The numbers tell a shocking story about the worst video games ever made. Games like Alone in the Dark: Illumination and Ride to Hell: Retribution crashed spectacularly with Metacritic scores of just 19, and many more titles barely reached past the 20-point mark.
Action 52’s infamous $199 price tag delivered completely unplayable content, while E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, developed by a games development company that underestimated the challenges of tight deadlines, helped trigger the 1980s gaming industry crash. The sort of thing I love about these gaming disasters is that they’re not just bad games – they serve as fascinating case studies of catastrophic failures. Let’s explore these legendary gaming failures and understand what makes them stand out as the worst games that ever spread across the industry.
The Birth of Gaming Disasters: Early Catastrophes
The E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game for Atari 2600 marks a turning point in gaming history. This terrible title did more than just fail – it brought down a thriving industry.
Everything started in 1982 after Atari got the rights to make a game based on Spielberg’s blockbuster film. The negotiations stretched until late July 1982, which left developer Howard Scott Warshaw just 5.5 weeks to build the game from scratch. Most games back then needed six to nine months to complete.
Atari’s expectations reached for the stars, even with these impossible deadlines. The company spent between $20-25 million on license rights and made 5 million cartridges. They bet big on the movie’s success to drive sales. The team skipped any player testing, which made things worse.
The results turned into a disaster. Holiday sales looked good at first, but critics tore the game apart for its confusing gameplay. Players got stuck in a loop that kept sending them back to the same screen with no explanation. Only 1.5 million cartridges sold out of the 5 million made.
The Alamogordo Burial
The next chapter became legendary. Atari secretly moved 10 to 20 semi-trailer trucks full of games and computer equipment to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in September 1983. The workers crushed everything and covered it with concrete.
This story stayed an urban legend until 2014. Excavators proved it true by finding hundreds of E.T. cartridges. James Heller, the former Atari manager behind the burial, revealed they buried 728,000 cartridges of various games there.
Money losses hit hard. Atari lost $536 million in 1983 and had to fire 30% of its 10,000 employees. The game played a big part in the video game industry crash of 1983 [52], which cost the industry billions.
E.T. teaches us what happens when rushed deadlines and corporate greed take priority over quality.
The Golden Age of Bad Games (1990s-2000s)
The gaming world saw some of its biggest flops during the 1990s and early 2000s. This golden age of gaming disasters gave us titles that earned their spots in the hall of shame. These games redefined what we consider the worst video games ever made.
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (2003) ranks as the most broken commercial game ever released. Stellar Stone launched this truck racing game in what looked like an unfinished test version. Players could drive straight through solid objects, climb straight up mountains without slowing down, and freely roam beyond the level boundaries. The game’s problems were endless:
- Nothing stopped you from driving through walls or other objects
- AI trucks just sat at the starting line and never moved in the first release
- A later patch made the AI trucks stop right before the finish line – you couldn’t lose even if you tried
- Players got treated to the now-legendary “YOU’RE WINNER!” screen with its bizarre three-handled trophy
Big Rigs turned so bad it became legendary. The game sold about 20,000 copies – surprising for something that hit rock bottom on both Metacritic and GameRankings.
Bubsy 3D (1996) showed us everything that could fail in a jump to 3D gaming. Super Mario 64 had just changed the game world, but Bubsy’s polygon adventure came with dizzy camera angles and controls that felt frozen. The game’s world looked like “it had been built out of cardboard boxes by the planet’s most attention deficit three-year-olds”. One critic nailed it: “Pretend your controller is filled with mud—this is how Bubsy plays”.
Superman 64 (1999) stuck players in Lex Luthor’s “virtual world” where they mostly flew through rings in a sickly green fog. The game’s dead controls, empty environments, and copy-paste missions made critics call it “unquestionably the worst game on the N64, and quite possibly the worst video game ever made”.
These epic failures became gaming culture landmarks from an age when deeply flawed games could still make it to store shelves.
Modern Gaming Failures That Shocked Players
The gaming industry has seen some spectacular failures that rival historical disasters. Games with massive budgets and long development cycles have crashed and burned at launch.
Fallout 76 ranks among the worst modern gaming disasters. Bethesda’s multiplayer experiment launched so broken in 2018 that PlayStation wouldn’t sell it for six months because of performance problems. The game had thousands of bugs. Developers later admitted that quality assurance knew about “every major bug in 76 [that appeared at launch]”. The game sparked many controversies too. Players who used mods to fix technical issues got banned and had to write essays explaining “why cheating is damaging”.
CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 release turned into another catastrophe in 2020. The game performed terribly on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One after eight years of buildup. Sony pulled it from their digital store. The company faced backlash for hiding the game’s actual condition. They had claimed it worked “surprisingly well” on older consoles before launch. A developer later revealed they often had to pick between showing “a T-pose or you hard crash” – they chose not to crash.
Arkane’s vampire shooter Redfall has continued this pattern of failures. The game struggled with “inconsistent AI behavior, shallow gameplay mechanics, and a limited pool of weapons”. Xbox head Phil Spencer had to publicly acknowledge how disappointing the launch was.
These troubled games share common problems: rushed development cycles, technical issues, and broken promises. Some developers have tried to make things right through updates. One developer noted that Fallout 76 became his “favorite game to work on” after improvements. Cyberpunk 2077 got major upgrades too, but its reputation never recovered.
Publishers who put release dates ahead of quality still produce the worst video games, even with innovative technology and huge budgets at their disposal.
