The Worst Video Games of All Time

The video game industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that is beginning to rival the movie industry for size, scope and fan-base. While there have been many video games released over the years that have been labeled as masterpieces, there have been plenty of other games that are nothing more than piles of awful, awful c**p. These video games take things to a whole new epic level of failure and they are widely remembered for being the worst video games in history. Some people bought these games hoping for something great, but only ended up with games that were of poor quality, impossible to play and generally just awful all around.

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The movie, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, was the highest grossing movie of all-time until Jurassic Park and was nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture. In addition, it was ranked as the 24th greatest movie of all time by the American Film Institute, and was listed as one of the 100 greatest films ever by Time Magazine. It was chosen as the seventh-greatest work of science-fiction in the past 25 years by Entertainment Weekly, and it is generally considered to be a masterpiece of filmmaking.

The game version on the other hand is considered to be, without a doubt, the worst video game of all-time. Released by Atari in 1982, was rushed to production in order to take advantage of the Christmas season and the juggernaut of success that the movie was. The entire video game was put together in only five weeks, and Atari produced four million cartridges expecting there to be a huge amount of sales for the video game. For Atari, what happened was not success, but epic failure. The game was tedious, boring and the graphics were sub-par, even for that era. Roughly 40 percent, or 1.6 million cartridges remained unsold, and many believe that Atari went bankrupt in no small part in 1984 due to the failure of this video game.

Now, things were not over for Atari after the failure of E.T. because in 1983 the company took its unsold cartridges and dumped them into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The cartridges were crushed there, buried and then covered in a layer of cement. Obviously the company was worried that the cartridges would come back from hell to doom us all. The New York Times got wind of this and reported on the how the cartridges met their end, which led to protests and new legislation from many city officials on how things like cartridges could be disposed of.

How bad was this game?

• It was listed as the worst game of all time by FHM Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly and PC World.

• The game is believed to be one of the main causes of the video game crash of 1983.

• It was listed as one of the 52 most important video games ever made in 2007 thanks to its role in causing the downfall of Atari and aiding the video game crash of 1983. It was the only game to make the list for negative reasons.

• It was chosen as the second-worst movie game of all time by GameTrailers, losing out to Charlie’s Angels.

• It was chosen as the second-worst video game of all time by GameTrailers, losing out to Superman 64.

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If a game involves a naked man trying to reach a naked woman tied to a post, you know that the game is not going to be good. Morally wrong and really just an awful video game in general, Custer’s Revenge was created by Mystique in 1982 for the Atari 2600 platform. The adults-only game involves a naked General Cluster navigating through a hail of arrows and a field of cacti in order to reach a nearly-naked Native American woman who is tied to a post. The video game is wrong on many levels and the graphics make it just plain awful.

Why is this game so bad? Here are just a few reasons from the video game industry itself over the past few years.

• Due to the simulation of an apparent rape of a Native American woman in the game, it is often cited as one of the most violent video games of all time.

• GameSpy listed it as the most shameful video game of all time.

• PC World picked it as the third-worst video game of all time.

• GameTrailers chose it as the third-worst video game of all time.

• Electronic Gaming Monthly picked it as the ninth-worst video game of all time.

All in all, this video game is not only bad in terms of game-play and graphics, but it is also in horrible taste. How this game was ever released is a mystery and it rightly deserves its title as one of the worst video games of all time.

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It seems as though 1982 was a very bad year for video games considering three of the worst video games ever were released that year. No wonder the video game industry crashed the next year. Now, here we list Pac-Man, but we are not talking about the iconic arcade version that is considered one of the most important video games in history. No, we are talking about the ill-fated Atari version that did not look or sound like the arcade version. Pac-Man looked different, the noises were not the same and the game-play was pretty awful. According to some reports, Atari actually released 12 million cartridges, even though only 10 million Atari consoles existed.

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Shaquille O’Neil is considered to be one of the greatest basketball players of all-time, but the game he released with Electronic Arts in 1994 is nothing short of a travesty. There have been plenty of video games released that play off the celebrity of sports stars. Back in 1994, Larry Bird was featured on video games and 10 years later Shaq decided to do the same. In Shaq Fu, Shaq is sent to another dimension where he must use martial arts to rescue a small boy. Almost a carbon-copy of Mortal Kombat in many cases, the game was criticized for being difficult to play and almost impossible to beat, even by patient players. In order to do damage, an opponent had to be hit in the right spot. In addition, every copy of Shaq Fu came with Shaq’s CD single from his rap album. So, that brings it down another notch as well.

GameFAQs rated it as the sixth-worst video game concept of all time, while GameTrailers called it the fourth-worst game ever made.

There have been enough bad games in the past 30 years to fill plenty of articles, but these rank up there as some of the worst. Have there been worse games than these? Some would say so, while others would say they actually enjoyed the games. As with anything, picking a worst list is all subjective and based on what one person thinks

Author: Craig Baird — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com