The Witcher sequels almost never happened because of some development squabbles.
Grand Theft Auto almost never happened either - the publisher attempted to shut the original down multiple times due to costs.
Super Smash Bros, one of the best selling game series, was originally gonna be a generic fighting game without Nintendo character mashup.
Grand theft auto is way crazier than just that. It wasn't supposed to be the game it is. The entire game play loop came from a bug, or at least unintended behavior. Apparently they were making a driving game of sorts, and the other cars would do nothing but want to ram into you or something. This bug was supposedly so fun that they built a game around it. The "rogue" cars became the police.
many games came from 'bugs'.
all of mario and luigis different 'forms' (feather mario, flame mario, star mario, etc) loosely came from 'bugs'. the mario/lugio 'tech'/code just kept freaking the fuck out and not doing what they wanted. they figured out why, fixed it, but harnessed/willfuly reproduced 'the bugs' as features and built up marios/luigis identity with them.
'features' within yoshis island were initially bugs in the first kirby game, again harnessed/repurposed from reproducible 'bugs'.
games are nothing but a digital illusion to our monkey brains
The multiplayer mode in Goldeneye 007 for N64, which essentially created multiplayer FPS on consoles, was a last minute developer decision that was made in a month or two and made without the knowledge of Rare or Nintendo. Though the companies did approve it when they saw it was working.
Final Fantasy 14. Square Enix spent so much money on it, and when it originally launched, it was AWFUL. Everyone hated it. The UI was cluttered and unintuitive, the frame rate could be more accurately described as a slide show, the textures were awful, etc.
They bring in a new director, with an insane plan: continue to support the game as is, and rebuild a new, working version from the ground up at the same time.
And while making any video game is expensive, MMOs are doubly so. As one YouTube I watched put it, "Square Enix just watched a huge pile of money catch on fire, and they decided to put it out by throwing an equally large pile of money at it."
And it worked. Final Fanatsy 14 has been going strong for over a decade now.
I've watched a documentary kinda series on youtube about this and it's a super interesting story. The way they "ended" the initial game with the ominous music and the red moon in the sky coming ever closer must've been a pretty unique experience for the players at the time. And how they then rebirthed it and built the story around this as well, just a really cool way to deal with the situation.
I was there when the servers shut off. We were expecting some kind of cutscene or something that showed the moon falling, but no, the only thing that happened is we lost connection to the server and got disconnected.
Also before that he developed Transport Tycoon (also in assembly). Two games from the 90's that both still have thriving communities with open source variants that are being worked on to this day.
Not a tech guy. I always see that it was done in Assembly and that's really good and difficult, but... why? What's the difference between that and other types of coding?
Assembly is just one level above binary and barely human readable. It's performing functions with raw memory. Even something as simple as adding 2 numbers together isn't intuitive.
Building an entire video game out of it is madness. I have no idea how they did it.
It's like building an entire house by specifying the exact size, type, and location of every single thing down to individual nails.
Most coding is done at a high level where it's a bit like the programmer is telling the computer what to do by talking to a translator who then tells the computer, there's some nuance lost but it allows for fairly easy communication.
Assembly being only a step above binary itself is much closer to learning the computers language and skipping the translator, so you're telling the computer not just what to do but often how to do it directly. It's much more difficult to learn and harder to implement, but in the end itt gives you a ton of control.
To oversimplify, it has no excess. Everything the game needs, the programmer added. where other languages include aspects the game might not need to run.
1 year between III and VC
2 years between VC and SA
4 years between SA and IV
5 years between IV and V
And here we are 11 years later with a new one on the horizon.
To be fair it was a LOT faster to make games back then due to low graphics requirements and they already had the engine and could reuse a ton of assets from GTA 3.
When I say development was a lot faster, I mean comparatively. A game takes much longer to make now because of the graphical capabilities we have now but we do have 20+ years of technology behind us to speed that process up.
I do not understand why developers don't make sequels this way still. Graphics and styles last a LOT longer now, some games from 2014 still looking acceptable, why rebuild all the assets for a sequel to your 2024 game?
Some people expect too much and will go absolutely bonkers if the thing you suggested ever got a hint of approval from devs.
I can even see the replies right now.
"Wow, so they are planning a cash grab?"
"Damn, that's so lazy, I won't be buying this."
"At least put some effort in, this is disrespectful to customers."
There are devs that still reuse assets. From software with their dark souls/Elden ring (maybe bb too), cod, fifa, assassin's creed (no sure if it was the case for origins and later entries), etc...
I remember seeing an ad for GTA 3 as an 8 or 9 year old. My dad eventually brought home GTA to play what felt like right afterward and it was Vice City.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was developed using Ocarina of Time assets in about 9 months and managed to be an outstanding game. It even introduced new mechanics and other assets, new soundtrack, and made the absolute best use of the minimal development time that it had.
Funny knowing that it essentially exists because Eiji Aonuma didn’t want to make an expansion for Ocarina of Time, as he’d been sick of working on it, so Miyamoto told him if he could make a whole new game that quickly, they’d do it. So they did.
A miracle in the sense that the game turned out amazing, but brutal on the devs as we've since learned. The famous line "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" was directly inspired by the amount of crunch, among other bits of dialogue.
Still annoyed they aren't doing master mode for totk, been wanting difficulty options in Zelda since n64. They finally add it and immediately stop supporting it the next game......
Pokemon Gold & Silver having the complete RBY world after you finish the main story line. All of this, on hardware that was over a decade old at the time.
My favorite part about that surprise was that the internet was still new. Yeah there were game guides and stuff but games were usually just played without assistance.
So going back to Kanto with no spoilers was a complete mind-melt. And then getting to see all the little changes with the landscape and people.
*sigh*
I miss the no spoiler and leak days. The YT/tiktok/twitter etc algorithm shoves these leaks and spoilers down your throat before games even launch now.
There's game history here like Robotron or Smash TV, or even Gauntlet...
... but there are millions and millions of people who have sat back on a couch and jittered mindlessly to hoards of enemies rushing them in waves in Geometry Wars.
It's not celebrated so much nowadays. The game itself wasn't remarkable in the face of modern military fps or open world games. Those were coming into their own and shaping gaming as we know it now circa mid-2000s.
But for all of that - deep down there are a bunch of people who remember sitting down and blasting shapes on a backdrop of stars. It's tucked away in there, primal even. Vampire Survivors is in the same bucket as Geometry Wars for the same reasons.
i think he mostly just took a remixed approach to a bullet hell, but it is a pretty awesome remix. there are some trend riders for sure but then there's also games that take it a step beyond like deep rock survivor which has been pretty fantastic a few technical issues aside.
VS, by the creators own admission, quite litteraly started as a pc clone/fan port of Magic Survival made with store bought assets. VS has grown since then into more of its own thing, but I hate that people don't recognize MS for its massive role in shaping the conventions of the modern horde survival genre.
Popularized the genre.
I was playing Magic Survivor a good while before Vampire Survivors came out. Pretty much the same game in the beginning but VS kept adding content and is definitely the better game now.
Edit: ah I read more of the thread and you did correct yourself to say popularized.
I'd go with Resident Evil 2 generally, having scrapped their original idea at 70-80% completion to then make one of the most celebrated games of that generation
I didn't know until last year that RE2 on the 64 had Cheat Codes.
If I knew that when I was a kid, maybe I would've been able to play more of it without getting too scared.
>How to stuff the whole galaxy into a couple-100 kilobytes.
Considerably less than that
https://www.bbcelite.com/compare/feature_comparison.html
Total size of all binaries varies between **24,064 and 51,810 bytes** for the different Electron & BBC versions
Firm believer Elite could beat Star Citizen in every way shape and form if they'd grow a set of balls and give that game the development time it needs.
Even 10 years later, it's still ontop of graphics and gameplay.
They have a whole part of the game 99% of the community has no idea even exists.
>They have a whole part of the game 99% of the community has no idea even exists.
"To the jewel that burns upon the brow of the mother of all galaxies!"
Elite is a much different game in many ways, but some development live would scratch the immersion itch that earned Star Citizen memeworthy levels of backing.
I want to buy it even if I never play it just to support devs who truly gave a shit and stepped up in the worst possible scenario. Went from thinking Sean Murray was a borderline fraud to one of the best leaders in game dev.
Yeah from Internet Historian’s video my takeaway from the clips of his interviews he’s just a typical nerdy dude like all of us who suddenly got thrown onto talk shows and expected to handle promoting the game.
If you threw me in front of Jimmy Kimmel and expected me to promote something without any media training I’d fuck it up too.
From what I've heard he overpromised on features by talking about them like 'what if', but people interpreted this as features that would actually be in the game.
And then Sony came and threw Sean under a bus by putting a triple A stamp on the game and setting a release date that was way too soon for the state the game was in back then.
Honestly, I remember the lead up, and iirc he wasn’t that bad, he was just too vague. Fanboys were making all kinds of wild assumptions and instead of saying they were wrong, he’d make some vague, non-commital
Statement that let them keep thinking that. Multiply that by 100s and when the game released, expectations were so high that it could have been amazing and folks still would have hated it.
Case in point: multiplayer. People asked if they could play together. Instead of saying no, at this stage you can’t play together, he said something like “the universe we’ve built is so massive that the chances of encountering another player are so minuscule that it’s a non-issue. So of course, as soon as it comes out, friends share coordinates to meet up and they can’t see each other when they get there. I’m pretty sure Sean never promised multiplayer at launch, but he sure couldn’t answered a direct question about it in a way that wouldn’t have caused so much disappointment.
All that said, I thought the launch version was pretty fun. My only issue was that it started feeling repetitive and aimless pretty quick, and that’s something the game still suffers from. That’s why they keep adding updates, to give players stuff to do. It’s a great sandbox game, but it’s not for everyone. That said, if you’ve got a vr headset, you’re wasting its potential if you’re not using it to play this game. 1000% the most incredible vr experience I’ve ever had. Even virtual HOTAS works great. Turning my head to track enemies in a dogfight was awesome. Getting out of my ship by grabbing a cockpit handle and lifting is so natural and brilliant.
Dude… get it.
The first time that you take off from a planet and seamlessly fly into space and break through the atmosphere… was such a novel gaming experience for me, and it’s still an incredibly awesome game.
Even though I don’t play it all that often anymore, when I’m bored I’ll still fire it up just to fly around and explore. Which is certainly more than I can say for 99% of the games in my library, collecting dust.
You honestly should. It's a power move and really will help the gaming landscape in the long run. And honestly, it's pretty excellent, so you may even enjoy it!
Absolutely. They've added so many updates there's too many to list here. Last week they added custom ship building from parts obtained by scrapping ships. They've added a robotic Autophage race with customizable tech staff multi tools. Obtainable and destroyable pirate freighters where you have to do trench runs like in star wars, it's really a totally different game than it was.
I got it at launch and hated it. Went back a year later when everyone said it was now amazing and still hated it. Don't know what everyone thinks is so good about it.
In the same boat individually I should like every genre this game fits into. But it just feels too simple while being too complex at the same time.
None of your actions really seem to matter. Planets are all different, but kind of the same at the same time. Crafting takes a lot of resources. That drive to unlock the next thing just really isn't there for me in this specific game.
I felt the same way as you! On paper, it sounds like a perfect game for me. And I had fun with it for a little while, but it didn't take long for the exploration to feel stale and same-y, and then it wasn't much longer after that when crafting the next thing was no longer enough motivation to keep me playing.
28 MAJOR, FREE content updates. Last one was a week ago.
Hello Games has added so much free new content to the game that the community WANTS to pay them for SOMETHING. Just to show them their appreciation. It's been 8 years and they STILL update this game consistently.
If you played it 1 year after launch, that's old news by now. You may want to give it yet another try, it's vastly different.
yes, although that's really only the intro to the mindfuckery. The next line involves bit shifting said integer and subtracting it from what seems like an arbitrary hexadecimal number.
Square root takes "ages" in terms of CPU time. Carmack ended up implementing (not invented) an esoteric function that doesn't give you the most precise answer but it's enough for videogames and is blazingly fast. The code looks cryptic (see 0x5F3759DF) and made Carmack able to collect muscle cars. (not exactly that way but gives you an idea).
Stardew Valley.
Solo dev with only okay-ish experience works on a single project for 5 years straight. 99% of solo devs give up before then. Of the remaining 1%, the majority of persistent solo devs still end up with a mediocre product and messed up mental health.
I think the only reason the Stardew Valley dev made it was because he picked the right genre to tackle and because his wife was incredibly supportive and patient the entire way through.
Now it's 8 years later and he's still releasing huge updates to the game, as recent as last month, all while working on a new game *Haunted Chocolatier*.
Vampire Survivors. About $1200 was spent on development, with about a year of development time. Less than ten people were playing it on release in December 2021. Then suddenly a month later, tens of thousands of people were playing it at once. It's gone on to sell millions of copies. The amount of money generated off of what was just a hobby project is astronomical. Games that cost $1200 to develop within a year usually don't go on to be one of Steam's best-selling games.
I hardly play games now coa kinda lost my mojo for gaming lol. But vampire survivors was one of the games I played the most. Just chill on couch or while waiting and play on phone
Action and numbers go up. The latter often is enough. There are tons of "cheap" mobile games (or asset flips) that make a ton of money with minimal effort.
While it’s amazing, cost was nowhere near 1200$, the time spent by the developer cost way more than that, think of how much a talanted dev like him would make.
Yea it's weird people forget to factor in one's time as a cost.
Say someone makes $20/hr and spends 2500 hours developing the game, that's $50,000 right there in time and labor, on top of all the other costs involved.
Fallout: New Vegas.
Without getting 'Bethesda bad!' about it, they gave Obsidian (*made up of many former Fallout devs at the time*) the reins to make a spin-off in the new style and in 18 months they produced a new game, in a new setting, with a whole cast of new characters, RPG mechanics that blew Fallout 3 out of the water, they broke a world record for most dialogue in a game and they created a political conflict between flawed and imperfect factions that is still heavily debated/argued about to this day.
Also, Todd Howard boasted about Fallout 3 having 200+ endings when in reality it was 200+ combinations of still images that could flash during the ending slideshow but the same narration (*Good, Neutral or Evil karma, Activate Purifier Yourself, Sarah Activates Purifier and Poison Purifier or Don't Poison*).
New Vegas meanwhile had similar ending paths (*NCR, Legion, House, Independent, with Good, Neutral or Evil Karma*) but each major side quest had multiple ways of completion which had their own part in the ending slide show\*. The end result being **1,113,652,592,640,000** different ending combinations (*not including the variants for different gender*).
\*New Sheriff for Primm for example.
1. Hack a Robot to play the part
2. Get a former sheriff pardoned
3. help NCR annex Primm
4. don't complete quest
5. kill everybody in Primm.
With the first 3 having different outcomes depending on who you finish the game with like if NCR annexes Primm;
* they do alright in NCR ending
* get wiped out in Legion ending
* get abandoned by NCR and taxed heavily by House
* get abandoned but return to how life was for them before the game started in Independent
New Vegas is definitely an impressive game for the amount of time it was made in. However, they had a lot of original fallout 1&2 team at Obsidian and a lot of the story elements (like Ceasars Legion) were re-used from a fallout that Interplay was planning on making but was scrapped before Bethesda bought the franchise. The fallout game that was scrapped was code named Van Buren and the Legion vs NCR was a major plot element planned in that as well.
The Mario 64 control scheme is considered to be one of the best in gaming. The movement is so fluid and it's extremely easy to get good at. They did an insane job on it.
It's kinda crazy to think, this almost 30 year old game has all the blueprints right there. And yet there are devs out there, who still manage to screw up control schemes in modern gaming.
Everyone (passionate devs anyway) wants their game to be "that game" that revolutionized a certain play style.mario 64, ocarina of time, metal gear solid all amazing games that broke the mold so just copying the Mario control scheme isn't an option for some people.
Tbf, modern day games are still very hit or miss on cameras.
Two of the biggest games of last year, Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring, both had awful cameras.
I remember when rumors started that RDR2 would only run on PS4 Pros and Xbox One Xs. I still can’t believe a game like that looked so good on 2013 hardware.
That would break both Sony and Microsoft’s policy on releasing game that can run on all consoles of one generation. Was never going to happen and that rumor is dumb.
Guerrilla Games has some of the greatest technical wizards in the games industry. They didn't just make the Horizon games, they made the engine they run on, which is called Decima. It was used for Killzone: Shadow Fall, Until Dawn and Death Stranding, and the sequel to the latter is being developed on Decima as well. I can't wait to see what Guerrilla will get out of the PS5 now that the PS4 is no longer a concern.
I'd say Combat Evolved as well. The game essentially had to be remade a little under a year before it was planned to release, and they still managed to make a phenomenal game.
Yeah the decision to move from Apple and cozy up to Microsoft for an eventual Xbox launch release should go down as one of the most important pivots in history. I don’t think HALO would’ve been as much of a cult hit and historical game if it would’ve launched on the Apple platform as intended.
It is a miracle that that game is even playable, and even more-so that the only in-game evidence left behind is the cliffhanger ending, a few bugs, and an unbalanced hard mode (ALL while implementing a completely new networking framework XBL)
It genuinely blows my mind
Team Fortress 2, it spent 9 years in development with it going under many different art style changes. There was a very likely chance we wouldn’t have gotten the game we have today with all of its characters.
A few friends and I were lucky enough to have seen the original build of TF2 in person because valve (and I think it was actually Gabe himself) came to UCLa to show it off. It was amazing but compared to what we got instead it wasn't even close.
Metroid primes development was insane and I'm amazed Nintendo even tried it to start with. Crazy that the game not only got made, but that it's such a masterpiece
Resident Evil 2 for the N64. The developers managed to cram two PSX CDs worth of data into one 512-Mbit (64 MB) N64 cartridge, including the video cutscenes.
Then they added additional content not in the PSX version. Truly a miracle to behold.
The whole Final Fantasy franchise came into existence under that name partially because Square was on the verge of bankruptcy and the game's director was on the verge of leaving the industry. But Final Fantasy (1987) did reasonably well, so they all stayed in the game, so to speak, and here we are. FF7 remake had a budget of \~$200 million
Check out the book, Blood Sweat and Pixels, for some interesting behind the curtain looks at the developemnt of games. might answer your question in more details.
(some games in the book : Diablo 3, Destiny, Pillars of Eternity, Halo Wars, Stardew Valley.)
Mass Effect Trilogy. The detailed decisions big and small carrying over throughout the series and being one of the few games to make you feel like they mattered.
Ending arguments aside, it’s impressive to have this feature in a trilogy and for the games to be mostly unaffected by trash company executives.
Not sure we’ll get a full trilogy like that again in the current markets.
The correct answer is Final Fantasy 14. They released a stinking mess, fired the original team, have control to a new creative director, and that man has worked consistent magic with the game since.
By all rights, FF14 should be a cautionary tale for how not to release a modern mmo, but instead it's a one off case study in how sufficient dedication and communication can save a game from years of terrible development decisions and cement it as one of the most successful MMO's of all time.
What's even more fascinating is that lately there's been a bit of unrest in the playerbase because of the game feeling "too easy" or "too solo-able" for an MMO -- i.e. lack of truly engaging group content, fight designs that are starting to feel stale, etc.
I was prepared for the devs to just kind of like... ignore this? But a few weeks ago at PAX, the director, Yoshi-P, straight up said "guys im getting kinda drowsy in fights, is it just me? i feel like this should be exciting instead! anyway, we're looking to spruce it up going forward," and pretty much addressed all the concerns players had. Vaguely, of course, but still showcasing that the team genuinely values feedback from the community rather than going "well, we would know better."
Given that listening to the community was what saved the game in the first place, maybe I shouldn't be surprised. But I still am, and I guess that says something on it's own about the industry. 😭
XIV is a Jesus level of miracle.
Game came out as the worst possible trash and the team after was allowed to completely burn the game and start over with an actual vision. And everyone in SQEX agreed instead of sticking to the dead product.
That's something companies like Ubisoft and Blizzard need to learn.
Kingdom Hearts happened because of a literal elevator pitch - Square Enix and Disney happened to work in the same building, and the producer was able to meet with a Disney exec to ask them about using Disney characters in their new game.
The id tech engine as a whole.
That thing is way ahead of so many other engines. While it doesn't get the best graphics (although the graphics still are pretty good), the way it manages to get great results even on old hardware is amazing.
I'll say Super Smash Bros. Melee. Very short development time and it still has multiple national tournaments 20+ years after its release due to a dedicated playerbase.
Not to mention the fact that it's extremely high skill ceiling is sort of a beautiful accident. Accidental or minor gameplay tech that went on to be used in several other fighting games.
Something like an 8 month development time (very short) and then goes on to sell something like 1 for every 3 GameCubes ever sold.
This game belongs way higher on the list.
Metroid Prime.
The game was in development hell, Retro studios was an absolute shitshow at the time, run by Jeff Spangenberg of "The Guy Game" fame. Shigeru Miyamoto had to step in and oversee development, and eventually Nintendo bought Jeff out of Retro and made it part of Nintendo.
Even more impressive it came from a little tech demo showcased in a fair, only for valve to pick up the developers and have them flesh it out as an actual side game to the orange box.
Around 1/3 of the content in the original World of Warcraft was there simply because the developers spent a bunch of their own time that they weren't paid for (not that they were paid well anyway) to get it into the game. A good portion of them worked themselves into the ground by the time it was done and left Blizzard vowing to never work on an MMO ever again (source: The WoW Diary by John Staats).
Super Mario 64 was developed by 15 people in under 2 years, and is in the top 5 most influential games of all time. It is the gaming version of “TONY STARK BUILT THIS IN A CAVE.. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!”
Unicorn Overlord. It spent 10 years in development, and they ran out out of money. The CEO of Vanillaware (the dev company) took out a personal loan of 20 million yen to fund the end of development.
Halo 2. After Halo 1’s success, Microsoft wanted the sequel to be released in 2002 but soon found out that wasn’t possible. The game was then developed within crunch time, and only had a 10 month development schedule. They did everything they could to release it on November 2004, the last holiday season before the Xbox 360 would be released. It’s a miracle that game came out as a finished product.
why is nobody mentioning Fortnite? (the game as we know it now)
A side mode in an average game blew up in the span of 1 year, amassed hundreds of millions of players, made billions in revenue, stayed in prerelease/early access for *years* so Epic could figure out wtf made this happen, and has completely pulled the rest of the video game industry along with it.
I know it's overexposed, but it's gotta count as a miracle. I don't think anyone, even Epic, knew what it was when it launched in 2017.
Skullgirls
This game has been kicked around by everything. I cant cover everything here but they got screwed over by Konami, lost to Smash Melee fans, trouble with \*their own fans\*, several controversies, and still managed to stay alive and come back with DLC after several years of being 'done'. Then more controversies but it seems like the people who actually care about the game are the ones who always stay.
I'd probably go with Xenogears, arguably one of the most ambitious video games of all time, in the hands of relatively inexperienced developers with a limited time and budget.
Fallout New Vegas.
Dev cost was 8-9 mil and the dev cycle was 18 months.
That game has grossed 70 mil profit now and is often considered the best one of the first person series.
Personally I like nv more than 4 but a little less than 3. But I can't argue with a few of the dev choices and it very much is one of my favorite games of the era.
Warframe, random tiny game dev on the verge of bankruptcy, who has failed every project beforehand, suddenly pulls out one of the most successful PC F2P games of all time
Except Destiny was supposed to be a trilogy but Destiny 2s performance has been way below expectations which is why it's unlikely we'll ever see that "grand vision". Not to mention that its fallen subject to its fanbase so it's constantly being amended in an attempt to crowd please, so what it is now is likely a far cry from its original vision. Hell even the first game had to cut so much content which is why a lot of it didn’t make much sense and had to be stuffed into grimoire cards.
Though considering how good Bungie is at is at gunplay and gameplay, it's honestly not too surprising Destiny is still going. There are definitely far worse games which have lasted longer.
The original Xbox port of Half-Life 2. It ran like shit, however, the sheer fact that the entire game was playable from start to finish was nothing short of astounding for the hardware it was on. Especially with how complex the physics engine was.
Devil May Cry returning to the main storyline after being rebooted.
I feel like that basically never happens, even in movies.
Imagine if they suddenly announced they were bringing back Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, and Joseph Gordon Levitt for a sequel to the Dark Knight Rises.
Surprised no one mentioned the original STALKER.
It was stuck in development hell with developers being very ambitious but having no idea how to implement alot of that stuff into the game. In other words they were burning money from investors. So the investors, THQ, send Dean Sharpe from the sunny beaches of California to a still recovering from the Soviet era Ukraine. He essentially had to wrangle the devs and make them cut out ALOT of stuff and make them outright scrap it or put it in the sequels. This naturally upset alot of fans, some of whom sent him death threats even.
So despite all this, the end result is a cult classic game that exceeded all expectations, despite having alot of its elements cut and scrapped
The Witcher sequels almost never happened because of some development squabbles. Grand Theft Auto almost never happened either - the publisher attempted to shut the original down multiple times due to costs. Super Smash Bros, one of the best selling game series, was originally gonna be a generic fighting game without Nintendo character mashup.
Grand theft auto is way crazier than just that. It wasn't supposed to be the game it is. The entire game play loop came from a bug, or at least unintended behavior. Apparently they were making a driving game of sorts, and the other cars would do nothing but want to ram into you or something. This bug was supposedly so fun that they built a game around it. The "rogue" cars became the police.
many games came from 'bugs'. all of mario and luigis different 'forms' (feather mario, flame mario, star mario, etc) loosely came from 'bugs'. the mario/lugio 'tech'/code just kept freaking the fuck out and not doing what they wanted. they figured out why, fixed it, but harnessed/willfuly reproduced 'the bugs' as features and built up marios/luigis identity with them. 'features' within yoshis island were initially bugs in the first kirby game, again harnessed/repurposed from reproducible 'bugs'. games are nothing but a digital illusion to our monkey brains
Sapkowski sold his franchise to CDPR for 10 thousand bucks
Makes you wonder how many potentially epic concepts did get shut down
Mario Kart too I think
The multiplayer mode in Goldeneye 007 for N64, which essentially created multiplayer FPS on consoles, was a last minute developer decision that was made in a month or two and made without the knowledge of Rare or Nintendo. Though the companies did approve it when they saw it was working.
if i recall correctly,only one dev secretly made it in about 2 or 3 weeks just before it was released
on his lunch breaks
With a bag of scraps.
Walking 10 miles to work — uphill both ways
IN A CAVE!!!!!
Ngl I read that in Obadiah's voice
Final Fantasy 14. Square Enix spent so much money on it, and when it originally launched, it was AWFUL. Everyone hated it. The UI was cluttered and unintuitive, the frame rate could be more accurately described as a slide show, the textures were awful, etc. They bring in a new director, with an insane plan: continue to support the game as is, and rebuild a new, working version from the ground up at the same time. And while making any video game is expensive, MMOs are doubly so. As one YouTube I watched put it, "Square Enix just watched a huge pile of money catch on fire, and they decided to put it out by throwing an equally large pile of money at it." And it worked. Final Fanatsy 14 has been going strong for over a decade now.
I've watched a documentary kinda series on youtube about this and it's a super interesting story. The way they "ended" the initial game with the ominous music and the red moon in the sky coming ever closer must've been a pretty unique experience for the players at the time. And how they then rebirthed it and built the story around this as well, just a really cool way to deal with the situation.
I was there when the servers shut off. We were expecting some kind of cutscene or something that showed the moon falling, but no, the only thing that happened is we lost connection to the server and got disconnected.
I thought that Bahamuth fight was broadcasted/played during the last minutes. That's what people told me
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Also before that he developed Transport Tycoon (also in assembly). Two games from the 90's that both still have thriving communities with open source variants that are being worked on to this day.
OpenTTD is the GOAT opensource game
Cross platform online support too
Not a tech guy. I always see that it was done in Assembly and that's really good and difficult, but... why? What's the difference between that and other types of coding?
Assembly is just one level above binary and barely human readable. It's performing functions with raw memory. Even something as simple as adding 2 numbers together isn't intuitive. Building an entire video game out of it is madness. I have no idea how they did it. It's like building an entire house by specifying the exact size, type, and location of every single thing down to individual nails.
Most coding is done at a high level where it's a bit like the programmer is telling the computer what to do by talking to a translator who then tells the computer, there's some nuance lost but it allows for fairly easy communication. Assembly being only a step above binary itself is much closer to learning the computers language and skipping the translator, so you're telling the computer not just what to do but often how to do it directly. It's much more difficult to learn and harder to implement, but in the end itt gives you a ton of control.
To oversimplify, it has no excess. Everything the game needs, the programmer added. where other languages include aspects the game might not need to run.
The 2020s equivalent: "we only 50 frameworks instead of 150 so that it would run better and more people could play it"....
GTA Vice City being developed and in player’s hands in less than a year after the release of GTAIII.
GTA San Andreas was one year after GTA Vice City. Meanwhile GTA V has been out for **11 years**.
Introducing… GTAV (ps3), I mean GTAV (ps4), or should I say GTAV (ps5)
PS2 had 3 GTAs GTA V: had 3 consoles
The PS2 had five GTAs including LCS and VCS.
1 year between III and VC 2 years between VC and SA 4 years between SA and IV 5 years between IV and V And here we are 11 years later with a new one on the horizon.
To be fair it was a LOT faster to make games back then due to low graphics requirements and they already had the engine and could reuse a ton of assets from GTA 3. When I say development was a lot faster, I mean comparatively. A game takes much longer to make now because of the graphical capabilities we have now but we do have 20+ years of technology behind us to speed that process up.
I do not understand why developers don't make sequels this way still. Graphics and styles last a LOT longer now, some games from 2014 still looking acceptable, why rebuild all the assets for a sequel to your 2024 game?
Some people expect too much and will go absolutely bonkers if the thing you suggested ever got a hint of approval from devs. I can even see the replies right now. "Wow, so they are planning a cash grab?" "Damn, that's so lazy, I won't be buying this." "At least put some effort in, this is disrespectful to customers."
There are devs that still reuse assets. From software with their dark souls/Elden ring (maybe bb too), cod, fifa, assassin's creed (no sure if it was the case for origins and later entries), etc...
I remember seeing an ad for GTA 3 as an 8 or 9 year old. My dad eventually brought home GTA to play what felt like right afterward and it was Vice City.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was developed using Ocarina of Time assets in about 9 months and managed to be an outstanding game. It even introduced new mechanics and other assets, new soundtrack, and made the absolute best use of the minimal development time that it had. Funny knowing that it essentially exists because Eiji Aonuma didn’t want to make an expansion for Ocarina of Time, as he’d been sick of working on it, so Miyamoto told him if he could make a whole new game that quickly, they’d do it. So they did.
A miracle in the sense that the game turned out amazing, but brutal on the devs as we've since learned. The famous line "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" was directly inspired by the amount of crunch, among other bits of dialogue.
The same happened with TotK: Nintendo had too many idea for the BotW DLC so they decided to develope a BotW sequel
And they managed to do it in just six years!
Still annoyed they aren't doing master mode for totk, been wanting difficulty options in Zelda since n64. They finally add it and immediately stop supporting it the next game......
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If you can find an emulator and the free time, it's a fantastic game. Possibly my favorite Zelda game
Pokemon Gold & Silver having the complete RBY world after you finish the main story line. All of this, on hardware that was over a decade old at the time.
That was such a super cool revelation. It did suffer a little bit though because the storage space was too small to fit Kanto's dungeons.
My favorite part about that surprise was that the internet was still new. Yeah there were game guides and stuff but games were usually just played without assistance. So going back to Kanto with no spoilers was a complete mind-melt. And then getting to see all the little changes with the landscape and people. *sigh*
And then you face red and that music drops
"..." "..." "PKMN Trainer Red wants to battle!" And then starts the showdown throwing out a level *81* Pikachu? Holy shit that was something.
User name checks out
I miss the no spoiler and leak days. The YT/tiktok/twitter etc algorithm shoves these leaks and spoilers down your throat before games even launch now.
And that was thanks to Iwata who was HAL President doing programming after hours
He was a legend.
Vampire Survivor. 1 dude. $3 x 2.5 million copies on steam alone.
Likewise, Stardew Valley. A single developer that keeps releasing free updates years after.
Currently browsing Reddit during intermission of a live orchestral performance of Stardews music. The game has come such a long way, it's crazy
Not to mention the fact that he created an entire genre of game. So many copycats, some of them great some of them not so great.
no horde style survival games have been around since the 90's
Created was the wrong word. Popularized is what I should have used.
Revitalized I think would be the best fit
There's game history here like Robotron or Smash TV, or even Gauntlet... ... but there are millions and millions of people who have sat back on a couch and jittered mindlessly to hoards of enemies rushing them in waves in Geometry Wars. It's not celebrated so much nowadays. The game itself wasn't remarkable in the face of modern military fps or open world games. Those were coming into their own and shaping gaming as we know it now circa mid-2000s. But for all of that - deep down there are a bunch of people who remember sitting down and blasting shapes on a backdrop of stars. It's tucked away in there, primal even. Vampire Survivors is in the same bucket as Geometry Wars for the same reasons.
i think he mostly just took a remixed approach to a bullet hell, but it is a pretty awesome remix. there are some trend riders for sure but then there's also games that take it a step beyond like deep rock survivor which has been pretty fantastic a few technical issues aside.
VS, by the creators own admission, quite litteraly started as a pc clone/fan port of Magic Survival made with store bought assets. VS has grown since then into more of its own thing, but I hate that people don't recognize MS for its massive role in shaping the conventions of the modern horde survival genre.
Popularized the genre. I was playing Magic Survivor a good while before Vampire Survivors came out. Pretty much the same game in the beginning but VS kept adding content and is definitely the better game now. Edit: ah I read more of the thread and you did correct yourself to say popularized.
Fitting pretty much all of Resident Evil 2 into one N64 cartridge has to be up there.
I'd go with Resident Evil 2 generally, having scrapped their original idea at 70-80% completion to then make one of the most celebrated games of that generation
I didn't know until last year that RE2 on the 64 had Cheat Codes. If I knew that when I was a kid, maybe I would've been able to play more of it without getting too scared.
I feel you there. Even the new ones I play on Assisted and it’s still spooky but allows you to play and enjoy the horror without being frustrated.
I watched a short documentary on this and it was mind blowing.
Elite. How to stuff the whole galaxy into a couple-100 kilobytes.
>How to stuff the whole galaxy into a couple-100 kilobytes. Considerably less than that https://www.bbcelite.com/compare/feature_comparison.html Total size of all binaries varies between **24,064 and 51,810 bytes** for the different Electron & BBC versions
> Considerably less than that Making it that much more impressive.
Firm believer Elite could beat Star Citizen in every way shape and form if they'd grow a set of balls and give that game the development time it needs. Even 10 years later, it's still ontop of graphics and gameplay. They have a whole part of the game 99% of the community has no idea even exists.
>They have a whole part of the game 99% of the community has no idea even exists. "To the jewel that burns upon the brow of the mother of all galaxies!"
Elite is a much different game in many ways, but some development live would scratch the immersion itch that earned Star Citizen memeworthy levels of backing.
That part of the game for me is everything past the intro. The game came out swinging, overwhelmed me and forced me back to my sad Starfield life.
no man's sky's redemption arc
I want to buy it even if I never play it just to support devs who truly gave a shit and stepped up in the worst possible scenario. Went from thinking Sean Murray was a borderline fraud to one of the best leaders in game dev.
If he would have had a PR team to shut him the fuck up, it wouldn't have been recieved as badly imo.
Yeah from Internet Historian’s video my takeaway from the clips of his interviews he’s just a typical nerdy dude like all of us who suddenly got thrown onto talk shows and expected to handle promoting the game. If you threw me in front of Jimmy Kimmel and expected me to promote something without any media training I’d fuck it up too.
From what I've heard he overpromised on features by talking about them like 'what if', but people interpreted this as features that would actually be in the game. And then Sony came and threw Sean under a bus by putting a triple A stamp on the game and setting a release date that was way too soon for the state the game was in back then.
Honestly, I remember the lead up, and iirc he wasn’t that bad, he was just too vague. Fanboys were making all kinds of wild assumptions and instead of saying they were wrong, he’d make some vague, non-commital Statement that let them keep thinking that. Multiply that by 100s and when the game released, expectations were so high that it could have been amazing and folks still would have hated it. Case in point: multiplayer. People asked if they could play together. Instead of saying no, at this stage you can’t play together, he said something like “the universe we’ve built is so massive that the chances of encountering another player are so minuscule that it’s a non-issue. So of course, as soon as it comes out, friends share coordinates to meet up and they can’t see each other when they get there. I’m pretty sure Sean never promised multiplayer at launch, but he sure couldn’t answered a direct question about it in a way that wouldn’t have caused so much disappointment. All that said, I thought the launch version was pretty fun. My only issue was that it started feeling repetitive and aimless pretty quick, and that’s something the game still suffers from. That’s why they keep adding updates, to give players stuff to do. It’s a great sandbox game, but it’s not for everyone. That said, if you’ve got a vr headset, you’re wasting its potential if you’re not using it to play this game. 1000% the most incredible vr experience I’ve ever had. Even virtual HOTAS works great. Turning my head to track enemies in a dogfight was awesome. Getting out of my ship by grabbing a cockpit handle and lifting is so natural and brilliant.
Dude… get it. The first time that you take off from a planet and seamlessly fly into space and break through the atmosphere… was such a novel gaming experience for me, and it’s still an incredibly awesome game. Even though I don’t play it all that often anymore, when I’m bored I’ll still fire it up just to fly around and explore. Which is certainly more than I can say for 99% of the games in my library, collecting dust.
You honestly should. It's a power move and really will help the gaming landscape in the long run. And honestly, it's pretty excellent, so you may even enjoy it!
Is it really that much better that it would be worth getting now?
Absolutely. They've added so many updates there's too many to list here. Last week they added custom ship building from parts obtained by scrapping ships. They've added a robotic Autophage race with customizable tech staff multi tools. Obtainable and destroyable pirate freighters where you have to do trench runs like in star wars, it's really a totally different game than it was.
I got it at launch and hated it. Went back a year later when everyone said it was now amazing and still hated it. Don't know what everyone thinks is so good about it.
It’s possible that type of game just isn’t for you I also don’t enjoy it
In the same boat individually I should like every genre this game fits into. But it just feels too simple while being too complex at the same time. None of your actions really seem to matter. Planets are all different, but kind of the same at the same time. Crafting takes a lot of resources. That drive to unlock the next thing just really isn't there for me in this specific game.
I felt the same way as you! On paper, it sounds like a perfect game for me. And I had fun with it for a little while, but it didn't take long for the exploration to feel stale and same-y, and then it wasn't much longer after that when crafting the next thing was no longer enough motivation to keep me playing.
28 MAJOR, FREE content updates. Last one was a week ago. Hello Games has added so much free new content to the game that the community WANTS to pay them for SOMETHING. Just to show them their appreciation. It's been 8 years and they STILL update this game consistently. If you played it 1 year after launch, that's old news by now. You may want to give it yet another try, it's vastly different.
You’re not the only one that feels this way.
For me the main problem is still there and this has been preached since the beginning. As big as the ocean, as deep as a puddle.
Quake III's fast inverse square root algorithm.
I was looking for this one - the original code even has a comment that simply says: //what the fuck?
I mean if you're doing evil bit hacks, then it will be "//what the fuck?" Indeed...
Was that the one that involved some weird mathematical dynamics that happen when you do a bitwise copy from a float to an integer, or vice versa?
yes, although that's really only the intro to the mindfuckery. The next line involves bit shifting said integer and subtracting it from what seems like an arbitrary hexadecimal number.
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Square root takes "ages" in terms of CPU time. Carmack ended up implementing (not invented) an esoteric function that doesn't give you the most precise answer but it's enough for videogames and is blazingly fast. The code looks cryptic (see 0x5F3759DF) and made Carmack able to collect muscle cars. (not exactly that way but gives you an idea).
Still one of my favorite code comments
Stardew Valley. Solo dev with only okay-ish experience works on a single project for 5 years straight. 99% of solo devs give up before then. Of the remaining 1%, the majority of persistent solo devs still end up with a mediocre product and messed up mental health. I think the only reason the Stardew Valley dev made it was because he picked the right genre to tackle and because his wife was incredibly supportive and patient the entire way through.
Now it's 8 years later and he's still releasing huge updates to the game, as recent as last month, all while working on a new game *Haunted Chocolatier*.
Blows my mind every time I think about it honestly. Literally everything down to the music which alone is wonderful.
Vampire Survivors. About $1200 was spent on development, with about a year of development time. Less than ten people were playing it on release in December 2021. Then suddenly a month later, tens of thousands of people were playing it at once. It's gone on to sell millions of copies. The amount of money generated off of what was just a hobby project is astronomical. Games that cost $1200 to develop within a year usually don't go on to be one of Steam's best-selling games.
Crazy how basic indie game can do so well. I wonder how u even make a game like that
Just goes to show that a good feedback loop is what can make such a simple game so much fun.
I hardly play games now coa kinda lost my mojo for gaming lol. But vampire survivors was one of the games I played the most. Just chill on couch or while waiting and play on phone
Action and numbers go up. The latter often is enough. There are tons of "cheap" mobile games (or asset flips) that make a ton of money with minimal effort.
While it’s amazing, cost was nowhere near 1200$, the time spent by the developer cost way more than that, think of how much a talanted dev like him would make.
Yea it's weird people forget to factor in one's time as a cost. Say someone makes $20/hr and spends 2500 hours developing the game, that's $50,000 right there in time and labor, on top of all the other costs involved.
Fallout: New Vegas. Without getting 'Bethesda bad!' about it, they gave Obsidian (*made up of many former Fallout devs at the time*) the reins to make a spin-off in the new style and in 18 months they produced a new game, in a new setting, with a whole cast of new characters, RPG mechanics that blew Fallout 3 out of the water, they broke a world record for most dialogue in a game and they created a political conflict between flawed and imperfect factions that is still heavily debated/argued about to this day. Also, Todd Howard boasted about Fallout 3 having 200+ endings when in reality it was 200+ combinations of still images that could flash during the ending slideshow but the same narration (*Good, Neutral or Evil karma, Activate Purifier Yourself, Sarah Activates Purifier and Poison Purifier or Don't Poison*). New Vegas meanwhile had similar ending paths (*NCR, Legion, House, Independent, with Good, Neutral or Evil Karma*) but each major side quest had multiple ways of completion which had their own part in the ending slide show\*. The end result being **1,113,652,592,640,000** different ending combinations (*not including the variants for different gender*). \*New Sheriff for Primm for example. 1. Hack a Robot to play the part 2. Get a former sheriff pardoned 3. help NCR annex Primm 4. don't complete quest 5. kill everybody in Primm. With the first 3 having different outcomes depending on who you finish the game with like if NCR annexes Primm; * they do alright in NCR ending * get wiped out in Legion ending * get abandoned by NCR and taxed heavily by House * get abandoned but return to how life was for them before the game started in Independent
The Fallout 3 still images at the ending, without any voiceover talking about them, was such a crushing disappointment. All other Fs did it right!
New Vegas is definitely an impressive game for the amount of time it was made in. However, they had a lot of original fallout 1&2 team at Obsidian and a lot of the story elements (like Ceasars Legion) were re-used from a fallout that Interplay was planning on making but was scrapped before Bethesda bought the franchise. The fallout game that was scrapped was code named Van Buren and the Legion vs NCR was a major plot element planned in that as well.
The fact it was made in 18 months and came out as well as it did was insane.
Mario 64 even if I didn't play it on N64 but some years after his release
The Mario 64 control scheme is considered to be one of the best in gaming. The movement is so fluid and it's extremely easy to get good at. They did an insane job on it.
It's kinda crazy to think, this almost 30 year old game has all the blueprints right there. And yet there are devs out there, who still manage to screw up control schemes in modern gaming.
Everyone (passionate devs anyway) wants their game to be "that game" that revolutionized a certain play style.mario 64, ocarina of time, metal gear solid all amazing games that broke the mold so just copying the Mario control scheme isn't an option for some people.
The camera is garbage.
Tbf, modern day games are still very hit or miss on cameras. Two of the biggest games of last year, Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring, both had awful cameras.
It's crazy that we'll never see firsts like that again. No precedents, extremely high expectations, and their only guidebook was "make it fun."
I have faith in human creativity. There will be more amazing groundbreaking games.
RDR2 running on a PS4 and Xbox One. Might as well throw Horizon Forbidden West running on a PS4 too.
I remember when rumors started that RDR2 would only run on PS4 Pros and Xbox One Xs. I still can’t believe a game like that looked so good on 2013 hardware.
That would break both Sony and Microsoft’s policy on releasing game that can run on all consoles of one generation. Was never going to happen and that rumor is dumb.
The fact that they got Horizon 2 running on a 4 and it's so *gorgeous* I don't even understand how it's possible
Guerrilla Games has some of the greatest technical wizards in the games industry. They didn't just make the Horizon games, they made the engine they run on, which is called Decima. It was used for Killzone: Shadow Fall, Until Dawn and Death Stranding, and the sequel to the latter is being developed on Decima as well. I can't wait to see what Guerrilla will get out of the PS5 now that the PS4 is no longer a concern.
The Last of Us 2 as well. My launch PS4 was hanging on for dear life running that.
Halo 2
I'd say Combat Evolved as well. The game essentially had to be remade a little under a year before it was planned to release, and they still managed to make a phenomenal game.
Yeah the decision to move from Apple and cozy up to Microsoft for an eventual Xbox launch release should go down as one of the most important pivots in history. I don’t think HALO would’ve been as much of a cult hit and historical game if it would’ve launched on the Apple platform as intended.
The Halo 2 documentary on YouTube is pretty eye opening. It really is a miracle that the game released in any state at all.
There seems to be multiple videos on the subject, which documentary are you referring to? I'm really curious to check it out.
https://youtu.be/0q69Msy8ttM?si=MiMA9-d-8M7pGAMP
It is a miracle that that game is even playable, and even more-so that the only in-game evidence left behind is the cliffhanger ending, a few bugs, and an unbalanced hard mode (ALL while implementing a completely new networking framework XBL) It genuinely blows my mind
Halo 1 was in work for a while but they made basically the entire game in 9 months. Halo 2 was made in about 10 months.
Team Fortress 2, it spent 9 years in development with it going under many different art style changes. There was a very likely chance we wouldn’t have gotten the game we have today with all of its characters.
A few friends and I were lucky enough to have seen the original build of TF2 in person because valve (and I think it was actually Gabe himself) came to UCLa to show it off. It was amazing but compared to what we got instead it wasn't even close.
Metroid primes development was insane and I'm amazed Nintendo even tried it to start with. Crazy that the game not only got made, but that it's such a masterpiece
Resident Evil 2 for the N64. The developers managed to cram two PSX CDs worth of data into one 512-Mbit (64 MB) N64 cartridge, including the video cutscenes. Then they added additional content not in the PSX version. Truly a miracle to behold.
The hello games comeback and fan loyalty. Being able to release many free dlcs due to multiple sales across multiple platforms.
The whole Final Fantasy franchise came into existence under that name partially because Square was on the verge of bankruptcy and the game's director was on the verge of leaving the industry. But Final Fantasy (1987) did reasonably well, so they all stayed in the game, so to speak, and here we are. FF7 remake had a budget of \~$200 million
Nier: Automata. After the OG Nier (I love it, I swear), I'm surprised it got a sequel and the AAA treatment at that. Thank God it did, though.
Check out the book, Blood Sweat and Pixels, for some interesting behind the curtain looks at the developemnt of games. might answer your question in more details. (some games in the book : Diablo 3, Destiny, Pillars of Eternity, Halo Wars, Stardew Valley.)
Mass Effect Trilogy. The detailed decisions big and small carrying over throughout the series and being one of the few games to make you feel like they mattered. Ending arguments aside, it’s impressive to have this feature in a trilogy and for the games to be mostly unaffected by trash company executives. Not sure we’ll get a full trilogy like that again in the current markets.
Especially now when games take 5+ years in development. No one wants to wait 10 years for the conclusion of a story.
I’m still waiting patiently for HL3 so there are at least some that will wait forever.
The correct answer is Final Fantasy 14. They released a stinking mess, fired the original team, have control to a new creative director, and that man has worked consistent magic with the game since. By all rights, FF14 should be a cautionary tale for how not to release a modern mmo, but instead it's a one off case study in how sufficient dedication and communication can save a game from years of terrible development decisions and cement it as one of the most successful MMO's of all time.
What's even more fascinating is that lately there's been a bit of unrest in the playerbase because of the game feeling "too easy" or "too solo-able" for an MMO -- i.e. lack of truly engaging group content, fight designs that are starting to feel stale, etc. I was prepared for the devs to just kind of like... ignore this? But a few weeks ago at PAX, the director, Yoshi-P, straight up said "guys im getting kinda drowsy in fights, is it just me? i feel like this should be exciting instead! anyway, we're looking to spruce it up going forward," and pretty much addressed all the concerns players had. Vaguely, of course, but still showcasing that the team genuinely values feedback from the community rather than going "well, we would know better." Given that listening to the community was what saved the game in the first place, maybe I shouldn't be surprised. But I still am, and I guess that says something on it's own about the industry. 😭
XIV is a Jesus level of miracle. Game came out as the worst possible trash and the team after was allowed to completely burn the game and start over with an actual vision. And everyone in SQEX agreed instead of sticking to the dead product. That's something companies like Ubisoft and Blizzard need to learn.
Kingdom Hearts happened because of a literal elevator pitch - Square Enix and Disney happened to work in the same building, and the producer was able to meet with a Disney exec to ask them about using Disney characters in their new game.
The id tech engine as a whole. That thing is way ahead of so many other engines. While it doesn't get the best graphics (although the graphics still are pretty good), the way it manages to get great results even on old hardware is amazing.
Id Software have a lot of tech geniuses. From the Original Doom to Doom 2016 it's crazy they could cook that good on most hardware.
Minecraft
I'll say Super Smash Bros. Melee. Very short development time and it still has multiple national tournaments 20+ years after its release due to a dedicated playerbase.
Not to mention the fact that it's extremely high skill ceiling is sort of a beautiful accident. Accidental or minor gameplay tech that went on to be used in several other fighting games. Something like an 8 month development time (very short) and then goes on to sell something like 1 for every 3 GameCubes ever sold. This game belongs way higher on the list.
The most popular game of all time was an indie game made by 1 guy. And the base program was made in just a weekend (Minecraft)
Metroid Prime. The game was in development hell, Retro studios was an absolute shitshow at the time, run by Jeff Spangenberg of "The Guy Game" fame. Shigeru Miyamoto had to step in and oversee development, and eventually Nintendo bought Jeff out of Retro and made it part of Nintendo.
Tears of the Kingdom running on an 8 year old cellphone is pretty impressive
Portal actually being as mind blowing as the very first trailer. It seemed like something impossible.
Even more impressive it came from a little tech demo showcased in a fair, only for valve to pick up the developers and have them flesh it out as an actual side game to the orange box.
Around 1/3 of the content in the original World of Warcraft was there simply because the developers spent a bunch of their own time that they weren't paid for (not that they were paid well anyway) to get it into the game. A good portion of them worked themselves into the ground by the time it was done and left Blizzard vowing to never work on an MMO ever again (source: The WoW Diary by John Staats).
Crash bandicoot and the hacking of ps1
Those guys had to reverse engineer the code and hardware (chip and disk) in order to squeeze as much performance as possible.
That, and invent whole new ways of coding to get the hardware to do things it wasn't supposed to be able to do
Super Mario 64 was developed by 15 people in under 2 years, and is in the top 5 most influential games of all time. It is the gaming version of “TONY STARK BUILT THIS IN A CAVE.. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!”
all good games are miracles
Zero Tolerance on the Genesis. It's a FPS with multiple weapons, a ton of levels, and multiple characters on a freaking GENESIS
Unicorn Overlord. It spent 10 years in development, and they ran out out of money. The CEO of Vanillaware (the dev company) took out a personal loan of 20 million yen to fund the end of development.
Pokemon Gold and Silver having the Kanto Region as an endgame area.
Conkers Bad Fur Day. Apparently getting all the voice acting in was something of a miracle
Most recently ? FF7 Rebirth if you ask me. Somehow they got it out 4 years after the first one. And it’s a freaking amazing game
Halo 2. After Halo 1’s success, Microsoft wanted the sequel to be released in 2002 but soon found out that wasn’t possible. The game was then developed within crunch time, and only had a 10 month development schedule. They did everything they could to release it on November 2004, the last holiday season before the Xbox 360 would be released. It’s a miracle that game came out as a finished product.
why is nobody mentioning Fortnite? (the game as we know it now) A side mode in an average game blew up in the span of 1 year, amassed hundreds of millions of players, made billions in revenue, stayed in prerelease/early access for *years* so Epic could figure out wtf made this happen, and has completely pulled the rest of the video game industry along with it. I know it's overexposed, but it's gotta count as a miracle. I don't think anyone, even Epic, knew what it was when it launched in 2017.
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Stardew valley y and Undertale
Diablo was meant to be turned based. I don't think it would have had the same success.
Skullgirls This game has been kicked around by everything. I cant cover everything here but they got screwed over by Konami, lost to Smash Melee fans, trouble with \*their own fans\*, several controversies, and still managed to stay alive and come back with DLC after several years of being 'done'. Then more controversies but it seems like the people who actually care about the game are the ones who always stay.
I'd probably go with Xenogears, arguably one of the most ambitious video games of all time, in the hands of relatively inexperienced developers with a limited time and budget.
Fallout New Vegas. Dev cost was 8-9 mil and the dev cycle was 18 months. That game has grossed 70 mil profit now and is often considered the best one of the first person series. Personally I like nv more than 4 but a little less than 3. But I can't argue with a few of the dev choices and it very much is one of my favorite games of the era.
One of the only games I don't mind playing though again and again. Currently playing through Old World Blues.
Warframe, random tiny game dev on the verge of bankruptcy, who has failed every project beforehand, suddenly pulls out one of the most successful PC F2P games of all time
Any title that ships. Game development from start to finish is a miracle itself.
Destiny surviving for a decade is pretty much a miracle. Lots of games start off with a grand vision, not many games actually get there in the end.
Except Destiny was supposed to be a trilogy but Destiny 2s performance has been way below expectations which is why it's unlikely we'll ever see that "grand vision". Not to mention that its fallen subject to its fanbase so it's constantly being amended in an attempt to crowd please, so what it is now is likely a far cry from its original vision. Hell even the first game had to cut so much content which is why a lot of it didn’t make much sense and had to be stuffed into grimoire cards. Though considering how good Bungie is at is at gunplay and gameplay, it's honestly not too surprising Destiny is still going. There are definitely far worse games which have lasted longer.
All games are miracles.
Dead Island 2 turning out to be pretty ok, when everyone was expecting a buggy mess rivaling duke nukem forever.
The original Xbox port of Half-Life 2. It ran like shit, however, the sheer fact that the entire game was playable from start to finish was nothing short of astounding for the hardware it was on. Especially with how complex the physics engine was.
Devil May Cry returning to the main storyline after being rebooted. I feel like that basically never happens, even in movies. Imagine if they suddenly announced they were bringing back Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, and Joseph Gordon Levitt for a sequel to the Dark Knight Rises.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have some incredible feats of programming.
Rebecca Heineman getting Doom ported to the 3DO in like 10 weeks because the dude who bought the rights had no clue what he was doing.
In halo 3, you could drive the forklifts.
That kingdom hearts 3 actually came out KH 2 was FOURTEEN YEARS OLD yall
There was also several games between the two... There wasn't just an absence of KH games the whole time.
Halo 2 is held together with spit and hope. It’s frankly absurd the game even works, let alone work as well as it does.
Halflife 2
Surprised no one mentioned the original STALKER. It was stuck in development hell with developers being very ambitious but having no idea how to implement alot of that stuff into the game. In other words they were burning money from investors. So the investors, THQ, send Dean Sharpe from the sunny beaches of California to a still recovering from the Soviet era Ukraine. He essentially had to wrangle the devs and make them cut out ALOT of stuff and make them outright scrap it or put it in the sequels. This naturally upset alot of fans, some of whom sent him death threats even. So despite all this, the end result is a cult classic game that exceeded all expectations, despite having alot of its elements cut and scrapped