Some video games will forever be remembered because they pushed the medium of gaming forward, because their stories were meaningful, because of their incredible graphics or wildly innovative gameplay.
Some video games will forever be remembered because”¦ they’re bad. They might have disastrously bad controls, ridiculous storylines, horrible mechanics, or a boring moment-to-moment gameplay loop. They might be outright unplayable messes. Sometimes, they’re so bad that they’re more glitch than game. All of the games on this list flopped with critics and fans alike, with good reason: they’re a painful slog to play.
But there’s one thing a lot of bad games have in common: they’re earnest. Their creators genuinely believed they were making something so cool and edgy that the entire world would fall in love with it. They are so exuberantly over-the-top that they wouldn’t be out of place in a teenager’s notebook doodles.
Here are six of the biggest video game flops of all time that are so gloriously cheesy they might still be worth a play:
Drake of the 99 Dragons (XBOX, PC)
Controls, story, graphics — in every metric, this game was a mess.
In Drake of the 99 Dragons, you’re playing as a gunkata coolguy named Drake who’s trained with a wise master in a penthouse dojo. When your master is killed, you set off on a quest to avenge him- but you’re killed in a ridiculous way before you can reach your goal. A set of sarcastic gods brings you back to life, and you set out through a cel-shaded Hong Kong to fight the cartoonishly evil Tang Corporation and get your revenge.
Drake of the 99 Dragons was supposed to launch a franchise: tie-in comic books, sequel games, and even a cartoon. Instead, it launched itself onto every list of terrible games made in the last three decades. It boasts a Metacritic rating of just 22%, with Computer Games Magazine claiming that “shooting at enemies is nearly impossible, and Yahoo!’s review lamenting the game’s “ugly visuals, sloppy controls, …[and] horrible camera”.
Our Hero wears a long black coat and has cheekbones that could cut glass. He constantly spouts edgy lines like “MOST PEOPLE I MEET, I ONLY MEET ONCE.” and “TO ME, LIFE IS ALL ABOUT DEATH.” He drops his guns casually and pulls new ones from thin air. Your weapons include dual-wielded revolvers, dual-wielded machine guns, and a bouncing grenade launcher; your enemies are a corporation that makes zombies out of people’s dead loved ones and is also, somehow, a ninja clan.
The controls are notoriously awful; they’re somehow both floaty and stiff. Drake handles like a potato launched out of a cannon. His double jump feels like Richter’s in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood”¦ in a third-person shooter. Worst of all, the gunplay is indescribably bad. Drake uses both mouse buttons for its gunplay; the left mouse shoots the left gun, and the right mouse the right gun.
It’s a clever idea, and could have been innovative… but, as IGN said, “maybe there’s a reason no one’s ever done [gunplay like this] yet”. It’s impossible to aim, and worse, it’s really difficult to tell when you’ve hit your enemy. The game uses cartoon POWs and WHAMs every time you shoot your gun to make it feel impactful, but the signal that your shot’s connected — a little blood splatter — gets lost in the noise.
“The most wretched, mangled mess of ugliness that your brain can conceive…”
Game Informer review
Incredibly, the PC port manages to mess things up even more. On the original XBox hardware, Drake doesn’t seem to have many performance problems, but the Steam release on a modern gaming PC is a nightmare to get working correctly. The game runs in the XBox’s original resolution of 480p. Even on a gaming laptop with a relatively small screen, that’s a tiny window. And the game can’t decide whether to run in fullscreen mode or windowed mode.
It also locks your mouse to the center of the screen. If you’re trying to alt-tab, it’s impossible to move your mouse, at all, until you get to the point where you can menu out. Another thing that’s likely to mess with modern gamers on the Steam release is that all menus are controlled with the “jump” button, which is by default mapped to the space key. It’s a design choice that made sense on console in the 2000s, but it feels dated and strange in a game that came to Steam in 2018.
Drake of the 99 Dragons is meant to have the vibes of The Matrix mixed with a Bruce Timm cartoon. It is the perfect distillation of early 2000s shlock. If what you’re looking for is a corny martial arts movie, you’d get a kick out of this one… except that the gameplay is ultimately as lifeless as Drake’s ninja master. If your shots don’t connect in a shooter, your game won’t connect with an audience.
Daikatana (N64, PC)
Slow to release, awful when it did, Diakatana made John Romero its, well — you know.
It’s impossible to talk about Daikatana without talking about John Romero. Romero is one of the minds behind Doom, Id Software’s shooter masterpiece. When Romero left Id to found his own company, he began work on a game that was supposed to be a masterpiece, a game that was supposed to take the world by storm: Daikatana. The game’s overly ambitious seven-month development schedule turned into a three-year development hell.
When the game finally came out, it was accompanied by an ad campaign that promised John Romero “would make you his bitch”. Yikes on bikes. (Romero has since disavowed the campaign, claiming he “regret[s] it and apologize[s] for it”, and saying that it was meant as “the kind of smack talk” that was common in gaming at the time.) This campaign wouldn’t have killed the game if it was good, but the game we got was not the ambitious game that gamers were promised. Daikatana scored a Metacritic rating of 40% on n64 and received similar review scores on PC.
So what’s so bad about Daikatana? Three words: Mandatory. NPC. Companions. Video game AI was still in its infancy, and Romero’s wildly overambitious design required you to schlep around idiot NPCs who couldn’t find their behinds with two hands and a map. The NPCs got stuck on geometry, got crushed under doors, and got shot by you — often — because they ran straight into your line of fire. They also screamed catchphrases more often than 80s action heroes quip, and generally required constant micromanagement.
“Daikatana just isn’t any fun.”
GameSpot review
The enemy AI wasn’t much better, with enemies that were effectively braindead. They ran at you, you shot them, and they died; if you didn’t immediately take them down, they’d get stuck on a bit of geometry and wobble around like zombies with broken legs. Combine this with monotonous environments that looked like a long string of hallways, RPG elements that didn’t add much to the gameplay, and a save system that punished you for your AI companions’ failings? The game got very dull, very fast.
The thing that earns Daikatana its place on this list, more than anything else, is the story. Romero clearly kept Id’s ethos that “story in games… is expected to be there, but is not that important”; the story of Daikatana is so gloriously cheesy that you will be laughing from beginning to end. There’s time travel! The game starts as a cyberpunk SF game, but quickly brings in wizards, Greek gods, zombies, and skeletons! The characters forget what’s happening from scene to scene! If you’re looking for a corny late ’90s action story, you could do a lot worse than this. It’s genuinely so bad that it wraps around to becoming good again.
Diakatana Patch 1.3
Speaking of making bad things good again, Daikatana has enough of a cult following to create a modding scene. The Daikatana fan community has crafted a patch to let the game run more easily on modern hardware and fix a number of the AI glitches and game-breaking bugs. It’s still Daikatana, but it’s a version with the polish the game should have had all along.
If you’re interested in gaming history, especially the history of the FPS, you might want to check Daikatana out — but for goodness’ sake, do it with the PC version and the fan patch. Otherwise, you’re better off keeping an eye out for Romero’s upcoming FPS, which will be built in Unreal 5 and center around a new IP. It may or may not be a good game, but this time, Romero definitely won’t try to make you”¦ well, you know.
Fighters Uncaged (XBOX 360 + Kinect)
A great concept — motion-controls + fighting game — ruined by awful hardware.
Ah, remember the days when we were all excited about motion controls? Fighters Uncaged is a fighting game for the Kinect that was supposed to deliver a “total-body combat experience”. If the Kinect made your body the controller, this game would make your body a lean, mean, fighting machine. It was the kind of game people had been excited about since the advent of the Wii — a totally immersive fighting game? What could go wrong?
Well, it ended up on this list. Fighters Uncaged only scored a metacritic rating of 32% . GameTrailers said, “Fighters Uncaged is a stumbling failure, akin to a fighter who’s doomed to a forgettable career as a low-ranking amateur.” And when the 10/10 user review is a 1/10 left by mistake? You know your game did not find a fanbase. So, what went wrong? Bluntly, Fighters Uncaged has two big problems: Kinect motion controls. Fighting game. Need we say more?
No, but we’re going to anyway. The thing you need to understand about fighting games, if you don’t play them often, is that fighting games are a bit more like high-speed chess than like a knife fight.
Fighting game fans are looking to pull off difficult, reflex-heavy combos- but they’re also trying to read and predict the other guy’s moves before he pulls them off. Even a hair of lag can absolutely wipe out your strategy. And the original Kinect? It’s known for its awful, awful latency.
“Fighters Uncaged is an appalling, joyless makeweight…”
The Telegraph review
Oh, speaking of the ‘other guy’? This game doesn’t have a traditional multiplayer mode. The game’s marketing spiel claims that the “jump-in multiplayer” means that you can “take your enemies down with your friends”. You know what it doesn’t let you do? Take down your friends. This is the eighth deadly sin for a fighting game, and it meant that it had very little replay value. You’re not going to see Fighters Uncaged at EVO any time soon.
The fights have very little variety. The combos are a mess, and the Kinect controls make them even messier. Worst of all, every time you need to figure out a combo, you’ve got to navigate through a load of menus to get there. Even without the Kinect controls, it’s not a great game; with them, it just comes off as a gimmicky cash-in.
But, like every game on this list, the story is a delightful wheel of cheese. Our protagonist, Simon, joins an illegal fighting tournament to get his father out of trouble with a crime lord. From there, you face down a series of bosses that Elle Gibson of Eurogamer described as “ugly men with stupid names”. Every character shouts nonsense like “HIS GUARD WEAKENED MY STRIKE!” in a tone and cadence that wouldn’t be out of place in a low-tier shounen anime.
If you’re looking for a cheesy fighting game story, one could say this is up there… except, to be honest, every third fighting game has a storyline that’s just as cheesy and nonsensical. For cheesy stories, fighting games are where it’s at. If you’re interested in the history of motion controls and are willing to slog through a Kinect fighting game? Maybe you could try this one out. For anyone else? This is a hard pass.
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)
Rushed out in three months by one guy, this title almost single-handedly killed an industry.
This horse has been thoroughly pulped, but you can’t make a list of video game flops without talking about E.T. for the Atari. This game is notoriously bad, and notoriously critically panned. It’s appeared on every list of bad games since the 80s, it’s been featured on every game review show you can think of, and it’s brought up every time people talk about bad games.
And, don’t get me wrong, it’s genuinely a bad game. The gameplay is opaque and repetitive, mostly consisting of falling in holes and levitating back out of them. You’re playing as ET, and you’ve got to gather pieces of your spaceship and avoid shadowy government agents. You have an energy bar, which depletes when you do anything — including falling into a hole — and three lives.
Your objective is to explore, find all the pieces of your ship, and get to a place where you can phone home. At this point, the game resets, and you have to do it all again in a shorter time limit. According to the instruction manual, the game ends “when E.T. runs out of energy or when you decide to quit playing”.
“Convoluted and inane…”
Kevin Bowen for GameSpy
So it’s not much fun. Even for the time, this was a confusing dud of a game. To a modern player, it’s functionally unplayable; to a player at the time, it was still an ugly, disjointed mess.
But we’ve got to give this game a little credit where it’s due: ET for Atari was coded by one man over three months. Howard Scott Warshaw, a gifted programmer who worked on other popular Atari games, got given the job on July 27th 1982 and had to complete it by September 1st to meet corporate deadlines. He faced a bunch of resistance from his higher-ups at every stage of the process — including from Steven Spielberg, who wanted him to make a simple Pac-Man clone. But Warshaw had an artistic vision he wanted to carry out: his goal was to capture the sentimentality of the original film. He managed to rush the game out the door in time for a Christmas release, but there was no time for any audience testing — not if Atari wanted to sell a million copies.
And the game absolutely sold a million copies. ET was a popular franchise when the game released, with so many young fans that you could sell anything if you slapped ET’s face on it. It was such a bad game that it nearly killed the video game industry — people refused to buy new games sight unseen after buying ET — and it killed Atari’s dominance in the console market. Atari buried a bunch of copies of ET in a desert landfill, and the quest to find that landfill became a legend in geek culture.
E.T. for Atari is kind of a miracle. It never should have been a functional game at all, with that turnaround time and that many demands from corporate. There’s definitely some misguided artistic vision there, and if Warshaw had had time and polish and the luxury of playtesting the darn game, he might have been able to create something special.
Unfortunately, what he created was E.T. for the Atari 2600, because corporate demands are the death of all art.
Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (PS1, N64)
A fighting game/platformer hybrid — what could go wrong?
This game is notorious in the Mortal Kombat fandom, because it’s an experiment that worked out about as well as the Flesh Pit Mutant. In the 90s, Mortal Kombat was all the rage; it made perfect sense to churn out as many multicoloured ninja fighters as humanly possible. Another thing that was all the rage in the 90s? Nails-hard quarter-munching beat-em-ups.
Someone at Midway thought they had a fantastic idea: “what if we combined these two things? And added platforming? And maybe some RPG elements?” They planned to create an entire subseries of these games, focusing on the backstories of characters like Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Not being a developer at Midway in the early 2000s, you’d expect this combination to be the perfect video game flop. And you would be right.
Jeff Gertzman of Gamespot gave the N64 version of the game a 4.9/10 and said “This one is only for Mortal Kombat fans who don’t already own a PlayStation.” Unfortunately for PlayStation fans, the reviews for their version were even worse. IGN gave the PS1 version of MK Mythologies a 3/10, saying, “if you thought the [Mortal Kombat] movie was bad, get a load of this!”
“It may have been a good idea on paper, but as a game it’s terrible.”
IGN
What’s so notoriously bad about MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero? For starters, it’s a side-scrolling action game that plays like a fighting game. Remember how I said fighting games play like high-speed chess matches? Well, one thing that makes that work is that movement in a fighting game is not very precise. Side-to-side movement in a fighting game is slow and shuffling, and jumps rarely land exactly where you plan them to. The game encourages you to move by attacking your opponent, instead of jumping around and avoiding them.
In an action platformer? This kind of movement is poison. But the developers behind MK Mythologies wanted the game to “feel like a Mortal Kombat game”, so of course, they kept the controls exactly the same. They didn’t build the gameplay around the controls, either. Certain parts of the game require incredibly precise platforming, and with Sub-Zero’s fighting game controls, that’s nigh-impossible. Worse, a lot of the game is trial-and-error- what IGN’s review called “die and re-try” stages. You’re given an obstacle that instantly kills you, lose a life, and have to remember to plan around it the next time. This kind of formula can work — the huge success of Kaizo Mario proves that — but it’s not what anyone wanted out of a Mortal Kombat sidescroller.
So, does this game have any redeeming qualities? Perhaps — if you were already considering playing Fighter’s Uncaged for its cheesy story.
The PS1 version of this game includes gloriously campy cutscenes rendered in stunningly low-res FMV. The opening cutscene starts with the dictionary definition of “mythology” flashed on the screen with ominous music behind it. We then get a narrator delivering the most clichéd fantasy intro imaginable. But just as you’re starting to fall asleep… the Acting begins. Actors in the cheapest Mortal Kombat costumes you’ve ever seen begin delivering lines like “I am not a ninja. Scorpion was a ninja!” with the most stilted cadence you can imagine. The actor who plays Quan Chi — a bald, long-nailed sorcerer with black lipstick — delivers a particularly enjoyable performance, chewing the scenery like he’s going on a diet tomorrow.
If you’re interested in Mortal Kombat lore, in all its delightfully melodramatic glory, you’ll probably get a kick out of these cutscenes. But I’d recommend watching them on YouTube and not suffering through the gameplay to get there.
Ride To Hell: Retribution (PS3, Xbox, PC)
Clunky and dull, this game was never going to be good, even without a mid-development genre switch.
You knew it was coming. This is another game to grace every list of the worst video games of all time, and with good reason.
Like half of the games on this list, Ride To Hell: Retribution was supposed to start a franchise — the developers wanted to create an entire universe of ’60s biker anarchy and mayhem. It was supposed to be an incredibly ambitious open-world game with fully customizable bikes, vehicular combat, and a huge variety of side missions. It instead became an extremely linear third-person action game, with confusing and nonsensical gameplay and a story to match.
Any critic who played this one got a severe case of road rage. Ride to Hell barely eked out a Metacritic score of 13 for the PS3 version(with other platforms not far behind). “Riding to actual Hell over 1000 miles of broken glass using your own [flesh] as a toboggan would be more enjoyable,” claimed PlayStation Official Magazine UK.
There is quite a bit that makes Ride To Hell a ride everyone wants to get off. It’s an open-world game that was sloppily converted into an action RPG. The game starts with a turret section and goes downhill from there. The combat is dull; you can easily win any fight by kicking your opponent a few dozen times.
The motorcycle sections are just plain awful: sometimes, you crash for no reason. Sometimes, the braindead AI crashes for no reason. Sometimes, you run into an obstacle that was not clearly signposted, or skid off the road without warning.
“No word exists for the level of disgust I have for everybody involved in its blasphemous making.”
Destructoid Review
Another reason Ride To Hell is notorious is that it uses women as collectibles. Every so often, the protagonist can save a woman from being assaulted. The game immediately plays a creepy, dead-eyed sex scene where everyone is still fully clothed, and then you just… go back to the game. No shade on anyone who likes romance and sex in their video games, but this is not a Bioware game; it’s juvenile at best and absolutely offensive at worst.
One of the things that’s at least slightly enjoyable about Ride to Hell is its absolutely wild, nonsensical plot (which seems to be the trend on this list). You’re playing as Jake, a young man who just came back from Vietnam. When Jake’s brother is killed by a rival biker gang, you have to revive your dad’s old biker gang and take vengeance! Unfortunately, none of the plot makes a lick of sense. Everything that happens is a flimsy excuse for fights and explosions. The developers were clearly trying to write a dark and edgy story about retribution, but the writing in this game is so bad that it feels like a farce.
Ride to Hell’s only other redeeming quality is the very deliberate ’60s counterculture aesthetic in its menus and graphic design. A lot of effort and care clearly went into them, especially the bike catalogue you flip through to buy upgrades, with its detailed ads and carefully done typography. The developers wanted to immerse you in their world. Unfortunately, the world Ride To Hell: Retribution created isn’t one worth spending time in.
This game is the definition of “So Bad, It’s Good”. People frequently compare it to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and they’re not wrong to do so. Everything about this game is wrong. Nothing about it makes a lick of sense. If you like bad video games, or if you want to make games yourself? It might be worth checking out Ride to Hell: Retribution, just to see how bad a game can get.
Perhaps good truly cannot exist without evil, a sort of no shadow without light thing. If this is indeed the case, and we live in a world of duality, then we owe the awful games on this list a debt of gratitude. Their very existence may be the reason games like Half-Life and StarCraft were made — in order to maintain balance.
Is there a terrible video game we missed? Let us know in the comments.
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Malcolm Schmitz
Malcolm Schmitz is a freelance writer from the United States. He loves life sims, JRPGs, and strategy games, and loves modding games even more than he loves playing them.
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