VGC Top Ten - Most Overhyped Games Ever Part 1 - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 12 September 2009 / 58,464 Views
When thinking of the “top ten most overhyped games ever” list, I realized that one list alone was simply not going to cut the mustard. Basically there is a problem with lumping modern games in with older ones, due to the advent of the internet. Some almost mundane games seem to get a shedload of over-hype, which the most successful game “back in the day” would even hope to get. The internet has, in a way, made us far more susceptible to developer, fan, publisher, or media hype.
Remember, just because a game is on this list does not mean it is a bad game or “over-rated” but that it was over-hyped to an unrealistic volume long before release. In many ways, this sheer overexposure to a game can ruin the game due to bad reviews, or unfair expectations, and in other cases, as you will see, some games were overhyped for no real reason alone.
10. Dragonball GT: Final Bout – (PS1)
The culprit: Fan Over-hype upon re-release
In 1997, the majority of Dragonball Z, a popular Japanese fighting anime, had not even hit American airwaves, nor was it really all that popular on the grand scheme of things. Bandai, for whatever reason, decided to go ahead and release a game that sat in the chronology of the series, almost 5 years before it really should have. The game bombed, and was universally forgotten by everyone except for huge Dragonball fans. Fast forward a few years, and Dragonball Z is the poster boy of Cartoon Network’s Toonami Block, raking in fat cash and selling all means of merchandise. Suddenly this once obscure game was getting talked up by the fans for its extreme rarity alone.
Not only could you find out from Dragonball enthusiasts that it “was the best fighting game ever made” but it was also “worth however much you can find it for”. The latter was a ridiculous statement as you could get the game for the measly sum of over one-hundred fifty dollars in U.S. cash alone, on Ebay and any other secondary market. The scalpers drove this game to such levels of hype that it was once again released, and everyone with 20 bucks in their pockets could find out the truth: Dragonball GT: final Bout was a mediocre fighter, and was broken in many ways on the gameplay front. Sorry Vegeta, this game’s power level was not over 9000.
9. Final Fantasy 8 – (PS1)
The culprit: Relentless ad campaign
9-9-99, a date that will be burnt in my head for a while. Not only was this day the launch of Sega’s Dreamcast, but the release for a game that I was inanely hyped for, that game was Final Fantasy 8. After the shocking western success of Final Fantasy 7, Squaresoft knew they had struck gold with Playstation owners. After a few years it was once again time to roll the hype train, a prominent activity of any Final Fantasy game. First a few screenshots popped up, then Official Playstation magazine distributed demo disks that showed a video trailer, then the crown jewel. A small upstart game called Brave Fencer Musashi was packaged with a playable demo of Final Fantasy 8, and many simply bought the game just to play the demo.
Poor lonely Musashi aside, the hype train kept rolling and rolling until fans of the series were left in a feverous state. Final Fantasy 8 was one of the few games back then that Walmart hyped up, and created a preorder campaign, almost a year before the release. Once the date hit, Final Fantasy 8 blew sales expectations out the window and racked up monstrous initial sales. While a commercial success, many felt the title to be a step above Final Fantasy VII in many ways including graphics, but a step back in a few ways such as storytelling and some gameplay. To this day, many are divided as to whether Final Fantasy 8 was good or not, and one can only assume that the games hype factor was partly to blame. Fans wanting either another game with Cloud or one that played similar, were grossly disappointed.
8. Super Mario bros. 3 - (NES)
The culprit: Feature film as commercial
Movie theaters are a great way to promote a product. Whether it be product placement campaigns or actual commercial before a movie, we have seen many studios go for thisd demographic. But it takes real balls to try and make a movie out of a sommercial, that’s where the movie Wizard steps in. Just prior to Super Mario Bros 3’s North American release, Universal Studios decided to bury the hatchet with a long standing feud they were having with Nintendo because of the game Donkey Kong. The movie “The Wizard” was created as a showpiece (a.k.a commercial) for Universal Studios and Nintendo games such as Ninja Gaiden and the as of yet unreleased Super Mario Bros 3. Just like the classic film “the Last Starfighter”, Wizard glamorizes video games and showcases what would eventually usher in competitive gaming.
As the back of the DVD box states: "the story follows a boy named Corey Woods (Fred Savage) that realizes his emotionally troubled kid brother is a video game prodigy, the two run away together to enter the ultimate video game competition in California. But getting there is half the battle: With their parents, older brother (Christian Slater) and a bounty hunter in pursuit and new friend Haley along for the ride, the boys set their sights on the big tournament, where they hope to haul in the $50,000 prize."
7. Pac-Man - (Atari 2600)
The culprit: home version was inferior to arcade
Based on a popularity that had not been rivaled at the time, Pac-man was a sure bet to rake some cash in for Atari. It was at this time that Pac-man was so popular that there was tacky pop song about Pac-man addiction and arcades were being filled by people trying to break high scores. Not trying to avoid money Atari, tried to make a home version for its Atari 2600 that had all of the chills and thrills of the original; problem was the 2600 was not an arcade machine. Due to memory limitations, and a short development time, Pac-Man 2600, turned out to be the “Sam’s Choice cola” to the arcades “Pepsi”, a game of inferior quality.
While the port sold 7 million copies and is the best-selling Atari 2600 title, it was critically panned. Critics focused on the game play and audio-visual difference from the arcade version. Initially, the port boosted the video game industry's presence in retail, but has since been cited as a contributing factor to the North American video game crash of 1983. Supposedly Atari even made 12 million units of the game anticipating insane profits, that really did not happen.
6. Battlecruiser: 3000AD - (PC)
The culprit: One-man hype machine
Battlecruiser: 3000AD is one of the many victims of a process in which a creator or visionary behind a game starts to hype the game up himself, for no real reason at all. Enter Derek Smart, popular game developer of the Battlecruiser franchise. The hype began in 1992 as ads began popping up in PC magazines saying: "The last thing you'll ever desire". Derek Smart then took it upon himself to hype the game up in interviews whenever he could. In one such interview he claimed that Battlecruiser 3000AD used a neural network to perform artificial intelligence tasks in the game. However, this claim has been criticized as highly improbable by other games designers. In one article in a computer games magazine, Keith Zabalaoui, former NASA programmer and one of the designers of the Close Combat series of strategy games, was quoted as saying,
"I have a hard time believing it's in there... the concept of training [neural nets] to do the complex tasks required in a game is inconceivable. It's mumbo jumbo. I guarantee you that if there's a neural net that does anything in this game this man would be in the Computer Science Hall of fame.”
When the game finally released in 1997, after numerous slowdowns, many found it not only buggy, but incomplete in many areas. Suddenly the claims by Smart had an adverse effect on the game, as many started flamewars, and trolling campaigns on various websites to sabotage the game. Smart has released several patches for the game, and rests the game problems solely on the publisher Take-Two, saying that: “they have messed the game up in some way”
5. Mortal Kombat - (Multi)
The culprit: Media Craze
Mortal Kombat is a testament that the media can hype things up much more than videogame companies can. What started as a small arcade fighting game, soon turned into a mass market franchise containing movies, TV, and books. Personally I don’t think It would have gotten that big, had it not been form media hype and public outcry. Seemingly, right after the games genesis people began to scapegoat the game for any misdeed that occurred supposedly in its name. Now the media had a new poster child for the fall of western civilization: Mortal Kombat.
Take this one notable court case for example:
"On November 22, 1997, thirteen-year-old Noah Wilson died when his friend Yancy stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife. The mother of Noah, Andrea Wilson, alleges that her son was stabbed to death because of his obsession with the Midway game Mortal Kombat. She alleges that Yancy S. was so obsessed with the game, that the child thought he was actually the character Cyrax." (from wikipedia)
While this was from one of the later games, these court cases populated the newspapers for years. As with musical artists like Eminem and Insane Clown Posse, their popularity only went up after people began to boycott the product, and harp on its influence.
4. Shenmue – (DC)
The culprit: a niche game touted as mainstream
Shenmue did a lot of amazing things for gaming, including the creation of Quick Time Events (QTEs) and was one of the first games to really bring items usually found in role playing games, and sim games to the mainstream. Problem was that for all of the innovation, Shenmue still targeted the smaller niche gamer, but was hyped for the wrong audience. After release many critics loved the game, but other said the game was self-indulgent and pretentious. According to Wikipedia "the game, which cost an unprecedented $70 million to make," was never going to recoup the cost to create the game, and is seen as a critical masterpiece but a failure in terms of sales despite efforts from Sega and the gaming media.
3. Daikatana – (PC)
The culprit: One-man hype machine part 2
This picture pretty much speaks for itself (from an ad campaign):
John Romero, much like Derek Smart, lost a lot of face for overhyping a first person shooter by the name of Daikatana. While an ambitious project, Daikatana turned out to be an extremely outdated game and full of bugs. One of the most notable bugs in the game is the fact that Enemies in the game typically marched straight towards the player regardless of the player's location, often resulting in enemies getting stuck behind simple barriers, with no attempt to avoid structures or move around objects. The game was criticized for looking outdated in 1997, when it was originally supposed to release, and looked even worse in 2000, when it finally released. The main problem for Romero was that he was seen as a video game prodigy, and nothing he could do was bad in many eyes, that is until Daikatana came out.
2. Black and White – (PC)
The culprit: One-man hype machine part 3
Black and White was one of those games, that was so undeniably ambitious and daring, that you could tell it would cause a critical rift on many fronts. Black and White was a “God game” that allowed the player to explore duality and make choices for the sake of good or evil, a gaming concept seen numerous time today. The Game was created by Peter Molyneux, who unfortunately has gained a small reputation for overstating what his games bring to the table. When Black and White came out it was riding a wave of critical anticipation and hype so large that it won all sorts of awards including a few very prestigious ones for game development. Then the critics began to realize that they were starting to be duped on a few of the games promises, and began to place the game on “overrated” lists and such. Molyneux then began to go on interviews and state things like "Black and White was going to a 5 game series that will keep going forever", and that "Black and White 2 was going to be the greatest game ever made."
Unfortunately for Molyneux, this trend seems to continue from this point on.
1. E.T. extra terrestrial - (Atari 2600)
The culprit: greed
As stated before in the Pac-man entry, the Atari 2600 was starting to really push gamers and a landslide of “shovelware games” were starting to over-saturate the market. After the surprise success of the film E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Atari knew that a good amount of money would be probable, if they could make a movie based on the property. Due to the success of an Indiana Jones game and a Star wars game, licensed movie tie-ins were becoming a huge cash cow for Atari. Due to a licensing dispute, the actual production of E.T. was delayed until some six weeks before the projected release. The developers did the best that they could with the short time given, but E.T. The Extraterrestrial was universally panned for being boring and uninspired.
The real problem was that Atari simply produced too many cartridges, and this was one contributing factor the the video games crash of the 1980’s. In hopes of high sales figures, Atari demanded its retailers place orders in advance for the entire year. At that time, Atari had dominated the software and hardware market, and was routinely unable to fill orders. At first, retailers responded by placing orders for more supplies than they actually expected to sell, but gradually, as new competitors began to enter the market, Atari started receiving an increasing number of order cancellations, for which the company was not prepared.
People like Steven Spielberg himself didn’t help by throwing around Buzzwords like “certifiable genius” when speaking of the game, and its developers.
This glut of unwanted cartridges led to one of the biggest flops of all time, and the eventual burial of millions of said games in a New Mexico landfill.
That’s it folks, keep your eyes open for part 2 of this list where we look at modern overhyped games.
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Sonic Tuesday....
The Wizard gave me Jenny Lewis.
The movie can do no wrong in my world.
the most overhyped game (and the most overrated game) ever has got to be...
GTA4
by far...... (wheres the gameplay??...., just throw in a lot of cool dialogs and a better grafix, and you got GTA4...., but even the darkness and excpecially Mass Effect gave a much better feeling of exploring the enviroment and having a lot of diffrent submissions to tryout....., even chinatown DS's a better game in all)
then in second place goes to
Halo 3
(but Halo 3 at least plays smooth on the second most difficulty, on the normal difficulty its a bit to simple, and has cool multipalyer part...)
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How can Shenmue or any Dreamcast game for that matter be overhyped when NO ONE was buying Dreamcasts or DC games on the first place! LOL
I am curious why the product of marketing for a game, which a company spends money on to generate awareness, gets lumped in with "hype". It is MARKETING to create brand awareness. As I see it, hype comes from people outside of the company's marketing realm, who overrate something and talk about too much.
By the way, regarding Battlecruiser, Derek Smart later admitted in an interview when he started the talk, he didn't even know how to program. He did some research into neural networks, and did a research paper, then went nuts with the design specs.
Worst list ever
@--OkeyDokey--
Yes, but like many people are saying, part of being 'overhyped' also means they didn't live up to expectations. And half the games on this list not only lived up to expectations, but were well recieved for their time or are well remembered today. And as I said before, this list smells more like a 'overhyped by people over the years online' list and not so much 'overhyped when they came out' list.
@Seraphic
You don't even own 8 :P unless you've finished it in the past
OT: Why isn't FFVII up there along with FFVIII?
I knew about that DBZ game, lol my cousin totally got that one, he had to mod his playstation though.
And why dont i know half the games on this list? are they all OLD? if so... it just made me feel better about my age not being to old at all. (19) :D
And yes i agree, after FFVII the only thing VIII had going for it was Graphics and Art-Style other then that i also feel VII was better then VIII.
Great list, I loved FFVIII. It is unfortunate that it had to follow a game as awesome and successful as FFVII. I feel that it's success was based in comparison.
I agree with Darth, the titles are based on games extremely over-hyped, and failed to succeed financially/and or quality wise at meeting that hype. Not necessarily just hyped titles. Many titles are extremely hyped, but manage to back up the hype. Examples, Halo, KZ2, ect.
I am sure games like Haze, Lair and Too Human will make future lists....:P.
Good list actually :) Though I never knew about the DBZ game :-P
I don't think shenmue should be on this list. I think it delivered and it wasn't overhyped.
If you want a real "over hyped" game, you should have listed the original "halo killer:" killzone 1. That game was pushed to the moon and fell wayyyyyyyy short of expectations.
Interesting list, I have to say. Yes, some of those are good games, but the hype for them was ludicrous. However, I find it interesting how you have FF8 and not FF7, which also got an insane amount of hype. Otherwise, I think it's pretty close.
@NightDragon: Sorry, Mario 3 was bundled in the "Challenge Set", which retailed for $89.99 in the USA. It was fairly late in the NES lifespan, but I can't say it was an unbundled game.
@kenryoku - most overtalked on the internet? You do realize that the internet as we know it wasnt around for some of these games? :-D
lol Fred Savage.
Haha, yeah, that gun in the Daikatana screen looks EXACTLY like Samus' arm cannon in Metroid Prime O_o
do people refuse to read
they are games that fell short of their massive hype!
Mario bros 3 overhyped? it was over hyped but it deserved it, the game delivered in its expectations
Daikatana looks like metroid prime lol
How can Super Mario Bros. 3 be over hyped? It's one of the greatest games of all time!
What --OkeyDokey-- said.
Can't you guys read? Overhyped game =/= bad, or even disappointing game.
Wow! Joke list? Half of these games are great (and highly influential)!
No offense, but this list fails.
Personally, I feel that Mario 3 is the best designed and arguably the best gaming experience of all time. There could have been a 200 million dollar add campaign and I still don't think it would have been over hyped.
I object to Dragon Ball: Final Bout (I liked it!) and especially Black and White being anywhere near an overhyped list.
what ff8 overhyped? hell noo!
i hope halo 1 2 and 3 are on the top spot!
Sorry.. but this might be one of the worst lists I've seen..
Don't think I agree with even half of these games on the list as being "Over Hyped"
but that's just m-o
I still have that movie The Wizard on VHS.
I agree for the most part.
Apart from comments about FFVIII. That game was fucking amazing. One of the most underrated games of the decade. Almost like Valkyria chronicles this decade.
Black and White may have been overhyped, but the game was fucking awesome... if just for the fact you could feed your people to your pet... also it's not over hype if the game meets the hype... Mario 3 is such a game...
Totally disagree with Mario 3 being up there... if anything, the game EXCEEDED the hype leading up to its release, because it went on to become the most critically acclaimed and best selling non pack-in game of all time.
Actually, I'd say Mario 3 is the number 1 post-release hyped up game of all time, because it led to everything from breakfast cereal to a Saturday morning cartoon show dedicated to the game, and was even featured in major motion pictures like Beethoven and 3 Ninjas years after its initial release!
Overall, great list though, can't really argue with any of them... other more recent games that should be on the next list are.. Enter The Matrix (which coincided with the release of Reloaded in May 2003), Halo 3, GTA IV, the PS3 (haha!), Super Smash Bros. Brawl, The Conduit, etc.
@ OkeyDokey: I don't know, Gears of War perhaps?
@spdk1 ahhh understood I'll accept the standardisation of QTEs from Shenmue
@spdk1
I think its pretty safe to say Nintendo new Mario 3 was going to be a success. By that time, Mario was a franchise already, and Mario 2 had already sold millions. Mario 3 was already hyped up the wazoo. The movie was just advertising to remind people the game was coming out and to get more people hyped into buying it. Which it did.
They wren't called QTEs until shenmue though, other games like Dragons Lair on Laserdisc, used something like them, but they were revolutionized and solidified with shenmue. using the word "creation" was probably a bad choice on my part.
Shenmue was released on Dec. 26 1999, prior to that about a week ago Sword the Berserk Gut's Rage was also released. So how can Shenmue claim first QTE when I'm 100% positive Berserk had QTEs as well
This list smells overwhelmingly of 'overtalked about on the Internet as being overhyped' and not 'overhyped'. For instance...Mario 3? Final Fantasy VIII? Pac-Man? Easily games that just as many people (or more) will say they like when you ask them, outside of the defensive 'cover my fanboy bases' internet gaming community. Heck, lots of people liked Black and White. It even got a sequel.
The Battlecruiser and Daikatana thing you may have something going there, but again, there's WAY more overhyped games out there. These are probably better examples of 'failed marketing', as is ET (the biggest and best example of them all).
It's kind of like when a lot of modern TV shows feature folks playing the Wii, it feels fake almost every time, and looks more like hype and product placement than anything else....imagine that for 2 hours.
Not at all as SMB 3 was my favorite Mario game, but I do feel as if it was unneeded hype for something that was going to be popular in the first place, and a two hour commercial for the game and the power glove. what if the game was bad? then the movie and Nintendo would have looked foolish.
And I get that you wanted to talk about how bad "The Wizard" is, but still... SMB3 is like the quintessential game that lived up to ridiculous hype. The game sold GTA numbers before the development of the European market, and went to be considered the masterpiece of it's genre and one of the greatest games of all time. If anyone bought SMB3 because they saw "The Wizard" do you think they were disappointed?
Tyrannical,
Are you serious? The game barely even resembles Pac-Man. Hardly even a maze, not in the iconic colors, and he's not even eating dots.
Let's just say your memory of the game is not the same as this guy's:
http://www.ataritimes.com/article.php?showarticle=255
or this guy's:
http://www.atarihq.com/reviews/2600/pac-man.html
it's an in-line citation, and I do mention wikipedia in there, but I will make it more clear for you
Stephen Kelley (author)- Are you too lazy to write your own sentences? In the Shenmue section you wrote, "the game, which cost an unprecedented $70 million to make", which is a direct line from the Wikipedia article except from IGN.
I expected to see a lair/haze in the list, not a game that sold near 8m and has a critic score of 9.4
Atari 2600 Pacman was awesome, and was one of the better arcade ports. I think the author is just too young to remember. 2600 MS. Pacman was even better
My guesses for part 2
MGS2, Halo 3, San Andreas, Fable, Killzone 2, Twilight Princess, Smash Bros. Brawl, Doom 3... what am I missing?
The hell? Overhyped implies that it did not live up to the hype, only about half of the list here actually applies in this case. Others have me scratching my head, like GT Final Bout, which was never hyped and always known as a PoS. ALWAYS.
ShenMue?! This is the greatest game EVER. This and Zelda OoT.
FF8 is the best game ever to me o_O
otherwise, nice list
I liked black and white.
nothign beets picking up a lazy villager and tossing him far far away and watching him plumit to his death.
i digg FF 8 more than 7 i would say
ha ha, nice article
great list but i think MK should be above Shenmue
I don't see how a game that is one of the biggest selling and highest rated games of all time can be considered over-hyped?
I mean if the list was 'most-hyped' games of all time yes, but its not. Its over hyped which implies that the hype was bigger than the reality. For SMB3 the hype was smaller than the reality only because the game was so very successful.
While I don't really agree with Mario 3 it is a very good list. Was the game hyped big time, sure! But it did sell over 18 million copies and was the number one selling game of all time not bundled until recently. The game really couldn't have sold much better, so I think the ridiculous hype was matched by ridiculous sales! Every other game on the list I agree with, and I do see where you coming form since Mario had a lot of Hype!
Very good list.
"It's funny. Molyneux says the same thing about every project he touches. He's the Developer Who Cried Wolf. One of these days he'll actually make a perfect game, but nobody will notice or care about him anymore."
What a great line. Best thing I've read all day.
Remember when you're gonna mention killzone 2 (cause we know you are :p) it wasn't a sony developer that said that it was ingame, it just wasn't denied either.
"Regardless of the Molyneaux bitching, his games are usually quite fun. While they are not the end all be all of gaming, they are quite entertaining."
They are- Dungeon Keeper is one of my favourite games of all time. I love the bloke to bits, bit I just wish he'd keep his gob shut at times (and release Fable 2 for the PC and stop buggering around with artificial exclusives).
@spdk1, No the Who probably didn't even know about it. I think one of the marketing guys was just a Who fan and thought the idea of an idiot savant making it to the top would be a great story for Nintendo games instead of pinball.
Regardless of the Molyneaux bitching, his games are usually quite fun. While they are not the end all be all of gaming, they are quite entertaining.
Black and White- broken, buggy and dull as fuck, it was just a Tamagotchi game crossed with a really, really crap RTS, featuring awful controls and annoying unskippable 'quests'. As the write-up mentioned it got universally good reviews from a tame press, who really should have known better.
I remember some starry-eyed bellend posting a thread on the official B&W forums saying he'd spent a ridiculous amount of time on the first island and everyone else should do the same so they could thoroughly experience the game. Cue lots of little minions posting about their 'amazing experiences' in teaching their ape to crap and collect wood. Thrilling- a finer example of the Emperor's New Clothes there has yet to be.
the list is not overarted games as I stated in the intro....over hyped games....big difference
final fantasy 8 is under-rated if ya ask me.
Rubang: Really!?
that's crazy...LOL was the Who supposed to have anything to do with it originally?
I found a used VHS copy of The Wizard at a thrift store, and gladly paid $6 for it. Now it's out on DVD. Ya know, it was originally dreamed up as a remake of The Who's Tommy, but about a video game wizard instead of a pinball wizard. So as a Who fan and Nintendo fan, the movie is double awesome.
It's funny. Molyneux says the same thing about every project he touches. He's the Developer Who Cried Wolf. One of these days he'll actually make a perfect game, but nobody will notice or care about him anymore.
Nice article, this should bring in a lot of views
WOW fabulous list!
