Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness - 10 Games That Ruined Game Companies
Intro
there are times that games take so much out of a company that the company just can't exist anymore. Hi folks, it's Falcon and today on GameRanks are 10 games that ruined game companies, starting with Start off with number 10.
007 legends
It's double 07 legends by Eurocom, Euro comes. They are mostly known for licensed games, and they were one of the most prolific British article game developers of the 1990s, all the way through to the 2000s.
So they definitely deserve some respect for that double 07 legend, however. It isn't that great that the game's release was scheduled to coincide. The 50th anniversary of the James Bond movies and if you know anything about Sonic games, specifically Sonico 6, you know that trying to tie games to an anniversary date is not a good idea.
Based on this game, the curse is clearly not exclusive to Sonic. For some reason, the basic idea of the game was that it was going to be a celebration of the entire movie series, so each section of the game would recreate certain sections of the movie, but it was kind of a mess. It couldn't just be a compilation of different eras of James Bond; for some reason, it had to be a tie-in to the most recent movie, Skyfall.
Even just seeing Craig in the old movies is weird enough, especially. So when they managed to get some of the likeness rights, some of the likeness rights to the characters from the previous movies, but not all of them, the whole celebration aspect of the game is kind of a mess, and the gameplay isn't a lot better either.
The controls are solid enough, but the whole thing ends up feeling like a third-rate Call of Duty knockoff without any of the personality or charm that a James Bond game should have. The craziest thing about it is the ending. Like, you know, the final mission wasn't on the disc, it was made available as a free download after Skyfall came out.
The only one that had the complete story on the disc was the Wii U version, so no surprise here. The game was panned by critics and did not do well commercially. Eurocom ended up closing its doors only about two months later. It's a shame too, because Eurocon was a pretty consistently solid developer and the idea for 007: Legends was not a bad one.
It was actually pretty good. It was just that development issues killed this game and took down the developers with it , and number nine is Kingdoms of Amler, reckoned by 38 studios.
Kingdoms of amalur: reckoning
This is a famous one that is unusual because the actual game isn't bad when it comes to killing companies. Games don't actually have to be bad or even really sell poorly for the developer to still croak.
There are a lot of factors when it comes to killing companies, and this one had them here. The factor was world series baseball pitcher Kurt Schilling in the state of Rhode Island. Basically. Kurt Schilling was burning through money at the studio, investing around 35 million of his own money before making a deal with Rhode Island to move the studio there in exchange for a 75 million dollar loan, which was a hell of a lot of money for a studio that just had no history to speak of.
There was game development experience there, though 38 studios brought in big, huge games. That's probably the main reason a game actually came out. 38's previous work on an mlr mmo never got anywhere. When the game came out in 2012, it got decent reviews and sold relatively well, especially for a new property, but it wasn't nearly enough to pay back the debt they owed Rhode Island.
The whole thing ended up being a huge scandal, in part because all the money that was lost came from state taxpayers. 75 million is kind of a lot of money to just go up and smoke, and people wanted their heads to roll. It's a story where the actual game is almost immaterial, like the game would have needed to sell around 3 million copies to make good on that, and that just wasn't going to happen. I'm really only scratching the surface of this story, but long story short, the entire staff of 38 got laid off a few months later, and that was it.
Tomb raider: angel of darkness
And number eight is the tomb raider angel of darkness from core design. The 2000s were rough for a lot of game developers out there. The increasing complexity of games, the rising cost of production, and the larger teams that were necessary to make these games, really wreaked havoc on certain developers.
So many classic developers have just died in this era of core design. If you know article games, you probably know Tomb Raider. It was incredibly popular for a while and spawned a ton of sequels, all made by Core Design. They somehow managed to pump out six mainline tomb raider games between 1996 and 2003, literally a game a year until Angel of Darkness, which saw multiple delays before its eventual release in 2003.
It was pretty clear that the team core were stretched pretty thin with all these sequels, like they were really hitting diminishing returns after the third game, so when the next generation came around, they weren't really ready for it. It's one of those games that just feels incomplete from the start.
The controls feel a generation behind, the game's plagued with bugs, and the whole thing feels half finished. There are story elements that go nowhere, gameplay mechanics that get introduced and don't do anything. It's a mess after the game's failure. The Tomb Raider franchise was handed over to Crystal Dynamics, and while the core didn't close down immediately, it never really worked on a major game again. In 2006, they were sold and renamed Rebel Derby, and they were finally taken out to the shed and shot in 2010.
Haze
And number seven is haze from free radical design, the halo killer. Is there a more cursed thing to try to be in gaming? There were a lot of games really chasing the Halo crown in the mid 2000s, but for whatever reason, nothing ever even got close.
Uh-uh that did not happen. Like a lot of games on this list, the idea is not terrible or anything. You play as a mercenary who sees the world like a article game, but reality is supposed to be much uglier. It's an interesting concept that the game does almost nothing with and ends up being forgettable.
It's just kind of a dull FPS with a few gimmicks. There's just nothing particularly good about it. It's sluggish, the story is laughable, and the multiplayer is just a total flatline. So, just nothing compared to Halo, like core design. The studio kind of hobbled on for a while. They sold themselves to Crytek and were called Crytek UK for a while, but that didn't last.
In 2014, most of the staff were laid off. Unfortunately, you'd think that'd be the end of it, but in 2021. Deep Silver brought them back, but nothing has been announced, so all we can do is hope that they do time slitters for rather than haze two.
