Popular Games that Were a Nightmare to Create (Development Hell)

Games like Duke Nukem Forever and Too Human spent years in development, so much so that Too Human was initially developed for the Playstation 1 and ended up on the Xbox 360, while Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1996 and not released until 2011. These games were huge flops, but what about the games that took a long time and had every minute of that development hell justified with big sales and a critically acclaimed game?

Shenmue

I actually remember this game being announce many years ago and i also remember the wait that followed. The developers started working on this title in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2000, a whole 6 years later, that they finally released it.

The Dreamcast was the lucky console but the SEGA machine was not the big seller that everyone expected it to be. The game was released nevertheless and it helped to set the tone for the RPG genre, but because of the console it was never as successful as it could have bene. Of course, this was a product of SEGA’s development team, so it was always going to be a SEGA game and that was the main reason it struggled.

Shenmue has since gone down in gaming history and fans love it as much now as they did then. But for the developers, who only focused on the sales figures, it wasn’t a game to get excited about.

Team Fortress 2

This game was in development for a whole 9 years! That’s huge when you consider that he original Team Fortress was a free mod for Quake. They clearly didn’t need to go big in order to have a game that was going to sell a lot of copies and win a lot of fans, but they did and that ensured that the production dragged on.

They refined the game, introduced new elements and made it a strong standalone title. It took them a long time and the developers suffered throughout that time, but at the end they emerged with one of the most successful team-based shooters ever and one that is still a massive success 10 years after it was released.

Starcraft 2

This is the series that kick-started the eSports trend, the game changed the industry. The original Starcraft game was huge and there was an instant demand for a sequel, which was eventually announced in 2007. But at that point, Blizzard had already been working on it for several years, having begun work in 2003.

A year into development, when they should have been putting the finishing touches to it, they announced that they were only a third of the way through. This was a busy time for the WoW creators and it seems that they couldn’t keep up with the success of their own company. Another few years passed before Starcraft 2 was finally released, appearing out of 7 years of development hell to rave reviews from critics and massive sales from RTS lovers the world over.

L.A. Noire

Although it was popular, this game didn’t make nearly as much as the developers hoped. However, it was well received by critics and it helped to pave new ground in facial recognition and other game mechanics. It was said to have cost $50 million and taken a total of 7 years to develop and while it didn’t break huge ground with sales, it did become the number 1 bestselling game at the time of release and it has since sold over 5 million copies.

The costs were mostly down to time. Because the longer you take, the more you need to pay actors and production staff for their time. You also need to pay for the cameras, the motion capture tech and everything else that is used to supply big industries and big games (click here to see more). It’s not cheap and before you know it you’ll be well into 6 figures before you even have a tangible foundation.