Once-hyped games that are now completely forgotten

I like to read through old gaming magazines for this kind of stuff. You see lots of games that you wouldn't even remember otherwise.

Its quite amazing, i have a magazine that has several pages dedicated to both The Gateway and Headhunter on the PS2. Headhunter has a entire page just with the guy's face on the cover, who looks like a younger Chuck Norris.

Then there is this 1/4 small crumped up section of text that constitutes 60ish words about some game called Grand Theft Auto or something, never heard of it, and there is one small screenshot of Claude standing in the street with 2 cop cars behind him.


It still happens today, games like LoL, Minecraft and even Borderlands garnered very little fanfare or attention, while major releases from EA, Activision, Sony, MS and others have deepthroated us for years with their "big" games that half the time ended like a wet fart.

My favorite gaming "wet fart" has to be Jade Empire. I only remember 2 game review scores, the notorious 8.8 for Twilight Princess and the laughable IGN 9.9 for Jade Empire. That game fell off the face of the earth mere weeks after release and its like nobody has ever mentioned it since, like it never happened, as if we all had this bizarre dream that wasent quite real.
 
State of Emergency. It was the cover for EGM back in the day.

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This fucking game right here. The god damn hype this got was insane. Story by Orson Scott Card and Music By Tommy Tallarico. This game made me buy a XBOX at the time. Boy what a buggy mess this was.
 
Have to agree with Rise of the Robots, first game I thought of as well.

Another game that had quite a bit of hype:
. This game was hyped, since it was around the time Bruce Willis was really popular (Pulp Fiction, 5th Element, 12 Monkeys). Didn't really hear anything about it after it came out.

my man

I remember this game getting hyped to Hell and back in all of the gaming magazines. Plus it was trying to ride the Armageddon wave, at least in packaging. No one remembers that it exists now.

The actual game is great, fun twin stick shooter.
 
I am going to get tons of hate for by his, especially since it isn't out yet. I predict Sunset Overdrive to be on this list on the sometime future.
 

Virtual instruments just sort of came and went. I remember a time when everyone was getting angry at guitar hero fans telling them to go and learn a real guitar and stop having fun. I guess they did.
 
Was going to post this: it might as well be called Rise of the Robots: The Thread. I guess most here are a bit too young to even know about this, but the hype surrounding this game was literally unprecedented; I don't think a single game, ever, up to that point, had gotten such a ridiculously massive amount of press hype (remember, this was a post-Street Fighter 2 world, and it STILL got more hype than any version of Street Fighter). Then it came out and it was a painfully unplayable mess. Magazines all around the world pretended the game didn't exist (except to take potshots at it once in a while), probably so as not to be shamed by association because of their obviously unwarranted hype. This example was burned in my mind as the most amazing disparity between pre- and post-release coverage; no game before or since was so mind-boggling, not even Spore.

Yep, the game was absolutely fucking everywhere. It was advertised to gamers and non-gamers alike in all manner of media outlets not usually considered for gaming. Even FFVII probably didn't get as much widespread coverage. I'm convinced they spent 90% of the budget of the game on advertising. I thought it looked horrible at the time, and tried it years later out of morbid curiosity. And it was.
 
I remember Dark Messiah of might and magic got a lot of coverage back in the day, gameplay is similar to Dishonored but It's almost forgotten.
 
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This game had a TON of reviewer hype surrounding it. However, a lot of people simply did not care all that much for it. The reviews were indeed pretty good, but the way they got on in the previews, I was expecting nines and tens everywhere. And a few months later, it was largely ignored, forgotten history.

Brink (another Bethesda thingy) falls into this, but at least Rage was actually quite good, unlike it.
 
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This game was getting several magazine covers, and I was completely into the hype. It seemed like such a great idea for a game, then it turned out to not really be what anyone expected.... and then the studio made Evil Genius and closed down. :(

That's a really good one, hadn't thought about that game in ages.
 
Yep, the game was absolutely fucking everywhere. It was advertised to gamers and non-gamers alike in all manner of media outlets not usually considered for gaming. Even FFVII probably didn't get as much widespread coverage. I'm convinced they spent 90% of the budget of the game on advertising. I thought it looked horrible at the time, and tried it years later out of morbid curiosity. And it was.

To be fair, Rise of the Robots has retained some infamy as an absolutely terrible game and frequently shows up on lists of worst SNES/Genesis games.

Games like Brute Force, on the other hand, are reasonably decent, but unmemorable, and so won't even be brought up as a bad game.
 
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Not as good as an example as many already posted, but I recall Hellgate being promoted very heavily before release and then vanishing off the face of the Earth. Shame because I liked the concept but playing it was a very middling experience.
 
Tabula Rasa

Richard Garriott's big new game after the Ultima series/UO had a huge amount of hype and then just died. I couldn't even remember the name of the game and had to look it up from Garriott's Wikipedia page.

I'd say the bit about his termination from and lawsuit against NCSoft was probably more interesting than the game itself.

This wins it hands down in my opinion.
 
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I still remember the insane amount of hype this game got and the full-stories devoted to it in Gaming Mags (much of it due to the fact that one of the girls in the game would be appearing in playboy).

Its apparently so forgotten now that the LttP thread I made it about barely got any responses.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=840404&highlight=

I still remember it, and it was a fine game indeed. Think I'll have to dig it out alongside my PS2 when I go home on vacation next week.
 
Have to agree with Rise of the Robots, first game I thought of as well.

Rise of the Robots is the epitomy of overambitious young British developers who don't really know what they're getting into. It seems there were plenty of those around in the late 80's to early 90's. Especially from Psygnosis. Shadow of the Beast was another one (wasn't Sony attempting to resurrect this brand as a modern AAA PS4 title?).

But my personal favorite is Microcosm. It was an FMV shmup inside a human body. They did a ton of worldbuilding for that game, going as far as describing the entire solar system the game is set in. It was going to be a system seller for the ill-fated FM Towns. They got freakin Rick Wakeman to compose the soundtrack (and then realized the hardware couldn't handle playing the FMV backgrounds and CD audio at the same time).
 
Games with one syllable titles.

Ti-tan-fall is more than one syllable!

BriGuy said:
>>Descent, MDK, Wild9<<

I can't recall those being massively hyped. Descent was only "hyped" in regards to being shareware on most PC's at the time to show the 3D-tech off.

Wild 9 had a demo on PSX, but I can't recall people going "OH WOW I NEED THAT" but that's probably just my circle/school at the time.

Oldroutes said:
Yeah, this is a good one. What happened with this? Didn't it come out in NA 2 years or something after its release in Japan?

Something like that, but people found out it really wasn't worth the hype. It's why when they released White Knight Chronicles 2, people were like "SKIP THE FIRST!"
 
Blasto was the first game to come to mind.

I'm sure you could litter the thread with MMOs chasing the WOW money. Conan, war hammer online, middle earth, etc. maybe even Everquest 2
 
I can't recall those being massively hyped. Descent was only "hyped" in regards to being shareware on most PC's at the time to show the 3D-tech off.

MDK was going to be the next big thing from Shiny after the success of Earthworm Jim and Aladdin. See the concept trailer here.

Shiny just seemed to lose traction after the 16-bit era though. After MDK they released Messiah which is even more forgotten. It's a shame, really. MDK was an awesome game with a unique feel.
 
Blasto was the first game to come to mind.

I'm sure you could litter the thread with MMOs chasing the WOW money. Conan, war hammer online, middle earth, etc. maybe even Everquest 2

EQ2 didn't chase WoW, it was developed at the same time, WoW happened during its release.

It is however pretty hyped and relative to the bar WoW set for sub numbers, I would agree it was essentially forgotten.
 
The Titanfall mentions are hysterical. The game wasn't that good, and I did stop playing it, but from what I've seen on here and else where it's still rather popular.

As for Watch Dogs, it's successful and I'm hoping for an Assassin's Creed like much better sequel when that inevitably comes out. The hype, release, sales and word of mouth is almost identical to what AC's first installment went through. So I'm hoping for the best out of the franchise despite this mediocre game with fake Batman and C-grade Lisbeth Salandar.
People posting shit that they didn't like but everybody clearly still remembers ruined this thread before it even got going. It's a shame.

I've started going back through the 1UP Show. Now that's an exercise in games that were hyped and then disappeared under the sands of time.
 
Brute Force. I rented that from Blockbuster yeeeeeaaaaaars ago, and it was such a generic borefest, it wasn't even funny.
 
Speaking of MMO's...


There have been plenty of hyped MMO's that failed, but none of them dropped off the face of the earth as quickly as this wreck. Its servers were shut down less than a year and a half after its release.
 
This is a good choice.

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It was supposed to be the Wii's Halo Killer, an amazing first person shooter with awesome online. I remember one of IGN's crew hyping the game a lot.

Didn't Matt_IGN practically beg Nintendo fans to buy this game in order to "send a message" that there was an audience for core games on Wii? Or was that MadWorld?
 
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This game had a TON of reviewer hype surrounding it. However, a lot of people simply did not care all that much for it. The reviews were indeed pretty good, but the way they got on in the previews, I was expecting nines and tens everywhere. And a few months later, it was largely ignored, forgotten history.

The shooty parts were so good though!

I have no idea why there wasn't online multiplayer for the shooter gameplay, which was excellent. Plus the vehicle traversal wasn't fully realized despite being fun sometimes. If they just focused on the FPS part of the game and didn't have it end in an ambiguous and weird way it would have been quite the gem.

Now? Just a forgotten gem plagued in what could have been.
 
Really, this needs to stop now.

Show me a single person who is even mildly interested in video games and doesn't know Titanfall.

Yeah, when you bring it up maybe. Where are the spamfest topics about the X1 savior though? I see no topic talking about it's expansions, multiplayer, or anything. The game is forgotten less than 6 months after it's release.
 
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Microsoft began the original Xbox hype train with screenshots of this game-- oddly enough, it was more or less forgotten by the time of its release, three years later. EGM featured it in an article in early '01.

It's so obscure now, there's hardly any good images of the box art.

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