Creator Backlash / Video Games

• Factor 5, the developers of the Rogue Squadron series, reportedly got sick of making them by the time they finished the third entry. While working on Lair, someone on the staff made a public comment about being glad that they didn't have to make X-Wings or yet another rehash of Hoth. Lair was the last game made by Factor 5.
• Will Wright defended the changes in SimCity Societies, saying that the series had gotten too complex, and that he enjoyed each one less and less. That didn't go over well.
• Keiji Inafune, who is best known for his work on the Mega Man series and played a large role in the Onimusha and Dead Rising franchises, has gone on record saying that he absolutely hates his job and wants nothing more than to retire. He also constantly rants about how the Japanese gaming industry is in serious decline.^note This last one has earned him some serious scrutiny from other people, especially in light of the trainwreck that was Mighty No. 9 and Capcom (whom he had left, see below) winning back the crowd with games like Mega Man 11, Devil May Cry 5, and the Resident Evil remakes.
  • A translated blog post states that even though he hated his job at Capcom, he wanted to stay on until Mega Man Legends 3. He quit when it became clear it wasn't leaving Development Hell anytime soon, and without him the project quickly fell apart.
  • Mega Man 3, despite being well-received by fans, is stated by Inafune to be his least favorite in the series, due to it being rushed.
  • While Inafune does not hate the original game at all, he wasn't happy with the early "Doughy" looking designs of the characters he designed for it in hindsight. Even as early as Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge, he felt his early designs hadn't aged well and made sure to revise them. In the G4 Icons Mega Man special, he said that if someone came up to him with his early designs, he would say "Nope, these suck. Do 'em again." He was also very unhappy with the infamously sloppy boxart for the game's North American release, even blaming it in part for why the game sold so poorly there.
  • He was also unhappy with the Game Boy port of Mega Man II, which was outsourced to a different company and was ultimately a sloppy game.
  • Inafune also disowned Super Adventure Rockman, a FMV based rail shooter, because he felt that the story's darker tone completely betrayed the lighthearted feel he wanted the Classic series to keep, and also because it wasn't very fun to play. It didn't stop Archie Comics from adapting it for their Mega Man (Archie Comics) series, though.
  • While he had no involvement with the game at all (being tied up working on Mega Man Zero and wanting the X series to end with the fifth game), Inafune was not happy with Mega Man X6, which Capcom rushed out in 10 months just to squeeze out some extra cash from the PS1 before it left the market, resulting in a game loaded with unreasonably hair-pulling difficulty, very sloppy level design, lazily designed boss fights and sprites blatantly recycled from previous games, a buggy sound test, and a garbled English translation that was cranked out in just one week. In Mega Man X: Official Complete Works, he outright apologized for the game ever happening.
    "I had honestly planned to for 'X5' to be the last title in the series, but somehow I found myself with 'X6.' I feel like I owe the fans an apology, but I have to admit the series was starting to go in a direction that was out of my control. I plan to reexamine the situation and be more careful with how I handle the Mega Man name from now on."
  • Regarding the infamous disaster that was Mighty No. 9, he made no bones about his disappointment with the end result and himself, admitting his high-profile mistakes (primarily the decision to have independently produced 10 different console versions of the game that cut into his abilities), openly admitting it was a failure and accepting all responsibility for it.
• Masahiro Sakurai has said that he regrets aiming Super Smash Bros. Melee so strongly towards the hardcore gamer crowd, making it inaccessible to newer fans, and called it a mistake he wouldn't repeat again. Given that many hardcore players still prefer Melee over later installments of the Super Smash Bros. franchise (or only prefer heavily-modded versions of Super Smash Bros. Brawl that are specifically designed to make it like Melee), he successfully followed through on this. He's clarified in further interviews that his regrets about Melee have been greatly exaggerated in popular belief. He holds no animosity towards its playerbase, and is perfectly happy with it still being popular. It merely doesn't match his design philosophy and belief in accessibility.
  • Part of this is apparently due to the technical exploits that completely derailed the metagame, which resulted in Sakurai's decision to patch those mechanics out and introduce other mechanics to broach the skill gap (like Final Smashes and "rage").
  • While Sakurai isn't ashamed of his work for Brawl, he didn't have any kind words for random tripping—another mechanic intended to close the skill gap—when it was removed from Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. His only comment was "To answer quite frankly, it will not return."
• Street Fighter IV director Yoshinori Ono expressed regret about the Street Fighter III series, commenting that they had "locked the doors to the entrance without realizing it".
• Shigeru Miyamoto stated in an interview that he considered Zelda II: The Adventure of Link to be the least favorite game he ever made, for reasons as follows;
  "I wouldn't say that I've ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there. In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper. I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing. So one thing, of course, (that he would have liked the game to been like) is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two.^note Specifically, he's referring to the long loading times of the Famicom Disk version of the game—the loading times are nonexistent in the western port But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to. The other thing is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort."
  • Both Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto and director Eiji Aonuma have expressed their regrets in the production of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. They don't dislike the game at all, but feel that it never turned out the way they had envisioned it. Miyamoto simply stated that he felt it was "missing something", and Aonuma felt that he didn't create the game that was intended to be "120% of what The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was".
  • On that note, Miyamoto had shown a similar contempt over the sheer amount of elements removed from his original vision of Ocarina, which were impossible to fully form due to the limitations of the N64. Much of these features were planned to be added in an expansion, referred to as 'Ura Zelda', but ended up being cancelled after the failure of the 64DD. You might recognize Ura Zelda as Master Quest, which only had its remixed dungeons finished (although debatably, this was a separate project).
  • Miyamoto wasn't exactly too fond of his involvement in Star Fox either, as stated in an interview found in the official Player's Guide for Star Fox 64, feeling the limits of the Super Nintendo really hampered the game's presentation and some of the gameplay concepts he wanted to include. This was the impetus for his work on the N64 game, as he was able to make a game closer to his original vision.
  • Miyamoto doesn't necessarily dislike F-Zero, but it is his least beloved of all the franchises he's helped created. When asked about the potential for new entries in a 2012 French interview, he was surprised that the series had much of a fanbase, believing that the lack of evolution between titles and ever declining sales meant people had grown weary of it.
  • Miyamoto expressed that he isn't very fond of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (known in Japan as Super Mario Bros. 2) due to it being a more difficult rehash of the first game, and that he actually prefers the American Super Mario Bros. 2. ^note He worked on the latter's Japanese counterpart, Doki Doki Panic.
• Also regarding Zelda, Eiji Aonuma has personal regrets regarding The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, not because he disliked it, but because of its rushed and tumultuous development (as well as the stress he endured during it) leading him to have made many mistakes. When he was able to revisit the game for its 3DS remake, he came up with a list of features needing changing and problems needing fixing and phrased it as a "What in the world" list (as in, "What in the world was I thinking!?"), which was reportedly full of apology notes for all the questionable design decisions he made when he was younger.
• The creators of the Pikmin series admit to not being the biggest fans of Pikmin 2. While they like the broad amount of content they added in pivoting the series to be about collecting treasure, they came to dislike how they did it at the expense of the challenge and time management that was core to Pikmin (2001), and how that created a Broken Base within the fan community. Following entries would more consciously follow the blueprint of the first game, with the third game even reincorporating a Race Against the Clock mechanic (something present in the first game but removed in the second).
• Portal's writer, Erik Wolpaw, is absolutely sick of "The Cake Is a Lie" jokes that spawned nonstop from the game. He said he wouldn't be making any references to it in Portal 2 (which turned out to be a lie, though there's only one, and it's played as an Obligatory Joke).
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • This was Sonic Team's response to the many changes done against their will by Sega of America's localizations to early games^note particularly the first one, which involved giving Sonic a mohawk, bowlegs and a stereotypical Totally Radical personality, renaming Dr. Eggman to Dr. Robotnik in addition to giving him a more grotesque, evil look with pitch-black eyes, and making major changes to the lore, such as changing the setting of the games from Earth to a fictional planet named Mobius, or giving Sonic and Robotnik a superhero-esque origin, which was why most of them were jettisoned in the mid and late 90s. Large part of their frustration came from the fact that the game had been designed to cater to Western markets from the beginning, and before the unauthorized alterations took place, the dev team had already done changes to the characters and story based on Sega of America's requests, arriving at a compromise that both parties agreed upon.
  • Yuji Naka has publically apologized for the barrel in "Carnival Night Zone" in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. You can see the recording here!
  • Sonic Team and Sega of Japan disapproved of Sonic Boom, which was outsourced by Sega of America and eventually released to an abysmal reception. Sonic Team's head Takashi Iizuka went on to say that he deeply regretted not having a greater say in its development and design. The exception is that they're still rather fond of Canon Foreigner Sticks the Badger, as they had more involvement in her design, and thus she's been upgraded to a Canon Immigrant in several Sonic Team projects, including a namedrop in Sonic Frontiers confirming she exists in the main series as well.
  • Series co-creator Yuji Naka (who later left Sega) once stated that he considered later games in the series to not be as fun as earlier ones, primarily because he felt they had become too easy.
  • Sonic Team members admitted that Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and the Werehog sections in Sonic Unleashed turned out poorly, and explained that the strict deadlines imposed on them prevented them from giving them the polish they needed. As a result, they based Colors largely around the well-received day stages of the latter.
  • Relatedly, in 2010, Sega ceased to manufacture, and requested the removal from stores of, select Sonic games with mediocre ratings on Metacritic. This list of games included the above-mentioned Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic Unleashed, although their stance on the latter game seems to have softened somewhat as they have relisted it on digital storefronts and allowed it to be part of Microsoft's enhanced backwards compatibility program on Xbox.
  • Simon Thomley of Headcannon was not at all satisfied with Sonic Origins, a collection of remasters of Sonic 1, CD, 2 and 3 & Knuckles. He and his team had developed the latter remaster, though they were rather rushed while doing it and as such the final product was riddled with bugs, made worse by Sega's tacky implementation of it into the collection. That being said, he and his team didn't hesitate to return a year later to develop the content featured in Sonic Origins Plus, the game's DLC expansion. They took the opportunity during their return to fix as many bugs as they could.
  • Jon St. John voiced Big the Cat in Sonic Adventure, Sonic Shuffle and Sonic Heroes. He later regretted doing so, going as far as deliberately forgetting how to do Big's voice just so he wouldn't get any call backs. Later still, Jon clarified on his Facebook page that he only hated the voice of Big, and not the character himself.
• Sega's former head of product development Ken Balthaser has expressed regrets on forcing the developers of the Genesis platformer based on Fantasia to release the game as it was for the holiday season:
  I wish now that I would’ve just said no and sent it back for another two months or so, to tweak the gameplay. I think it could have been a really fantastic game if we had done that.
• One of the main developers at Gearbox quit from not just the company, but the gaming industry as a whole out of disgust towards Borderlands getting much of its plot axed.
• Computer Gaming World's preview of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne included the phrase "a breathtaking, original ballet of death", which was promptly plastered over the boxart and every advertisement for the game in existence. The writer of said preview, in his "Scorched Earth" back-page column some time after the game's release, expressed his dissatisfaction that Rockstar had taken a phrase from a preview and attempted to use it to sell people a finished game.
• Noa was displeased over the response Elona got on Kongregate, and the people it brought to the main boards. Many of the people coming in after the first couple weeks would not have the patience to properly learn Elona controls and quirks.
• Running With Scissors has all but disowned Postal III and now refuses to sell it on their online store, owing to the game's horribly Troubled Production and the amount of corners Akella had to cut, going as far as to call it "Russian Postal" and include potshots aimed at it in their future works. Postal 2's second expansion firmly placed it into Canon Discontinuity, retconning into a radiation-induced nightmare suffered by the Postal Dude.
  "Here's some tips from the future: Bet on the Red Sox and don't buy POSTAL III."
• There is an easter egg in Fallout 2 which contains the text "Yes, we know Descent to Undermountain was crap." Both games were released by Interplay.
• Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry was booted off Sierra some time after the release of Love For Sail. The next two games, Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust were both made without his involvement. He was very grateful. Especially in this case of Box Office Bust.
  Lowe's Website: Thank you, VU Games, for keeping me completely away from this latest disaster!
• Shinji Mikami apparently loathes being called the "father of Resident Evil". This was likely due to the fact that after the success of the first game in the series, Mikami was assigned as the producer of the series, which gave him fewer opportunities to work as a game director in subsequent projects, as he explains in this interview. Mikami also stated that he's actually embarrassed by the tank controls and fixed camera angles in the first game, calling them a workaround of the limitations at the time. He wanted to get "revenge" by making Resident Evil 4 use an Always Over the Shoulder camera without tank controls so that players could be fully immersed in the horrors without any limitations. Whenever fans tell Mikami that they liked the horror and scares that the first Resident Evil gave, he would cringe and ask them to stop.
• Yager Development hates the multiplayer mode for Spec Ops: The Line, as it was included as part of a corporate checklist, goes against the themes in the game's campaign, and was made by a different studio. Rather noticeably, all of the achievements and trophies for the game can specifically only be unlocked in the single-player mode, meaning the studio is actively encouraging people to not play the multiplayer. Cory Davis, the game's lead writer, has this to say about it:
  It sheds a negative light on all of the meaningful things we did in the single-player experience. The multiplayer game's tone is entirely different, the game mechanics were raped to make it happen, and it was a waste of money. No one is playing it, and I don't even feel like it's part of the overall package — it's another game rammed onto the disk like a cancerous growth, threatening to destroy the best things about the experience that the team at Yager put their heart and souls into creating.
• Suda51 was severely disappointed with Shadows of the Damned and how much the final product strayed from his original proposal, Kurayami, which was planned to be an adventure game based on the Franz Kafka novel The Castle. When Electronic Arts got involved with the project, they thought Suda's proposal wasn't profitable enough and retooled his idea into a horror-themed third-person shooter that barely resembled what Suda had in mind.
• Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of the Story of Seasons franchise, has stated that he dislikes how romance-oriented the series has gotten in later years. He went on to make a Creator-Driven Successor in Hometown Story which, while marriage is a part, is more like older titles in that it focuses on relationships in general.
• Bill Williams, longtime gaming programmer, was hired to work on The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare. He considered it the worst working experience of his life, nicknaming it "Bill's Nightmare", and handed it to an outsourced designer just before completion because he couldn't take it anymore. It ended up being the last game he ever did full programming for.
• The phone game Flappy Bird was the center of much controversy after becoming one of the biggest game crazes in smart phone history. Dong Nguyen, the game's creator, couldn't stand the controversy and just wanted it to end. He pulled the plug and removed the game within 2 weeks after it started picking up popularity. The controversy surrounded how the graphics were extremely similar but not actually the same as some game sprites from Super Mario World, and how he earned $50,000 a day from the ad revenue the game generated. It wasn't specifically negative towards him or the game, but he was feeling overwhelmed and just wanted it to stop.
• Erik Salter, one of the translators for the semi-infamous Fan Translation of Final Fantasy IV, looks back on his work with regret. Upon discovering that Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin had began to tear into the translation on his website, he tweeted in response "... I can't say I disagree."
• Treasure supposedly isn't too happy about the Japan-only shooter Dragon Drive: D-Masters Shot. It was the only game they released that never got acknowledged on their own official site, even to this day.
• NetherRealm Studios, formerly part of Midway Games, have little love for the Mortal Kombat games they produced in the latter half of Midway's lifespan. It's easy to tell because so many of the characters who were introduced in those games were viciously murdered or otherwise mocked in Mortal Kombat X. Notable examples include Hsu Hao dying to Scorpion without a fight in the first issue of the comics, and former Idiot Hero Shujinko being beaten to death by Cassie Cage in her Arcade ending.
• Jonochrome suffered a pretty sad one when his Five Nights at Freddy's fan-game, One Night at Flumpty's, became big. He stated that he wanted to make great video games, not just great fan games. After which, he took both games down and refused to mention the character Flumpty ever again. After a revolt in the fanbase however, he reluctantly put both of the games up on Game Jolt. However, given that he made a third game as part of the "Fazbear Fanverse Initiative," it seems like his feelings towards Flumpty's have changed in recent years.
• The development team of Fallout 4 still clearly love their work on the game and appreciate the love seen for it by the fan community, downplaying this trope. However, Todd Howard has admitted in interviews that he and the team regret the implementation of the heavily cut-down dialogue system. Howard also went on to admit that the developers had too many quests focus too heavily on violent solution in lieu of peaceful options (another common complaint given to the game, although Howard chalks this issue up more to miscommunication within the developers themselves than any one person's fault).
• PAYDAY 2 had a few rough patches between its own co-founders. Bo Andersson became CEO of Starbreeze (which owns Overkill, the developers of the game) while his brother Ulf Andersson continued his role of voicing the character Wolf. Over the years, the game had gotten a ton of paid DLCs in the form of weapon packs. When fans started to complain about it and other problems that the game had, Bo mocked them for it. Ulf grew disgusted by his brother's behavior and attitude and decided to quit his job in protest while going on to form a new indie game studio with other former Overkill developers.^note As for what happened to Bo, both his reputation and company would be torpedoed by the utter mess that was Overkill's The Walking Dead, leading him to leave the company before completely vanishing off the face of the earth.
• Undertale: Toby Fox admitted in a tweet that he was annoyed by the player character's slow movement speed, but thought adding a run button retroactively would mess up the timing of many scenes. The follow-up game Deltarune does have a run button.
• The King of Fighters: From what can be seen and heard, it's clear that everyone at SNK (with the sole exception of Eisuke Ogura) despises the Eolith-created character K9999, namely due to him being too much of a Captain Ersatz of Tetsuo (that, and the fact that he was also a right Jerkass whom not a lot liked, even if he does have his fans). While they could tolerate the other Eolith-made characters^note namely, May Lee, Angel (who even managed to return for The King of Fighters XIV!), the original Zero, Igniz (though he did get a Take That! in the form of Goodman) and Kusanagi (who reappeared in 2003 though as a creation of Chizuru's Yata Mirror as opposed to being a NESTS guinea pig), it was K9999 whom they had real issues with, no doubt out of fear of getting sued for copyright infringement. They even went as far as to not just retcon him killing Foxy in their team's ending in 2001, they outright removed him from the canon altogether and replaced him with Nameless for the Dream Match Game The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match, a character with a more tragic backstory and more original fighting style and was thus, more well-received by the fandom. As of The King of Fighters XV however (which, rather tellingly, had the aforementioned Ogura as creative director and thus in full control over the roster), they've brought him back, though not before redesigning him into "Krohnen" to make him stand out more as his own character.
• Halo:
  • Bungie have a bit of a mixed relationship with Halo 2. While company veterans like Joe Staten and David Candland have gone on record with saying it is their favourite Halo game, others consider that the game's original vision had to be significantly compromised thanks to Troubled Production. This includes the infamous E3 2003 demo, which had to be completely scrapped due to the Xbox being unable to handle the game engine.
  • Bungie have also singled out the Halo 3 level "Cortana" as a level they dislike. The level was originally going to be much more complex than in the final game, including a section where you fight Gravemind with an immobile Scarab. For one reason or another, this level was cut and replaced by repurposing the second half of "Floodgate" as a standalone level. The end result is that "Cortana" is the only mission in Halo 3 that did not have a dedicated level designer.
  • 343 Industries have their own Halo 2 with Halo 5: Guardians. Many of the early details revealed for its sequel, Halo Infinite, seem to indicate dissatisfaction with how Guardians turned out, primarily due to its more fantastical visuals and story, the reduced role of Master Chief, and its marketing campaign which many consider to be a major case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot.
• The early Tomb Raider games went through many rough patches with the developers:
  • When Tomb Raider II was being made, Eidos wanted to advertise the game by boosting Lara's sexual appeal. Toby Gard, one of the main creators behind Tomb Raider, quit in disgust and felt like he lost all creative control.
  • Tomb Raider III retained almost none of the original staff from the previous game since they were completely burned out from making yet another Tomb Raider game. A new team of developers had to be brought in to make the third game.
  • Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation had the developers become completely sick of the franchise and decided to have Lara die at the very end in the hopes of not making another Tomb Raider game ever again. Eidos forced them to make another game anyway, which became the lackluster Tomb Raider Chronicles. Eidos also had the team simultaneously work on Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness in order make it a Killer App on the Playstation 2, which not only made Chronicles Christmas Rushed, it also wound up making Angel of Darkness extremely buggy and resulted poor sales. Core Design was then promptly fired by Eidos.
• Overwatch's game director Jeff Kaplan has stated that he regrets adding golden guns as a reward for playing Competitive, feeling that rather than merely reward good competitive players, it instead attracted people who played competitive only for them.
• League of Legends held the "Year of the Ruined King" in 2021, dedicating its major events to a Story Arc surrounding the apocalyptic return of Viego the Ruined King, with a ragtag group of heroes amassed from around the world to stop him. However, the end result was widely seen as a disappointment that didn't live up to the hype, and by the end of the year, Riot Games gave an event retrospective that conceded to many of the fan criticisms. A particular regret they shared was the many means with which the story was told — there was an in-game Visual Novel, a webcomic, and CG cinematics, all of which had highly inconsistent continuity and a set of characterization, pacing, and tone problems that frustrated viewers and put its canonicity in doubt. In addition to apologizing for these mistakes and promising to do better for future lore events, they also dubbed the whole event as variably canonical, only existing in the most core of shared ideas, allowing fans to disregard the elements they wanted stricken from the record.
• Silent Hill 2 art director Masahiro Ito has expressed regret at creating Pyramid Head. He's never stated the reason, but many have speculated that it's because the character has been milked into a Series Mascot for the Silent Hill franchise, when he was meant to only be for James's story, and he was never properly financially compensated for all of these later appearances.
• Webfoot Technologies, developers of the Dragon Ball Z The Legacy Of Goku series, also worked on a Dragon Ball Z fighting game named Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu. Webfoot referred to Taiketsu as "that which shall not be named" after its release, as it was developed under tight time constraints using many assets from a previously-canceled game, and released to largely negative reception.
• In the booklet notes for the Cotton Original Soundtrack album, one of the 3D modellers for the poorly-received Rainbow Cotton follows a description of his role on the game with the words "I'm sorry".
• Cliff Bleszinski is not a fan of his old nickname of CliffyB and has gone to great lengths to distance himself from it, and the persona associated with it.
• Codemasters brings sparse mentions of Game Genie cheat devices and they have generally moved away from it, although some of their games such as Colin McRae Rally games have included in-game cheat systems as their developer in-jokes. While they do possess some Game Genie devices in their vaults, the staff shrugged when they noticed them.
• Nintendo has the Virtual Boy, which is their biggest hardware failure since entering the gaming market, only selling 770,000 units globally. The system lasted less than a year before being discontinued, and Nintendo wouldn't even publicly acknowledge its existence until Super Smash Bros. Brawl as part of the title's "Chronicle" section (a near-complete list of games published by Nintendo).^note It is in the trophy room in Melee alongside the other Nintendo consoles... but only if you have the language set to Japanese. Ever since, the Virtual Boy has been relegated to little more than a self-deprecative Running Gag: from its description in Animal Crossing: New Leaf poking fun at its red graphics, to Luigi's Mansion 3 having an expy created by E. Gadd as your communication device (who insists that This Is Going to Be Huge), to Nintendo of America marketing videos acknowledging how awkward it is to use. As for the system's game library, none of the titles have ever seen re-release or remakes in any form; the closest has been a video of Mario's Tennis being viewable in the Nintendo Labo VR kit.
• Some issues of the Official Playstation 2 Magazine had an article entitled Did We Really?, which made fun of moments of the magazine's past the team came to regret. Chosen topics included underrating Grand Theft Auto III in the belief that It Will Never Catch On, panning Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness in the review, only to give it 8/10 anyway, putting Herdy Gerdy (a mostly forgotten adventure/puzzle game for the PS2) on the cover the month ICO was up for review, and covering a staff member in bacon for a photo shoot.
• The website for Mac developer Storm Impact shifts nearly all of its focus to its two flagship games, TaskMaker and MacSki. Their third game, Asterbamm, is outright described as a flop.
• The video game adaptation of AKIRA is wrought with this: as well as being one of the worst games released on the Amiga, the details of its development are a little nightmarish. Some of the devs have since gone on to bigger and better things: Martin Blackmore worked with the Kinect for Microsoft, and Anders Johansson is a developer for the Need for Speed series, just to name a couple. Neither of them are all that enthusiastic about Akira. Worse still, all attempts to contact the heads of development company ICE Software were met with profanity-laden resistance.
• Ubisoft has admitted that they poorly handled the development and launch of Assassin's Creed: Unity, which was infamous for numerous bugs and an Obvious Beta status that only got "fixed" after a series of big patches and apologies like releasing all of the game's DLC for free. Since then the company has stated they want to avoid making the same mistake, and did as much as they could to fix Unity's problems with the following entry, Assassin's Creed Syndicate.
• Bad Day L.A. is this for American McGee. Not only was the game critically panned for its visuals, gameplay, and unfunny, juvenile sense of humor, but McGee admitted that the game's shortcomings were a result of using a janky game engine unsuited for 3D action games, a limited budget, and being horribly mismanaged from the start.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy: Stop the Rock!: If there's any truth in the segment with Rooster Teeth in the Bill Nye Saves the World episode Cheat Codes for Reality. When Rooster Teeth brought the game to Bill to show it off, Bill's first response was "You did not bring that freaking game!'', followed by embarrassment over one of the Punny Name jokes, going as far as to say that he's reluctant to call it the worst thing he's ever done, and then quickly cutting the segment short.
• The Licensed Game of Blues Brothers 2000 became the unacknowledged subject of a 2002 Electronic Gaming Monthly article by one of its developers (writing under the pseudonym "Richard Del Medio") titled "How Bad Games Get Made," going into the sordid details of its Troubled Production from their acquisition of a "terrible license" for the money to the final rush to release it in Obvious Beta state. Ten years later, readers of Hardcore Gaming 101 started investigating and found the developers out.
• Hudson Soft at first tried to defend Bomberman Act:Zero against criticism, but following the release of Bomberman Live, they agreed with everyone else that the game was a bad, bad idea.
• The English localization of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a unique case: Koji Igarashi has admitted that he was embarrassed about the game's English script (particularly in regards to the "What is a man?!" scene at the beginning of the game), but is nonetheless surprised and begrudgingly grateful that it helped make the game as popular as it was in the West.
• Daikatana is a very sore subject for John Romero, who had earned fame for developing Doom and Quake, but hedged his reputation on the game that wound up sinking his company. In particular, he apologized over a decade afterward for the game's infamous magazine ad slogan, which read "John Romero's about to make you his bitch". When mentioning that he was working on a new game, he went so far as to announce that it wasn't a sequel to the game.
• Capcom would really, really, really like everyone to forget Devil May Cry 2. Aside from making sure none of the subsequent games touched on 2's story in any way, shape, or form (3 and 4 were both set before 2^note Though as of Devil May Cry 5, 4 has since been changed to take place after 2., and DmC: Devil May Cry is a complete Continuity Reboot), they actually include a few Take Thats in Viewtiful Joe. For instance, Dante flat out says he doesn't know what Alastor is talking about when Alastor mentions the events of DMC 2, while Trish coyly suggests that the "Dante" seen in the game was actually his friend Enzo in disguise. However, as of Devil May Cry 5, they changed their stance into, if nothing else, at least acknowledging that it exists.
• Music composer Grant Kirkhope feels like this with the "DK Rap" from Donkey Kong 64. He said he'd intended for it to be enjoyable in an intentionally cheesy way, but it instead came across as unintentionally corny and outdated, making it one of the most memetic songs in video game history. That said, one of the Kickstarter stretch goals for Yooka-Laylee was a Creator-Driven Successor to the "DK Rap" called the "GK Rap", so he clearly has a sense of humor about it.
• Jason Oda, who first became known as the creator of the Emo Game series of web games, doesn't regard them particularly fondly, seeing them as fairly immature goof-offs that got popular largely because there wasn't much interesting content on the internet in the early '00s, especially in comparison to his later work. The homepage for the series features a short letter written in 2017 to commemorate the original game's fifteenth anniversary, in which Oda describes revisiting the games as being "as painful and cringe-inducing to me as reading my high school poetry" on account of their reliance on juvenile 'edgy' humor and their reflection of the pretentiousness of the emo culture of the time. To quote him from his website:
  "The first games I ever made were a series of badly programmed games about emo. They became pretty popular and were featured in SPIN, The New York Times, and on MTV. At this point, I have to say I'm pretty embarrassed I ever made these. They're pretty terrible and immature. The jokes are just barely funny. Back in the day when the internet wasn't very entertaining, these sort of games passed for fun. As much as I'd like to forget I ever made these, they are at this point, just an unavoidable part of my history."
• Square Enix would rather have people forget about version 1.0 of Final Fantasy XIV. The original release of the game was an unqualified disaster, panned across the board for numerous issues (poor optimization, lag, unintuitive controls and UI, etc.), but Square sank so much money into the game that its failure (along with the divisive reaction to the Final Fantasy XIII series) did serious damage to the brand. The company even fired several developers over XIV's failure, including the producer who worked on the more successful Final Fantasy XI. Nowadays, the only time Square or the developers ever talk about 1.0 of XIV is when they talk about what they did wrong. For instance, when the topic of the possibility of "classic" servers for XIV (similar to World of Warcraft Classic) to replicate the version 1.0 experience was brought up, FFXIV: A Realm Reborn director Naoki Yoshida burst into laughter and offered a one-word answer: "Nightmare." When it comes to the game's anniversary celebrations, they only include the launch of A Realm Reborn and ignore 1.0.
• Scott Cawthon's view on Five Nights at Freddy's World is pretty sour. A few months after giving the game a major update with post-game content, he eventually came to regret the game's bizarre plotline, mistakes he claimed he made early in the production, and the number of debates that it had sparked overall. He wrote the Android/iOS port description in to Self-Deprecation (to the point where he called it "the game that almost single handedly destroyed the FNaF franchise") and then cancelled the ports altogether, and its official website had gone completely black.
• AkumaKira, one of the creators of Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion, doesn't look fondly on their old horror Garry's Mod maps, the Shadows series, attributing it to inexperience, a number of poor game design choices, the plot being made up as it went along, being unable to maintain a consistent tone (something they believe still has trouble with), along with the use of memes. They did three videos on the map on their Youtube channel.
• Grabbed by the Ghoulies became this for Rare. Many of the company's newer games included a Take That! against it. Despite this, the game still got a re-release in the Xbox Originals service, and was included in the compilation Rare Replay.
• Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, has admitted to being somewhat ashamed of The Halloween Hack, a ROM hack of EarthBound (1994) he made in his teenage years. He is especially embarrassed by what he now considers his younger self's attempts at being "edgy", such as peppering the dialogue with profanity and slurs, and has said that nowadays he wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
• Uri reportedly wasn't particularly proud of the original version of Insanity, which was her first game; even her translator refused to make translations of it due to regarding it as poorly-made (it's apparently rather light on gameplay, with bad pacing that makes the story hard to follow). Luckily, Uri remade the game with many improvements and that version has been translated from Japanese.
• The staff at Jackbox Games repeatedly poke fun at Word Spud from The Jackbox Party Pack, to the point of becoming a Running Gag on their Twitch stream. The game Survive the Internet randomly includes an icon for the nonexistent "Word Spud 2" on the desktop.
• Seamus Blackley is best known as the creator of the Xbox, but before that he conceptualised and worked on Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Blackley is so ashamed of the game, he refuses to bring it up or talk about it when asked. Additionally, he and other Microsoft staff who worked on that console also feel this way about its original controller, which was criticized for being large and unwieldy, earning the nickname of "The Duke" from gamers. They admitted that Microsoft, being primarily a software company up until that point, was inexperienced in building hardware and that nothing demonstrated that more than The Duke.
• In an interview with SiliconEra, Haru Akenaga, then-president of NIS America, stated that he was dissatisfied with the PlayStation 3 game Last Rebellion. He only released it due to a previous relationship with developer Hitmaker^note NIS published Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light in the U.S., and tried his best to convince his team not to promote it beyond the typical "new release" press statement.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Most Zelda fans can't even bear the mention of any of The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games. Nintendo has outright stated that they never happened. Same with Hotel Mario.
  • Though Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma were pleased with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a whole, they've gone on a limb to apologize for the Water Temple. It's especially telling that Aonuma wasn't the series director yet but still felt the need to apologize for that dungeon... because he was the game's primary dungeon designer. In fact, part of the reason that Ocarina of Time got an Updated Re-release on the 3DS was so Aonuma could fix the problems with the Water Temple.
  • One of the commercials for Ocarina of Time was released with the tagline "Willst thou get the girl? Or play like one?". While seen as mildly sexist humor at the time, this clearly doesn't fit with Nintendo's modern family-friendly "games are for everyone" image. Nintendo eventually replaced the text with "Willst thou soar? Or willst thou suck?" for the GameCube release and made ads from the ground up in the 3DS release.
• Jonathan Strugnell has commented on a playthrough of Mission to McDonaldland, an Australian-exclusive PC game he developed based on McDonald's featuring horribly Off-Model CGi and Limited Animation. In his series of comments, he mentions that he found a copy of the game at a secondhand store and started to play it, then ejected the disc in horror at how awful the game looked. He also mentions that he designed the game in four days without sleep to meet its deadline. Lastly, he mentions that he wanted to include a mini-game called "McMortal Combat" where Ronald and Hamburglar fought it out in an arena as a very well-hidden Easter Egg, but a combination of ethics and time constraints made sure he didn't include it.
• Persona was one of Atlus' first attempts to localize an RPG in the North American market, but the end result was a mess. The company eventually made a proper localization of the game for its PSP Updated Re-release, more than a decade later.
• In 2010, Seven45 Studios released a game called Power Gig: Rise of the SixString to compete with Guitar Hero and Rock Band (they even had Eric Clapton endorse the game). A few months after the game flopped, Seven45 made sure to scrub all mention of Power Gig from their website.
• Despite record sales and characteristically positive reviews, Ken Sugimori, the artist for the series, felt Pokémon X and Y were too complicated and strayed from his original visions, vowing around the time of the games' release that Generation 7 would be simpler.
• The Reality-On-The-Norm game Disappearance Time. The author was so embarrassed that he went back and updated the game by adding snarky commentary throughout.
• The Romeo & Juliet quest in RuneScape was one to Jagex, being one of the first quests introduced in the game. It was one of the first old quests to be removed, but even references outside of the game itself to the quest were removed. This is not the case in Old School Runescape, however, as it's not only still present but even a requirement for a quest released in 2019.
• In a promo for Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, Shaquille O'Neal said Shaq Fu was this trope and that he wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the first for the sequel.
• Grasshopper Manufacture worked on Shining Soul and the sequel; however all references to this have been removed from the game's credits. Only reluctantly will Suda51 admit that the studio worked on the sequel.
• Stormrise was this to Creative Assembly because the game itself was very poorly received due to being released half-finished, absolutely loaded with bugs to the point of making some missions unplayable. Its most-touted feature, intended to allow the player to easily take command of their troops, regardless of the location, was also found to be very difficult and annoying to use. Due to its very poor sales, the game was pulled off from their website for good.
• Capcom has said that the first Street Fighter has not aged well, mainly due to how the game's special moves were very difficult to execute. According to the developers at the time, the special moves were a kind of Cheat Code, which is why their input is dodgy. Consider that, back then, fighting games were SUPPOSED to be like that, with only punches and kicks available, few, if any, characters to select, against a wide array of CPU-exclusive fighters who have their odds stacked better for them, including said special moves.
• According to PeanutButterGamer's Top 10 WORST Licensed Games! video, Cole Sprouse, who played Cody Martin, is not fond of the The Suite Life of Zack & Cody Licensed Game, Tipton Trouble. Specifically, when asked on Twitter on how to beat a certain level in the game, Cole responded with, "The best way to beat that game is to eject it and physically destroy it."
• Some of the developers at Traveller's Tales absolutely hated working on Super Monkey Ball Adventure. At one gaming forum that one of the developers posted at, a member posted how he was thinking of trying the game out again and the developer replied "never ever go back to that game again".
• Corey Burton feels this way in regard to how he voiced Shockwave in at least one Transformers: War for Cybertron commercial, he didn't think of it too much at first, but regretted doing the commercial because it made Shockwave feel incredibly Out of Character ("When your hit percentage exceeds mine, you may choose the soundtrack!"?).
• Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power attempted to make a Video Game 3D Leap for the Trine universe, but was received poorly. It received complaints for being too short and for lacking gameplay mechanics from the previous two entries. The developers later admitted that the complaints from Trine fans were completely valid and that they didn't have the financial resources to take the game in a 3D direction without covering costs by cutting features found in the previous entries. Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince would eventually return to the 2D gameplay of the first two Trine games, is the longest entry yet, and generally has been received enthusiastically.
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War has generally received widespread acclaim as both an exceptional use of the Warhammer 40,000 universe and as a damned fine Real-Time Strategy game. Its first two expansion packs, Winter Assault and Dark Crusade are also well-loved. Its third and final expansion, Soulstorm...not so much. Like many entries on this page, Soulstorm was farmed out to another developer and arrived rushed and buggy. It was a retread of Dark Crusade with two new factions shoved in, buggy and poorly balanced (examples include the Sisters of Battle's ultimate unit not flagging as dead and thus being unable to be rebuilt if killed and the Dark Eldar Dais of Destruction having drastically more invincible frames than it's animations informed). The expansion got a Take That! in Dawn of War II, where the campaign covered in Soulstorm was explained as a disaster for series protagonists the Blood Ravens Space Marines that brought the Chapter to the edge of ruin.
• Fire Shark, specifically the original 1-player build of the game (as opposed to later and overseas builds of the game that allow two simultaneous players), came under fire from players for being sadistically difficult, even by arcade game standards. Masahiro Yuge, who worked on the game as its composer, later expressed regret for the game's difficulty, as it was not the original intended difficulty; he noted that it was the result of executives at Toaplan pressuring the developers to crank up the difficulty in response to arcades demanding harder games that can make more money for them.
• Harvey Smith:
  • He has expressed regrets over his job directing Deus Ex: Invisible War, going as far as saying that he and the team "fucked up" by removing or watering down certain aspects they saw as unnecessary at the time and pushing the game too far in sci-fi territory. He also mentioned the team's inexperience with game development on consoles, who caused many struggles that reflected on the final product. But while he has regrets, he doesn't despise the game.
  • The same cannot be said about BlackSite: Area 51, a game he condemned so harshly in one interview that it got him fired from Midway Games. The game endured a Troubled Production due to Midway insisting that the team use the still-experimental Unreal Engine 3, which ended with it being rushed out the door in an Obvious Beta state to scathing reviews. What's more, Smith's attention was divided between BlackSite and another game he was working on at the time, and by his own admission, he wasn't really that interested in it and partly blames himself for the sorry state it was released in. The only thing he liked about it was its political satire, especially of The War on Terror.
• Jim Cummings (1952) has stated at conventions that he didn't care about voicing the Terror Mask from the Splatterhouse reboot, and that he only did it for the money. This is probably due to the role being much more family-unfriendly than his usual work, with the character being very profane and violent.
• As of the 25th anniversary update of Half-Life, Valve would officially declare this particular version of Half-Life as the "definitive version" and that it would be the version they will support going forward. As part of this declaration, Valve would delist the notorious Half-Life: Source from the Steam store to encourage players to play the original.^note It's not being removed outright, as the game's assets are still being used by the Source engine community.
• The original DonPachi, as influential as it was for being one of the series that put the Bullet Hell genre in the map, isn't viewed as fondly by Cave and is considered by its staff as a "creative failure". Since most of the staff who worked on the game were former Toaplan programmers, they had massive shoes to fill, and got flak for not being on par with Toaplan's catalogue. It's one of the reasons why the sequel DoDonPachi tried something different and put Cave on the map.

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