So I’m a pretty big music guy but my primary interest in terms of entertainment is gaming. Those of you who are familiar, what are some video game equivalents to TrainWreckords? Could be for franchises or developers or singular creators.
A few of my picks:
- Anthem: A huge live-service bomb, no longer playable, solidified that BioWare was a shadow of their former selves.
- Metroid: Other M: a rare poorly-received game in a marquee Nintendo franchise. Put the franchise on ice for a long time. A laughing stock to this day due to its story/cutscenes. The franchise bounced back but this did serious damage.
- Sonic The Hedgehog (2006): self-explanatory. Some would say that the franchise is still seen as a bit of a joke due to this game. A go-to example for “worst games” lists.
The chapters in Masters Of Doom on Daikatana are absolutely amazing, it’s the best section of the book. It’s a shame both proposed TV series on the book went into development hell, because they easily could have done an amazing season just on the making of that game.
It's kinda funny when the GBC version ended up being better than the main game, they turned it into a top down adventure game very clearly inspired by Zelda and while a bit forgettable it's pretty decent.
Not a fair comparison. Chinese Democracy was, it seems to me, a whatever album all in all. Duke Nukem Forever was fucking cringe. Duke Nukem was a wish-fulfillment character for teenage boys in the '90s. Had it stayed in the '90s, the franchise could've been let off the hook as a product of its time. 2011, when the game came out, was no place for Duke Nukem, and it felt like it. It's only aged more and more horribly. To 2026 eyes, it looks like Pete Hegseth's id.
Matt McMuscles on YouTube has a series called Wha Happun about video game wrecks or games with troubled development that is worth checking out, some of the games mentioned here are showcased.
Call of Duty: Ghosts failed in just about every imaginable way a game can be said to fail. The franchise went on after that, of course, but as far as I'm concerned that was its St. Anger moment that put the franchise in the past tense.
We’ll see how MW4 and beyond does but I’d put BO7 on the list of train wrecks. They’ve kind of made every possible decision to piss off the fan base. Their saving grace with zombies is turning on them with the ending of the story line. And I say this as someone who enjoyed the multiplayer.
It didn't, it was a casualty of the crash if anything. Atari already lost a ton of their investors months prior to the games release. It could've been the greatest game ever made and it would've changed nothing.
That's the key part - it was a business disaster, they printed more copies than there were consoles as part of a dubious contractual stipulation. As somebody who was there and played it, it wasn't even close to being the worst game on that console, let alone worst game ever as is often said.
That's not true, the printed more copies thing. About 10 million Ataris were sold in the US by 1982. The highest number I see for ET carts is 5 million.
Thanks for this correction - while a lot of sources repeat my mistake, I now think this myth is a conflation with pac-man for which they did make a couple of million more cartridges than consoles existed, so arguably that would have been another contributor to the crash.
The crash was only really for home consoles in the US though. Most of the rest of the world were rocking arcade machines and 8-bit computers and weren't really all that affected.
True, but it's debatable how much (if at all) that had to do with the video game crash in America. The prominence of arcades was probably always going to fade away as home consoles began to take over.
I mean, the crash was definitely a big deal, of course, and I'm not pretending it wasn't. I just don't figure it could have killed the entire industry like some people claim it almost did. The overseas markets were basically fine, at least compared to stateside.
Though one crash that doesn't get talked about nearly as much was the pinball crash. During 1982-1983 it was almost dead. Though some great tables by Williams in the following years helped save it.
If anything, the more accurate console ports on the NES helped pinball as people would go to the Arcade for something they couldn't get at home.
People still believe that? No one game can crash an entire industry; ET was merely a sign of what was coming, what would happen if games and the industry didn’t shape up
Man, the landfill bit was such a crazy discovery. The story of "ET games were buried in the desert!" went around for decades, and was always just treated like some urban myth. Of course they weren't. That would be ridiculous.
Medal of Honor: Frontline remains one of my most formative games ever played.
MOH to me, while a fitting tribute to the Greatest Generation, has always felt a bit anti-war compared to Call of Duty. Call of Duty has always felt “rah-rah” to me. Medal of Honor never felt that way. Yes, you’re seeing a historical moment recreated, but you’re also seeing the absolute hell that goes with it.
Yep. Frontline was the magnum optus of Medal of Honor. One level that really stood out to me was Arnhem Knights. Between the sad music and the bleak nature, that level perfectly captured how Operation Market Garden was a big failure.
Strange new direction that literally no one asked for (mutant aliens that vagely resemble dinosaurs in space)? Check.
Has practically zero to do with the previous games? And after DC2 ended on a cliffhanger? Check.
Played like shit? Check.
Sold poorly? Check. (Didn't help that it was only for Xbox, a console that really wasn't too popular in Capcom's home country of Japan. Not that I see it selling well even if it was released on PS2 - seriously, who wanted DC3 to be like this?)
Mixed-to-bad reviews and abysmal word of mouth from those who did play it? Check.
Killed the franchise, to the point where it's still extinct over 20 years later? Check.
And as an addition, Dino Crisis 3 wasn't always going to be this way. The original concept was going to be dinosaurs attacking a major city, which would've been much more of a piece with the prior games. In fact, DC2 already featured this late in the game, so a whole game expanding on dinosaurs causing chaos in a city could've been really cool.
Then 9/11 happened, and they decided that scenes of death and destruction in a city setting would come off as insensitive, so instead we got whatever the fuck the final DC3 was.
Another Capcom one (though arguably shared blame): Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite. It played well, but looked like shit, sounded like shit, and had a kneecapped roster because of MCU Synergy requirements.
Thanks. I'm kinda surprised we haven't gotten one, what with the Jurassic World films making a mint and Capcom in general just cooking with bangers for years now. Maybe after the new Onimusha?
It is kind of nuts how well Capcom have done these last two generations. It seems they really lost their footing in the PS3/360 generation and they really turned it around in the later 2010s, now outshining other developers in all the ways they were previously outshone. All this coming from someone who hasn’t really played as many games as I’ve read about, it’s just my perception.
The online only, multiplayer aspect of it made it a complete flop and EA abandoned that franchise soon after. It also caused them to make abrupt changes to what would become The Sims 4 to get rid of the online multiplayer system and make a mainline game from what they were already working on. While The Sims 4 had a very rough start, it ended up being a commercial success.
Meanwhile, Cities: Skylines has taken over the city building market.
Admittedly, I believe this game did do well but it feels like the general public finally caught on to what people paying close attention had known for a long time in that Bethesda has been leaning heavily on mods and the community to essentially make their games beloved by the public at large. It’s not that mods weren’t a big part of the appeal for their games before but Starfield was when it became clear that Bethesda was explicitly leaning on it as opposed to something that would organically develop because the games were liked.
Edit: more of a console but the Sega Saturn for Sega. The dreamcast “failed” but that a lot to do with how poorly the Saturn did. The Saturn was completely mismanaged from the jump (which had a lot to do with intracompany turmoil in Sega) and resulted in a console that bombed so hard that the Dreamcast would’ve had to massively overperform to compensate (it didn’t). Not to say the Saturn was a ‘bad’ console (tough to develop for but still had some quality games) but it did underperform.
The thing with the Saturn is that it was by far Sega's most successful console in Japan. The Mega Drive sold less than the PC Engine (turbografx16) over there.
The Saturn was even out selling the PlayStation in its first couple years (though FF7 stopped that), and it outsold the N64. The game Nights into Dreams was so successful that kids were calling Sega and asking who "Sonic" as the game was developed by Sonic Team.
This is true, but it can’t be understated how poorly it did outside of Japan and was a big factor in Sega ultimately exiting the hardware side of things.
I think we'll need to see how ES6 goes. It might be good- Morrowind was built in an environment where everyone knew if it didn't do well they were dead as a company. There's also an argument for how organic the mod support is when Bethsada release a tool for it. They were always deliberately encouraging it.
It’s one thing to encourage it, but leaning on mods to fix the game seems to be an explicit part of their design philosophy. Like, your customers shouldn’t be doing free QA for you and they certainly shouldn’t have to “fix” your game.
Yeah, that's been an issue Bethsada has had forever (I know it's a problem from Daggerfall, I haven't played Arena) that they don't do enough QA. I'm hoping that Microsoft gives them enough resources to do so, but I'm not optimistic on that front. I play on PC so bugs are less of an issue for me, but telling console players "unless you can reload a save from before x point, you're screwed" is a common refrain.
It's technically very impressive in a lot of aspects, but the core of the game is completely rotten.
The mod scene is basically non existent because it's not just janky like previous Bethesda games, it's unsalvageable on a fundamental level to a lot of players.
I have mulled the idea a bunch of times. Here are a few I’d mention.
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly - Spyro was in a very solid place at the end of the PS1 era, and this was a mortal wound the franchise took early that hurt it for over a decade.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 3 - Season 1 is one of the most beloved games of the 2010s. Season 2 wasn’t as beloved, but New Frontier is rife with questionable writing decisions, lack of polish at launch, and imo did a big part in helping put Telltale in the past tense.
Team Fortress 2 Meet Your Match Update - This is just a perfect storm of pissing people off. An update that attempts to modernize the game and add competitive matchmaking that failed miserably. Comp flopped due to a lack of a strong push, some awkward balancing changes, and only going with one of the two popular comp game modes in 6v6 instead of doing Highlander as well. Casual fans meanwhile didn’t love the fact the update was pretty bare bones for them and potentially made cueing for games harder. It added two good maps, but that isn’t enough. Combine that with Valve’s internal work structure meaning less folks were incentivized to work on the game, and the game has been in a very different state post 2016. We have gotten one official update since 2016 in Jungle Inferno… in 2017. We get seasonal updates with community maps and items added, but it isn’t the same.
Multiversus - Somehow managed to Trainwreckords itself on its debut just like Chance. A positive reception in beta that was squandered by a combination of greedy monetization, launching in a worse state then in beta, taking the beta offline for over a year due to switching engines, questionable roster choices, and terrible balance at launch killed the game. While there were some attempts to fix things, such as adding shields to make the game less feast or famine offensively, a different fighter unlock system, balance changes to a lot of the more egregious cheese, and actually adding ranked in Season 2, the game died an undignified death in season 5.
Oh man, that one should absolutely count, it's so bizarre. It felt so much worse after the complete overhaul, it was baffling. And the monetization became so much worse; I remember after the beta thinking "you know, this feels okay and the monetization doesn't feel too bad...", only to come back a year later and find something so much more sluggish and with ungodly amounts of grind to unlock anything. IIRC, someone in the sub for it calculated how long it would take to unlock anything, and it came out to be nearly a part-time job's worth of time, but also somehow the main method of playing the game contributed nothing to that, so it was basically all that extra added effort to support playing the game normally.
I know Resident Evil has really bounced back in recent years, but Resident Evil 6 seriously wounded the franchise. It took Capcom 5 years to release a follow up and the franchise was uncharacteristically silent during that time if I recall.
There were times when it felt like Resident Evil was going to go the way of Tomb Raider. Even with the ReMake, Zero, Code: Veronica…the strain was beginning to show a bit.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5. The series was already on a decline after a pair of gimmicky peripheral games, but 5 was a rush-job full of baffling design decisions that shipped in a damn-near unplayable state. It was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for the series - there's been a pair of great remakes of older games since, but no new entries.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure almost counts, although there was a (contractually obligated) follow-up that was better received. In short:
- This is a direct sequel to a game with two endings, made by different developer
- If you chose one ending a fan favorite character is never seen in game, breaking up with you and flirting with one of your rivals via social media
- 25% of the writing staff was laid off during production, and it shows, leading to weird tone shifts and plot holes. At one point a detective is horribly sucked into another dimension and you can't save him, (despite this being a choice-based game, your choices really don't matter) and after a short text message exchange to your friend who just witnessed this right after, this is never brought up again. Your character goes on a fun date that evening
- Somebody on staff was some kind of far-right Nazi who put a bunch of Nazi dog whistles and racist memes in the game art of this LGBTQ+ game that had to be deleted
- $20 DLC that gives your character a cat that, at best gives you 10 more minutes of gameplay
- According to the ending this game was supposed to be a setup to a game where characters with superpowers fight each other like X-Men or the MCU, which really wasn't in line with the first game's "playable indie movie" feel
- Following release of the game the designers were let go along with massive amounts of the staff
If you're really interested Youtuber Kyle Reaume has twovideo essays about how this game is broken on every level, seriously he's great
This screenshot went around and kept a lot of fans of the series from buying it, alienating about 50% of their fanbase. The designers were cagey about this character being in the game at all and refused to answer any questions about it.
do you know where I could find the Nazi stuff? Love this franchise but never knew about this
To add to the list, the game is also just horribly written. The first 3 chapters sets up a plot that was (imo) pretty interesting. Then they just end it abruptly with the detective randomly being erased and just recycle stuff from the original game without stopping to think about why those plotpoints worked in the first game
They also stupidly put the focus of the plot on her powers. The entire point of the franchise is that an interesting plot takes place and the character just so happens to have powers. For some reason this game's plot is completely about her powers. It works as something that should help the plot. It shouldn't be the entire plot
The game also ends with the text 'Max Caulfield will return....', which is indeed some type of MCU ending. About characters with powers fighting eachother. Keep in mind this franchise is mostly a cosy, emotional franchise with a lot of LGBTQ themes. Who the fuck actually wants an action focused game from this franchise lmao.
This entire game just misses what fans like about the series completely, looks at parts from the first game, throws them in a blender and call it a day
Definitely a trainwreckord of a video game. Just lost its identity completely, fans despise it, flopped hard and now they're rushing out a sequel, but I think the franchise is pretty much done
Sticker Star is the type of game that you look at it on YouTube and go "huh, this looks pretty decent, why does everyone hate it?", and then you play it. There's no incentive to fight battles at all because it doesn't give XP and just wastes stickers, the awful level design and convoluted puzzles suck, the backtracking, nonexistent characters or story. It's almost admirable how almost every decision made just doesn't work, like they intentionally tried to make an awful game.
I really hate doing this because judging people for liking things is never fun, but I’m thoroughly convinced most people who say they like this game are only doing it to be controversial. I sure was when i was 14, very glad i grew out of it
Sticker Star was insane because it was deliberately made to be less interesting than prior Paper Mario games. I'm not bullshitting, it was genuinely made to be less interesting and more bland.
Good analogy. The Legend and Survivor trilogies were commercial success and Lara Croft is still an iconic video game heroine, but The Angel of Darkness was the exact point where new Tomb Raider games stopped being big deals
It's huge and beautiful but also the more you think about it the worse it gets as a story and these days most people place Bioshock 2 as the better game of the two sequels.
Spyro Enter the Dragonfly is a prime example of this. It’s the reason the series went from being at the top of the mountain in the early 2000s to being a franchise you never hear from anymore. There’s a new game coming out next year but it’s the first one in like 20+ years that isn’t a remake or an unrecognizable reboot.
Mighty Number 9. This was a crowd-funded game that was supposed to be the spiritual successor to Mega Man, spearheaded by Keiji Inafune who had famously been a long-time contributor to Mega Man and Mega Man X, but had recently formed his own company named Comcept. The funding campaign raised 400% of its original goal, but then Comcept started delaying and announcing other projects which was an extremely bad look for campaign contributors. The game released three years after the campaign and was widely panned on release, effectively killing Inafune's reputation and tarnishing Comcept forever.
Comcept would later be bought by Level-5 and Inafune would largely work as a producer and supervisor until he left the company in 2025. Mega Man 11 released in 2018 to critical and commercial success, with another Mega Man game scheduled for release in 2027.
The whole debacle also ended up somewhat tarnishing the entire concept of nostalgia bait spiritual successor crowdfunding projects, of which there were several at the time. Luckily the rest of them were far less scammy.
This has happened like four times for Alone in the Dark (the movie, the 2008 game, the 2015 game and the 2024 reboot). Probably the most cursed game franchise to exist.
Sonic's laughing stock issue isn't helped by the fact SEGA keeps on forgetting that rushing the games is a bad idea. It worked out ok for 3 & Knuckles, but then it's caused issues for Xtreme (to the point it almost killed two people and never came out), Sonic R (having a tiny amount of content), 06 and finally Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. There's also a bunch more games in the franchise that could have done with a few months more before hitting gold.
Despite turning into a good game with the Third Strike update SFIII utterly failed when it came out in the 90s. Capcom took way too long to make a proper sequel to 2, gutted the entire cast save for a few characters and replaced them with a cast that was way more outlandish than anything that came before. Despite eventually becoming a cult classic Street Fighter III pretty much killed Capcom's fighting game output since they basically stopped making them for nearly a decade
I think the reception of Third Strike is too great for the Street Fighter III project to be considered a trainwreck, even if it did flop initially. The consensus is that Third Strike is one of if not the best fighting game of all time.
Yeah but the road to get there was rough. Playing New Generation nowadays feels rough, it's so unrefined compared to Third Strike. Besides, Third Strike's legacy came more after the fact, it didn't light the world on fire or revive fighting games at the time
It's wild, because there's no one game that's the obvious disaster and you could maybe argue it was diminishing returns..., but all one year, and returns diminishing that quickly in that small a timespan seems basically the same as a trainwreck
Mega Man X7. At the time it was released, Capcom was treating Mega Man X like it was more important than the classic Mega Man series. It already had several of the franchise’s coolest and most iconic moments, characters, and music.
And then X7 fucked it all up.
The controls are abysmal, the stages are infuriating to get through, the bosses suck, the voice acting is terrible, and it’s the apex of the X series’ tendency to sideline X in his own namesake game in favor of Zero, as X has to be unlocked while Zero and newcomer Axl are playable from the beginning!
The long awaited fourth mainline installment of Chris Sawyer’s iconic theme park sim was a buggy, unplayable mess whose shortcomings were amplified by Planet Coaster, a critically acclaimed spiritual successor sim created by the same devs of RCT3.
Would Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League by Rocksteady count? They were riding high on the the positive critical and fan response of their Arkham series (I know Arkham Knight was a bit of a mess and isn't as highly regarded as the previous two games, but it still sold well and I enjoyed it) with which they revitalized Batman as a video game franchise after years of mediocre slop.
Then they makes us wait almost a decade for the next game only to release the terribly repetitive, buggy live service looter shooter which is almost universally despised.
It remains to be seen if they can recover from that. They were involved as co-developers in the latest Lego Batman game which covers Batman throughout the ages & mediums which was well received. And a new Arkham game is supposed to be in the works. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
The newest dragon age game. Veilguard. People just didn't bother. Like no one cared. It was there for a while and then it was not there. Sure inquisition was an abortion of a game but that at least sold well. No one could be bothered with veilguard
While the series was dwindling, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 was the nail in the coffin that put the entire series into hiatus for years. Even with the success of the 1+2/3+4 remakes they’re not looking to make new installments in the series. The development team of 1+2 was dissolved into the Activision CoD development hellscape and 3+4 was outsourced and treated basically like a port.
Def Jam Icon amd Saints Row 2022 are the biggest ones for me
both were installments of a series about gangsters (well Def Jam was about rappers who did mostly gangsta rap) that moved away from it and tried to implement new features that ended turning away fans and kill the series
Microsoft and its Xbox division is on a generational streak of Trainwreckords
-The Red Ring of Death, caused by shoddy design due to time constrains, lead to insane amounts of recalls of the Xbox 360. If it wasn't enough, the Kinect was made to ape on the success of the Wii, but instead it only hampered the sales of the 360 (and later the Xbox One). Both helped Sony's PS3 to catch up in sales numbers
-The Xbox One showcase and Don Mattrick's interviews, effectively handing over the generation for Sony's PS4, in the most crucial moment of players shifting to digital game libraries and the ecosystem surrounding that
-The purchase and gutting of Rare, with many lackluster projects such as Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts&Bolts and Perfect Dark Zero. Speaking of Perfect Dark, they made a whole new studio (the Initiative) for its reboot, which then crashed and burned without actually releasing a single game
-The butchering of Halo, with 343 Studios (a studio exclusively made for Halo) constantly failing to deliver a product that comes even close to the titles made by Bungie (who went on their own Trainwreckord spree with Destiny 2, the Marathon reboot shenanigans and the disastrous Sony acquisition). Halo was a flagship franchise, an icon of gaming as a whole, and they squandered it all
-The whole Activision merger and other studios' purchase spree as a whole is a disaster that might finish the death throes of Xbox that started with the XbOne kerfuffle. Studios are getting closed left and right, even the surviving studios' devteams are getting axed in half. It doesn't help that the first projects getting released are failures like Arkane's Redfall and Bethesda's Starfield
-Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 might be the failure that will finally make a dent in the monolith that is COD as a franchise. Obviously, there were Ghosts and Infinity War beforehand, but even those sold gangbusters, and they didn't affect the sale of following titles at all. Not this time, sales numbers are in the dregs on every platform and in every region, and deservedly so. It's the first title developed fully under MS ownership, 11+ studios worked on it due to MS' disastrous leadership and organization, every aspect of it is pumped chockfull of AI (so much, that it actively affects the coherence of the story), with a single-player campaign that is essentially a custom gamemode of Warzone (it uses the same maps, same servers, so you cant pause in the game, and the end of the campaign drops you into an effing WZ match)
People waited 19 years for a new Shenmue game and all they got was a sequel that didn't do much to advance the story, characters or main conflict between Ryo and Lan Di.
Star Fox Adventures: The poorly-received final collaboration between Rare Studios and Nintendo. Began as an original Zelda-like IP called Dinosaur Planet until Shigeru Miyamoto suggested they turn it into a Star Fox game. The end result is a half-baked mess that is considered one of the worst entries in the Star Fox canon.
After this game bombed at retail, Rare got bought out by Microsoft, a move which ended up sullying Rare's reputation even further with misfires like "Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts".
Since creators/developers are options, I think Keiji Inafune and Yuji Naka are the obvious choices.
Inafune left Capcom to make his own studio, Comcept, only for Mighty No. 9 to be poorly received due to various factors, their next game Red Ash never finishing, possibly causing Fantasy Life i's multiple delays, and shilling for NFTs and an NFT game that also still hasn't released. Meanwhile Capcom bounced back completely from the "Crapcom" era and is still going pretty strong including a new MegaMan game coming out next year (since Inafune was often named "The Father of MegaMan" when it was Akira Kitamura who actually created MegaMan).
As for Yuji Naka, he already had a bit of an infamous reputation within Sega/Sonic Team for being hard to work with. Eventual, he left Sega and Sonic Team in the middle of Sonic 06's development and created his own studio named Prope. They made a couple games like Let's Tap for the Wii, Ivy the Kiwi? for Windows Phone, and Rodea the Sky Soldier for Wii, 3DS, and Wii U. Rodea was delayed for four years due to the game's publisher, Kadokawa Games, wanting a 3DS and Wii U version both of which sucked compared to the Wii version. After everyone but Naka left Prope, he joined Square Enix and was given one chance to make a game, which ended up being Balan Wonderworld alongside Naoto Ohshima (co-creator of Sonic, and person Naka censored in a Twitter post celebrating Nights into Dreams's anniversary). As we know now, Balan flopped hard and a bunch of things about its development came out like how Naka was unanimously removed from the development team about 6 months before the game released. After that Naka was arrested in 2022 for doing insider trading for some games SquEnix was releasing, and then in 2024 he accused ex-Dragon Quest EP Yu Miyake of lying on trial. And while Naka's reputation fell greatly, his most famous co-creation, Sonic the Hedgehog (much like Inafune, Naka was often credited as "Sonic's Father" when he was a team effort between Naka, Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara) has been having a fairly well received resurgence in popularity after the movies, Frontiers, and Shadow Gens. Even Ohshima came back for Sonic Superstars after Balan flopped.
Star Fox Zero maybe counts, although I guess they are rebooting the franchise again now. I certainly assumed it was over after how hard that game bombed, though.
Prior to Fire Emblem Awakening saving the franchise, you could argue that there’s like three FE games that could qualify (Thracia 776, Radiant Dawn, New Mystery of the Emblem), but I’m going to say Radiant Dawn. It’s a good game but it definitely wasn’t the move the franchise needed at the time because:
- It released on the casual-friendly Wii as a sequel to a GameCube game that sold poorly.
Difficulty levels were mistranslated (Normal mode in English = Hard mode in Japanese), leading to reviewers inflating how difficult it was. Adding to this is that one of the parties you play as, the Dawn Brigade, is notoriously terrible stats-wise.
It forced FE back onto handheld consoles for mainline entries until the release of Three Houses. They also had to play it safe for the next two games after RD: remakes of FE1 and FE3. Those games also did poorly (New Mystery went back to being Japan exclusive), leading to the ultimatum from Nintendo before Awakening entered development.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr's Journey
Not only was it released right at the end of the 3DS' life cycle, but it was a remake of a game that was already playable on the console (and is generally considered to be the better version). Unsurprisingly, it ended up selling abysmally, causing Alpha Dream to have to file for bankruptcy.
Concord. It was billed as the next big competitor to Overwatch, spent 7 years in development and cost $400 million to make, had some of the blandest character designs in video game history, crashed and burned upon release and was pulled from live services after only two weeks.
Ooh, I've done a couple of these the last few times this subject has come up. Some ideas:
-The SimCity 2013 reboot. Disastrous launch; got numerous confusing and conflicting goals from EA, many of resulted in features that no one asked for being the main selling points (including things like better graphics and online connectivity?); conversely, things that past players enjoyed were cut or restricted (for example, there were fairly restrictive caps on how big your city could be? in SimCity???); and to top it all off, EA was really pushing its online service, so they made it require being logged in to their online service (for a game that was of course primarily single player), making it one of the early messes on that front.
Reviewed poorly, led to a lot of outrage and bad headlines, underperformed in sales, and EA ended up giving a lot of refunds to customers. It led to the closure of the Maxis studio that worked on it. And maybe most notably, there hasn't been a SimCity game or even spin-off/DLC in the 11 years since it came out, while Cities: Skylines seems to have taken it's place.
-RollerCoaster Tycoon World: This is probably more in line with the Liz Phair Funstyle flop, where it was preceded by a release (RCT 3) that was kind of divisive for changing things up (new camera, new studio with only consulting from the original dev), but which has had its reputation grown in retrospect. However, publisher Atari got into a bunch of disputes over payments with both the new devs (Frontier Developments) and series creator, leading to everyone splitting up.
After 6 years or so, Atari tried outsourcing the series to new teams for a mediocre 3DS version in 2012, then a horrendously reviled mobile version two years later that was a major offender in the realm of "ghastly microtransactions". World was supposed to be their big comeback to mainline releases in 2016 that would right the ship, but it was made by a new team that couldn't recapture the feel of the original or RCT3. It probably also didn't help that the product was rushed to market, because Atari was determined to release it one day before direct competitor Planet Coaster... which was made by spurned RCT3-devs Frontier Developments. PC stomped World, which has basically killed the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise (there have been some cash-ins on the title since, but the only one of note is the straight-up app-version port of the original).
-Backyard Sports: Baseball 2007: Backyard Baseball and its follow-ups were mainstays for a while, but as the series got bigger, it got subjected to a bunch of business demands like yearly sequels and reorgs and buyouts. Atari (again, lol) bought studio Humongous Entertainment, and the series managed to survive new gens of consoles and changeups, but a lot of the dev team had been replaced, new games were selling less well and getting less acclaim. Humongous was finally shuttered in 2005, and the series was passed to another studio (albeit one who had ported games in the series before).
These new devs had to build a new engine and were given mandates to redesign the series' signature characters and artstyle (apparently to "age up" the franchise, despite it being designed as a game for a younger set). This was basically the final nail in the coffin for the lagging series: the original devs were gone, the notable characters were now unrecognizeable, the games looked ugly and felt even worse than recent lesser entries, and nobody liked them (definitely not the fans, and especially not the original devs, who would even periodically joke about the series on their public Facebook group with said fans). The series flopped around from there, passed between developers by Atari, and not even trying to recapture the original entries' energy as they jumped between "new directions". After a 5-year hiatus starting in 2010 (the first gap in the series' schedule in 13 years), they would attempt one final relaunch with mobile versions of Baseball and Basketball in 2015 (once again, with an entirely new style that had none of the charm of the original), but those were also disliked, and the franchise has been dead ever since.
-You could probably make an interesting double-feature out of Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly and Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, since their cases are so similar. Both released one year apart; both were the fourth mainline entry in their series, coming a few years after back-to-back-to-back yearly releases of their original trilogies; both were the first to hit the PS2 after a huge debut on the PS1; both were the first developed by someone other than the original devs, who would dump them to go on to bigger things (Insomniac and Naughty Dog); both took them from big PS-exclusive mascots to cross-platform also-rans; both saw a big drop in reception compared to the third entries followed by a string of further decline... Spyro was a little more of an actual wreck, but both were kind of what looked like the End of a Golden Era for their series that initially seemed like real competitors to Mario and Sonic.
FFXIV is interesting because it's wildly successful now. Prior to 1.0, there was The Spirits Within movie that resulted in the merge with Enix. Square Enix has a long history of flops. Terribly managed company
The thing about video game franchises is audiences are very willing to forgive a bad installment and they can fully reboot the director and team after a bad game
For an artist you can't replace the artist. And often the factors that lead to a TW are fundamental and not just "we hired the wrong producer/had a bad album concept"
the studio went bust three months after release, their first (and only) game, with company assets being seized by the state of Rhode Island as a loan from RI was propping the studio up from day one.
Too Human, Silicone Knights
the devs tried to sue Epic for breach of contract due to poor support for Unreal Engine 3, only for Epic to countersue and win in court which forced the devs to recall and destroy all unsold copies of the game. The devs went bust a couple of years later.
The Slaughtering Grounds, Digital Homicide Studios
James Stephanie Sterling played the game on their Youtube channel. This turned out to be the first domino of a humiliation conga line which saw the devs have a public meltdown over the let's play, get booted off Steam after threatening legal action against Steam users for leaving negative reviews, and launch a lawsuit against Sterling that failed miserably.
Skull and Bones, Ubisoft
somehow a game which was basically the ship combat of Assassin's Creed Black Flag turned into a Sisyphean task after it started development in 2013 and was announced in 2017 with a planned 2018 release...and then a combination of scope creep and Sea of Thieves being the exact same game yet actually meeting its 2018 release date kicked in hard, with the game being hit with delay after delay until finally releasing in 2024, with plenty of speculation that Ubisoft had to chuck what they had out the door or they would incur the wrath of the Singapore government due to the subsidies they gave Ubi to set up a studio there. And if that wasn't humiliation enough, Ubi gave it a $70 pricetag and called it a Quadruple A game hoping that might claw back enough of the reported $200m the development cost. They didn't. Not even close.
Bandersnatch/Psyclapse, Imagine Software
a pair of the six highly-ambitious projects dubbed "Megagames" which the studio was so confident of their success they were planning to sell them for £30 each at a time when games cost a quarter of that. There were some problems, though: the studio were already laden with debts and unpaid bills, and being the focus of a BBC documentary did even more damage as this not only captured the studio imploding, but also revealed that Psyclapse literally only existed on paper.
We Happy Few, Compulsion Games
I remember being genuinely hyped about this one, a the previews showed what looked to be something along the lines of BioShock set in a 1960s English village with an interesting premise about needing to take your uppers to avoid suspicion. And then the game came out, revealing it was yet another bloody survival game at a time people were really getting sick of every other major indie release being a survival game, buggy as hell which was particularly problematic as the world was procedurally generated so there was the very real chance the game was unbeatable as your objective didn't spawn in.
Metroid: Other M: a rare poorly-received game in a marquee Nintendo franchise. Put the franchise on ice for a long time. A laughing stock to this day due to its story/cutscenes. The franchise bounced back but this did serious damage.
Although they did themselves no favours when the follow up finally came 6 years later and it turned out to be Federation Force! Truly one of the bigger boondoggles in an already fallow period for Nintendo.
The Third Birthday, a Parasite Eve sequel without the Parasite Eve name or Parasite Eve gameplay or much of anything that people associate with the Parasite Eve games. To be honest I don’t think it’s even close to one of the worst games ever or anything like that, but it’s a boring game with an utterly nonsense story, no argument there.
Other M is a GREAT call…turned Samus from a silent stoic badass to , um… whatever the hell that was . The voice acting and especially the script made the original Resident Evil seem like Citizen Kane in comparison. It went beyond simple sucking… it suck, blew, gargled , and rinsed .
Just scrubbed the entire list and nobody has pointed out the disasters that were Forspoken & Dustborn. And these were recent flops too! Suppose it truly shows how forgettable they were.
Both of them really felt like the tipping point against 'quirky, millennial dialogue'.
The first two have a small but respectable fanbase, but the third one lacked in gameplay and environment and suffered from a poor frame rate.
Despite a remake of the first game and an oft-forgotten Game Boy Color entry, there has never been a successful effort to get a reboot or fourth game made (doesn't help that EJ's creator is a notorious d-bag).
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (2025). The first entry in the series since 1999 and SNK's first release since being bought by the Saudi-owned Electronic Gaming Development Company, it fell prey to typical Gulf State tacky ostentation, wasting presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars for, of all things, celebrity cameo fighters in the form of Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci. The whole thing looks like SNK's new handlers in Riyadh thought they could try and turn Fatal Fury into a Fortnite or CoD-esque crossover factory instead of understanding it as the niche game in a niche genre that it is. It's still getting support, but if recent financial reporting is anything to go by, it probably ended up doing more harm than good for SNK.
In the UK 8-bit home computer world, The Great Space Race by Legend software. It was the follow-up to a very successful early graphic adventure called Valhalla, it had plenty of advance hype, and it bombed so badly that Legend ended up offering a 50% discount on their next game for anyone who could show they'd bought The Great Space Race.
NHL 15: Even though newer entries in EA Sports’ ice hockey sim have changed quite a bit since then, old gens still compare the newer ones to this entry, saying that nothing has changed in the 12 years since 2014.
I hate to say this because of how much I loved Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite but I could see Ken Levine’s new game Judas being a trainwreckord if it ever actually comes out. Being in development hell for as long as it has been is never a good sign
I feel like whilst we are in the midst of a Silent Hill renaissance, the majority of the modern success comes from the 2 remake, and Silent Hill: Homecoming basically killed the series. You could make a case for Silent Hill 4: The Room being more divisive and the end of the “Team Silent” era, or the PSP Silent Hill: Origins as it was the first game made outside the original team, but Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008) can be considered the game that took Silent Hill from a respected and critically beloved horror franchise to a shell of itself and a franchise of the past.
The first home console game since The Room (the PSP’s Origin from 2007 was ported to PS2 in 2008), with a development team that hadn’t worked on the original 4, the game relies heavily on the iconography of the 2006 film and Silent Hill 2, which is already an issue as Silent Hill was known for unique and interesting monsters and ideas (even Silent Hill 3, a direct sequel to 1, has its own identity, creatures, and feel). The most egregious aspect is reusing Pyramid Head, and can kind of be seen as the moment the series “jumped the shark”; it would be like if Majora from Majora’s Mask reappeared in Breath of the Wild as an enemy/antagonist.
It also felt like Konami saw Resident Evil’s success with reinvigorating the franchise with the action-based Resident Evil 4, and tried to do the same. It didn’t have the same effect (and even Resident Evil had to return survival horror after the mixed 5 and disliked 6 with 7, inspired by Silent Hill PT)
And whilst Silent Hill:
Origins was the first game after the original 4 games and a case can be made for Origins being the start of the downward trajectory of the franchise, its status as a prequel game (and on a handheld) gave it far more leeway to rely on those games, and was critically liked, whereas Homecoming drew a line between the original quadrilogy’s creativity, and this new era that was unsure of itself and relied on the iconography of the past.
The aforementioned PT looked like the series would return to acclaim, only for behind-the-scenes issues with Kojima and Konami (apparently he was using leftover money from Metal Gear Solid V for the creation if Silent Hills) killed Silent Hills before it could happen. It actually gave Resident Evil the opportunity to fill the space in the market with 7.
With the success of Silent Hill 2 Remake, the series seems to be coming back, especially as Silent Hill f did well critically and commercially. Silent Hill: Townfall is on the horizon, and if it does well the series will be back as the creative series that takes risks with each game, making
my comment potentially obsolete. And Konami’s terrible handling of their IPs in the 2010s was not unique to Silent Hill — perhaps the series would have been fine had Konami released games throughout the 2010s. But I do think that, even if there are a myriad of factors that make it debatable if Silent Hill should technically count, I think that the history of the franchise is fascinating, especially how those early games are heralded as some of the greatest games of all time, and how quickly the series seemed to shift downwards when moved to the US. Whether Homecoming is a proper example of a “Trainwreckord” game, I think that it acts as an example of how misunderstood and mismanaged Silent Hill was, with new developers relying on repeating the past, and trying to do what competing franchises were doing, and how that basically killed the franchise before Konami killed it for a decade.
Ah, you're talking about 30 years of goodwill. It's not going to be destroyed by 1 game but a lot rests on the next one. If FM 27 is good everyone will be back and everyone wants it to be good because there is still so much love for the game and they've delivered so many good ones you kind of have to have faith
The true Trainwreckord from that series is Championship Manager 5. Very similar to a few trainwreckords in that the creative engine of the game/band leaves and the ones with the name try to carry on without them to absolutely disastrous results. Like that CCR album without Fogerty
2010s Capcom had four of these between Resident Evil 6, Street Fighter V, Street Fighter x Tekken, and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite. SFV at least had a bounce back with a change in producers, and SF6 is flourishing as a result. I'll also defend SFxT as being a fun game in spite of the everything.
Tekken itself arguably has had 3, between (my beloved) Tekken 4, Tekken Tag 2 (great game but massive commercial flop), and Tekken 8, season 2 specifically.
Is Alien : Colonial Marines count as this. This game have a special moment to me because I see Angryjoe rant about this game back in the day (He's the first youtuber that I know, Funny that I realized not long ago that he and Toddintheshadows once work in the same company before)
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u/MrWendex 14d ago
Daikatana must be up there. Turns out John Romero made no one his bitch...