a black mark against the console(s) it gets released on. Sometimes, something is so disastrous that it kills that console entirely. Whether it happened through terrible sales or simply word of mouth, here are 9 ill-conceived games that actually killed their consoles...
9. Atari 2600 - ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982)
Perhaps the most famous flop in video game history, ET: The Extra Terrestrial single handily killed the 2600, cost Atari millions of dollars and more importantly its reputation. Based on Steven Spielbergs film of the same name, ET was the first game adapted from a movie and it was expected to capitalise on the worldwide success of the motion picture. Unfortunately for game designer Howard Scott Warshaw, negotiations to secure the rights to make the game dragged on for so long that he ended up with only five weeks to get the game ready for a Christmas release, resulting in something that's generally thought of as one of the worst ever made and the biggest commercial failure the industry has ever seen. In fact, the backlash was so severe that it lead to the famous video game crash of 1983, known in Japan as Atari Shock. This recession saw revenues fall to $100 million by 1985, having been as high as $3.2 billion only two years previous. This drop of almost 97 per cent brought the second generation of consoles to a sudden and unforeseen end. Atari were left with so many unsold and returned cartridges that they secretly buried millions of them in a New Mexico landfill, an urban legend that was proven to be a fact when an excavation took place in 2013. Former Atari manager James Heller, who was in charge of the first burial, later admitted that close to a million more cartridges were burned under his watch.
