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Top 6 Gaming Flops of All Time

Top 6 Gaming Flops of All Time

2017 is looking like another solid year for our beloved gaming industry. Many top games have already been confirmed for the new year – The Legend of Zelda : Breath of the Wild , Gran Turismo Sport , Red Dead Redemption 2 , For Honor , and Resident Evil 7, to name a few. Of course, the industry always seems to have a few highly touted games that just plain suck. Let’s take a painful walk down memory lane as we highlight the biggest flops in video game history. Don’t worry, we’ll save you the pain of having to relive the granddaddy of them all, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial . It’s bad. We know. Let’s move on to five other heaping piles of awfulness.

Nintendo Virtual Boy

Nintendo Virtual Boy

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Maybe Nintendo was just early to the virtual reality party, or maybe this idea just plain sucked. It was heavy, expensive, the games were bad, and it made people sick – literally. Nintendo cut the price tag down repeatedly in an effort to drive sales, but no one would touch this thing with a ten-foot pole.

Shenmue

Shenmue

The game’s production and marketing cost came in at a staggering $70 million during the mid to late 1990’s. It was fricking fantastic, but sadly it only sold roughly 1.2 million copies. Shenmue is both hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time and one of the biggest flops to ever hit the industry. In fact, it’s a major reason Sega no longer produces video game consoles.

Sonic Boom

Sonic Boom

Sega’s attempt to cling to Sonic success certainly wasn’t helped by its 2014 project, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric . The concept was awful, the maps were buggy, the writing sucked, and the controls were downright awful. Unfortunately for Sega, this steaming pile barely sold over 500,000 copies

Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever

They should have renamed this one Duke Nukem Never, because it was the definition of a flop in 2011. 15 years of development time to plus roughly $30 million of privately funded cash for a game that only lived up to half of the publisher’s expectations. That right there is the definition of a video game flop.

Sunset

Sunset

This indie production was tagged as the next best thing to come out of the independent game scene, outpacing its Kickstarter campaign goal of $25,000 to make nearly $70,000. Except it wasn’t that great, and the community never quite caught on as shown in its abysmal 4,500 total copies sold. To make matters worse, nearly half of those sales were from Kickstarter backers – ouch.

The Last Express

The Last Express

Despite receiving rave reviews and being one of the first games to ever attempt replicating real time, it was destined for failure before it even got started. The publisher’s entire marketing team quit just weeks before the launch, resulting in virtually no marketing exposure. Soon after, the publisher was acquired and a PlayStation port was canceled in the process. All in all, The Last Express sold 100,000 copies, just 900,000 shy of its goal to break even.

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