When failure is not an option

The appearance almost ten years ago of the ET cartridges buried in New Mexico, proof of how far things can go when a project does not go as expected, has made me meditate on the word failure and the joyous use that we sometimes make of it in the world of videogames from specialized media, forums of any kind and chats between friends.

Sometimes we speak very lightly of failure when a certain machine fails to wipe out the competition, or when a specific title is unable to rise to the top of sales, sweeping away everything in its path. But the truth is that to get to the extreme of using that term, things must paint a little worse.

And in the history of this business, so subject to trends and unforeseeable situations, we have been able to witness real disasters that, on occasions, have been capable of putting the largest companies in the sector on the ropes. Surely a few examples come to mind, right? We are going to remember some of the most resounding failures that this world has known.

I wanted it… but I didn’t buy it

Bad sales results do not necessarily have to be associated with a bad product. It is enough to remember the one so dear (to the point of idealized in the memory) Dreamcast to understand what I mean. Considered by many users as one of the most attractive consoles that have seen the light of day, the sad truth is that it was the final straw for a Sega that was already quite hurt from the disaster it caused. Sega Saturn.

This machine went on sale in Japan at the end of 1998, reaching the rest of the markets the following year, but by the time its production ceased in 2001, it had barely managed to exceed 10 million units shipped. Too little for a company that was forced to stop producing its own platforms to establish itself as a third party developer, thus putting its great icons to work for the competition.

And lo and behold, the console was good, dammit. Works of the stature of Sonic Adventure and its sequel, Jet Set Radio, Skies Of Arcadia, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Soul Calibur or Crazy Taxi are a good example of the hours of fun it provided us. Special mention deserves in this category Shen Mue, another example of how things can go wrong when the ambition of a development causes costs that the demand is not enough to satisfy even close. Still, it was a masterpiece.

It also did not lack daring ideas, such as the Visual Memory Unit that we could insert into its psychedelic controller, or high stakes such as a really serious online game, something that at that time was still very much in the future for consoles. Not surprisingly, it was the first of its category to include an internal modem to connect to the Internet as standard, something we don’t even wonder about today.

Rumors of a return to Sega’s own manufacturing, with a hypothetical successor to the Dreamcast as the wet dream of millions of fans, have not ceased during this century. But there is much more illusion than reality in them, and things would have to change a lot for this situation to occur again. Failure was not an option for Sega.

Higher towers have fallen

Another historic player that paid dearly for its last big move was Atari, which, faced with the constant onslaught of brand new systems arriving from Japan, placed its last hopes in the failed Jaguar. The youngest of the place will not remember it, but there were times in which they only heard about the bits that each console had, so Atari presented its feline, boasting of being the first console that worked at 64 bits. The madness.

But reality is rarely as beautiful as advertisers make it out to be, and as you can see in the video above, the technical level of the launches was far from the graphic promise that Jaguar presented in full color. As if that were not enough, the time planning could not have been worse, since being a machine designed to humiliate the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo (hope is the last thing to be lost), it ended up being swept off the map by Hurricane PlayStation and, to a lesser extent, measurement, Sega Saturn. A Nintendo 64, which did honor the numbers, almost did not even get to know it.

The result? The once glorious name of Atari dragged to the ground, and adding the other commercial disaster that was Lynx, the end of a golden age. The brand continues to exist today, as it will never lose the nostalgic pull that warms our hearts, but obviously the structure of that mythical company that created some of the most iconic platforms of all time is now just ashes.

He who risks sometimes doesn’t win either

Although it is by no means a failure with such terrible consequences, Nintendo also has a harsh memory in Virtual Boy. A device that tried to advance decades in time, claiming to offer a 3D gaming experience in no less than 1995 that the technology of the moment made simply unfeasible.

Despite them, the Big N jumped into the pool with a strong investment in development and promotion of a product that barely sold a fraction of what was expected due to its high price and a poor gaming experience. So hard was the fall that its creator, a great like Gunpei Yokoi, had to leave the company through the back door.

However, and this should be the moral of the story, Nintendo was not intimidated by this setback and has continued to bet on innovation ever since, thanks to which it has managed to remain such a relevant and special company. The lesson that remained, of course, is that it is not enough to bet on the most futuristic follies if they are not accompanied by a truly satisfactory experience for the customer.

Who gave you a candle at this funeral?

The year was 2003 and Nokia could boast of being the company that split the cod in the growing empire of mobile telephony, so some clever Finn thought it would be a good idea to stick their noses in the field of video games. Whoever he was, he was right in imagining that mobile and gaming would have a future together… but not in the way envisioned at the time with N-Gage.

If I told you about a phone with the best features of the moment and a catalog in which developers such as Sega, Activision, Capcom, EA, Codemasters or THQ participated, you might think that things don’t look bad, right? Well no, because when put into practice, this hybrid between laptop and mobile was a real nonsense.

Where could I start? For example, it was necessary to remove the battery every time you wanted to switch games, its tiny vertical screen made any decent experience nearly impossible, and the Symbian operating system was never a proper platform for a console. And please don’t get me started on the way you had to hold the N-Gage, edge-on and perpendicular to your face, in order to have a phone conversation.

I had one and I assure you that I was ashamed having to take it out of his pocket to talk to her in that orthopedic way. Its successor, the N-Gage QD, arrived a year later, fixing several of the machine’s design blunders, such as the way games were introduced or the phone’s use posture, but even that wasn’t enough to save it. of the burning

Sales of 3 million units are estimated, very few if we compare them with what other Nokia terminals were achieving at that time. Its spirit lived on as a service integrated into other company equipment some time later, but the monster that still haunts me in my nightmares will remain to be remembered.

crazy life is better

Talking about notorious failures in the world of video games is not only reduced to hardware, of course. Earlier I mentioned the artistically flawless, though commercially unsuccessful, Shen Mue, although examples are not lacking in these parts. And in this respect it is always sadly curious to remember the case of My staffthat dream that became a nightmare for its creators.

John Romero, at that time on the crest of the wave due to the great successes achieved with titles such as Doom o Wolfenstein 3D, grew so much that he was able to complete a game loaded with ambition in a matter of months with which to launch his newly founded studio. Unfortunately things did not go as well as they painted, since after years of complicated work accompanied by a constant and ridiculous promotional campaign, the final version of the game ended up being a huge playable disappointment that only sold 200,000 copies, just enough to cover expenses. of production. After that, Romero was never the same again.

And how does your body stay if I tell you that the unforgettable Pac-Man Was it also a failure? Naturally, I’m not referring to the popular arcade game that we’ve all played at some point, but to that ambitious port for the Atari 2600 that had to be one of the biggest hits of all time. So much so that Atari ordered the manufacture of a whopping 12 million cartridges, even though at that time the console had only sold 10 million units. Optimistic people that are not missing.

Sales were not low, as 7 million copies were shipped, but taking into account the number of Pac-Man that remained in the warehouse, the commercial blow for Atari was vintage. Together with the event that occurred with the license E.T.this excess of confidence became the great reason for what we now know as the video game crisis of 1983. To top it off, the port was a filthy chestnut.

Another perfect example of the decline in popularity, no longer of a particular company but of an entire genre, is represented by Grim Fandango. In an attempt to keep graphic adventures still fresh, its creators dared for the first time with a polygonal environment, but the market did not respond and with this work the end of a great era was marked. Tim Schafer and other major developers left the house and LucasArts changed course to bet all its cards on the license from now on. Star Wars.

There are many other examples that we could mention of works that, with not so drastic consequences, were a commercial failure for their creators, such as Beyond Good & Evil, Psychonauts o Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. The three were excellent on an artistic level, each one in its category, and yet it was not enough for things to go well in stores at the time. Sometimes it’s better to be funny than to be funny.

In ExtraLife | The surprising history of the cartridge: a console that was a failure but changed video games forever

Opening Image | Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)