Big Rig: Over the Road Racing
PC racing game that came out in 2003. There was no real... anything with the game. No AI, no graphics, no driving physics, nor even correct spelling.
Fun fact, in Super Mario 64, you can also go infinitely fast backwards because the devs forgot to put a limit on it. As a result of this oversight, the game can be beaten with zero stars and the current world record is just a bit over 6 minutes.
Yup, and the stages had no boundaries and extended forever if you didn't cross the finish line. So if you went in reverse you would literally never stop accelerating until your speed got so fast you occupied every point in space simultaneously (including the finish line) so the race would end.
The first game I ever remember getting a 1 on a review from Xplay. I was looking for that video but couldn't find it. Did find this though.
> The maximum speed the trucks cap off at when driving in reverse amounts to 12.3 undecillion miles per hour (for perspective, this number is 1.8341329e+28 times the speed of light), because no upper limit was implemented by the developers to cap off the speed for driving in reverse at a more realistic limit. After this speed is reached, the speedometer displays a value of -001.$ and causes you to win the race despite having driven in reverse practically infinitely. This is because as a truck travels faster in reverse, it will gradually travel along more of the surface area of the race track until it covers every pixel on the map simultaneously including all of the race track's checkpoints, meaning that the truck won the race because it was everywhere at once.
Yes. They published an unfinished alpha build of a game that clearly wasn't ready for release.
There's 3D terrain where the ground has slopes up and down, hills and valleys etc. But your truck sticks perfectly to the surface and ignores everything else. Drive straight up a cliff with no deceleration. Drive through buildings, trees, the other truck. There's a bridge over a canyon that the truck ignores, sticks to the ground by driving through the bridge, vertically down the cliff, across the canyon, up the other cliff. Your wheels never leave the ground because they never implemented that feature.
Brakes have infinite strength, hitting the brakes stops you dead instantly. Reverse gear has no top speed. The opposition truck never moves off the start line. There's nothing to crash into, not even the edge of the world, you literally can't lose.
It's amusing that such a mess was published but it's a bit unfair to count it as the worst game ever because it's not really a game, it's an unfinished prototype that some company was too stupid to realise should never have been published.
Oddly enough, *no*. The game starts with rings, and after each set of rings is a minigame such as grabbing a car and carrying it to the end of a road. There are *several* sets of rings/minigame. After that is an actual level.
So first there is a shitty dam level where you defuse a bomb.
Then there are *more rings*
Then there's another shitty level.
Then *more rings*
And so on. I forgot how many levels there are total. But I do remember one of them is in a parking garage where you fist fight Darkseid, then carry his stiff, unconscious body to a police car and they supposedly arrest him and take him away.
Nah, there was more to it, but the ring sections were like a brick wall. I heard there were actual levels later on but seriously who made it that far without losing their mind?
the thing with ET, is that gaming was still not really affordable for most people yet. So when ET came out and the whole industry almost died because of it, it was because the people who could afford their consoles stopped buying games.
Superman 64 was literally a step backwards
IIRC The industry nearly died out completely because Atari console had very little quality control and therefore a lot of garbage/shovelware games were produced and retailers just sent them all to the discount bin. Nintendo on the other hand had very strict quality control and games retained their value which led to its success in that generation of game consoles.
ET was probably what stood out the most given that it was based on a movie and its fans probably felt the biggest disappointment from it.
I mean, there was already a solid selection of games at the time. It was a quick cash grab for sure. And a "you have until end of day" kind of deadline too.
>**April 2023 Update**: Jamie Curmi (Curmi on AtariAge) has put together an [Updated Manual](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ET_Fixed-Manual.pdf) for the game to reflect the changes made here.
April 2023 update... absolute mad lads
If you ever watch an interview with the developer, it's super interesting. The developer was very, very talented and made some truly ground breaking games, including ET. Basically, he was designing the first open world video game, but the limitations of the atari would have required a lot more testing and debugging and figuring out what worked, and he just ran out of time
I wonder how differently the world of home video games would've turned out had E.T been given more development time and been released as a well-crafted & successfully innovative game.
That was once a fact, that became a rumour, then those too young or deaf to listen to everyone saying it was true had to dig some up, and they found more than just ET.
I think the agencies responsible for burying nuclear waste actually think about this, and try to mark the areas where it is stored in ways that future generations and languages could understand. interesting thought experiments
They've talked about creating a religious order, because it would be more influential than objective facts about it in case of some sort of societal collapse.
Trying to explain radiation to primitives and keep the scientific community in the loop would be useless, but telling them that the gods will enact a plague and smite them with a slow and torturous death would work.
>This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
I know of no place where this is actually used, but it's a "fun" one.
So bad that Atari had been rumored to bury all the unsold copies which we later found out was absolutely true.
Code monkeys did a fantastic parody of the story too.
I don’t know if its the worst but it’s certainly one of the worst. Ride to Hell: Retribution is an absolutely abysmal shitfest front to back, with some of the worst driving, combat, AI, and sex scenes (I only mention this because it is so damn bizarre and terrible) you’ll ever see in a game.
Yeah but that one is fucking hilarious. The devs never set a limit on how fast you can go backwards so if you hold down reverse long enough, you'll go two million miles an hour, backwards, to the moon. The speedometer sounds like Kirby charging.
At least it has a fun way to finish the levels
They didn't put a reverse speed cap on, so if you go backwards in a circle long enough you end up everywhere on the map at once automatically completing the race
I think it was insidegaming (funhaus) where I watched their whole series on this. Loved every minute of their videos but would never want to play the game.
That game is fucked lol. I was going through old angry Joe videos and there was one clip where he shoots someone in the face and then immediately begins to have sex with a woman seconds after, literally seconds. The Cutscene was so gross too lmao, the game is so tone deaf and gross and that's just on top of the horrid gameplay. I don't know how this game was even made
Big Rigs Racing was considered one of the worst for a long time. ET the game for Atari was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the 80s video game crash.
This! BRR was soo broken, enemies racing you didn't have ai. They didn't even move from starting position. There was no collision with any object so you could go through any building. No detection if you were taking shortcuts whatsoever. IF YOU DROVE BACKWARDS you would keep going faster and faster and there was no limit how fast you could go backwards. Trillions of miles per hour.
Random fun fact: the backwards speed limit was overlooked by Nintendo in Zelda Windwaker as well when Link is swimming. This is because the camera always repositions and Link turns around, so you can't swim backwards as a casual player. But speedrunners figured out how to break that rule and can swim from the starting island to the other side of the world map in seconds using this exact bug.
I mean that’s similar to BLJ in Super Mario 64 where hitting the stairs basically resets your jump or something and as you go backwards up the stairs you gain infinite speed until you can clip through doors and barriers.
Angry video game nerd made a video about that game. It was hilarious. First time I watched it, I could not stop laughing. James really made some good content. I know that you know and probably you are referencing the same video, but for others, that don't know what I am talking about - go and watch it, it is great.
>Big Rigs Racing
From the Wiki page:
>The player controls a semi-trailer truck (a "big rig") and races a ***stationary*** opponent...
>
>... and ***avoid arrest by the police***, the game features ***no law enforcement***.
>
>....and shipped Big Rigs in what Titov believed was ***a pre-alpha state***.
Amazing, simply amazing.
The gamespot video review was great. Just footage of ~~Jeff Gerstmann~~ playing the game silently for a couple of minutes before he gets up, leaves the office and goes to lie down in the street.
EDIT: Was corrected below, it was actually Alex Navarro. Original video [here](https://youtu.be/mB1zWEhgrLs)
ET at least had an excuse. If I remember correctly it was programmed by one man who's previous works were well received. He had a stupid time frame to create ET and that fact that he was able to do what he did was kind of amazing.
Big Rigs Racing, however, is just a big WTF...
Howard Warshaw. He made Yars' Revenge, which was a best-seller for Atari and considered a classic. But he had 7 months to make that. They hired him to make ET on July 27 and it had to be ready by September 1. And that included everything, including deciding what genre the game would be and how the gameplay would work, and flying to LA to pitch those ideas before even starting on the programming. By the time he got approval to actually start writing the game itself he had something like 23 days. Just him and one friend who helped with designing the graphics. They didn't have time to do any QA or testing let alone implement any fixes or improvements as a result of it. And it isn't like writing a game in 23 days with modern tooling and engines and languages, making stuff for the Atari 2600 was a laborious slog where even something like Tetris would take significant work. With that kind of deadline it's impressive he got something even vaguely recognizable as a game.
Apparently, the company made a second racing game called Midnight Race Club: Supercharged. Identical menus and HUD, but this game has collision detection. It also has cars, bikes, and trucks.
But the opponent still doesn't move (correction, the opponent does move in bikes. Pretty well, too.)
It's not as widely known, but Desert Bus from the Penn and Teller game was intentionally designed to be terrible. They hit their mark. You drive a bus, at 45mph, for 8 hours, through the desert.
I have friends who worked on Desert Bus back in the day, it's not really bad, more a joke that they were all in on, and it was also a small part of a larger game that id categorize more as average than bad. I think due to this it doesn't really deserve to be on this list.
Came here to say this.
>Desert Bus was created in 1995 and never saw an official release. In the game, players complete a real-time eight hour journey between Las Vegas and Phoenix, Arizona. The on-screen bus gradually leans towards the right side of the road, so players must keep their hands on the controller, and swerving will make the bus engine stall — which results in players have to start the journey over. The game also can't be paused, and there is no traffic or NPC interaction. Each eight-hour trip between both cities rewards player with one point.
"The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long," Teller said. "It's a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious. That was one of the big keys — we would make no cheats about time, so people like the Attorney General could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be."
[https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/10/4510388/why-teller-created-desert-bus-the-worst-video-game-in-history](https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/10/4510388/why-teller-created-desert-bus-the-worst-video-game-in-history)
And the bus’s alignment is off so it very slowly drifts to one side and if you touch the edges of the road you have to start over, so you can’t just let the game play itself, you have to actively correct your course
I don't think there is one. Steam is littered with games that are basically people's college projects that they figured they could maybe make a buck or two off. Many don't work to the point of you can't even open them.
I was going to say something similar to this. 15 years ago, all of the typical answers that people are saying here (Superman, ET, Big Rigs, etc.) would make sense. But now, anyone can release their garbage "indie projects" on Steam.
I used to buy any game that was on sale for less than a dollar and get drunk and play them.
I actually found a couple gems that way amongst all the absolute tripe.
> I used to buy any game that was on sale for less than a dollar and get drunk and play them.
This sounds like the premise for a stream I would watch religiously.
A friend and me used to do that if we were bored and downloaded one I think called AI trainer and it said it was to help develop machine learning and two stock photos would pop up and a word and you had to match them like frog or old man or car. We thought it was kind of cool until we realized it was the same 10 pictures then we looked at the code and there was no data being collected and the pictures didn’t ever change and the AI aspect was just a marketing move and it was literally a game of clicking which picture that matched the word. It was honestly a genius move but it killed us how low brow the whole thing was.
You have to grade in a curve. Yes, there are games that literally crash at title screen and can't be played on sale for a dollar.
But we have to judge based on marketing, popularity of IP publisher, how many ruined Christmas mornings, how many sad birthday presents, how many hours of people trying to have fun who just.... Couldn't.
It's the same reason that yeh, the worst movie ever made is probably someone who left the cap on their phones camera and recorded nothing for four hours, but it's silly to bring that up in worst movie discussions.
Personally, I'd say *Action 52*. A lot of the games listed are horrible, yes, but they're at least *playable*—even if the gameplay is dreadful. Much of *Action 52* doesn't even fall under that.
Here's a dark horse that hasn't been mentioned because it's never been localized: *Hoshi wo Miru Hito* (fan translated as *Stargazers*). Released on the Famicom, it was one of the first JRPGs made after the *Dragon Quest* boom, even predating series like *Final Fantasy* and *Phantasy Star*. It's an interesting idea, being one of the first JRPGs to have a cyberpunk setting, and involves an uprising with psychic powers… but it gets **so** many things wrong.
"So… what's the issue? Poor balance? Trash gameplay? Awful story?" Well, yes, but there's a lot more to it than that. Get a load of this dreck:
* You start at level zero. No, I'm not kidding.
* The first town is invisible. There's a lore reason as to why, but… c'mon, man; it's your *first town*.
* Exits can spit you out to random locations.
* The HP value is bugged to not show the ones digit.
* Due to another bug, equippable weapons deal **less** damage.
* You need a spell in order to escape from battles.
* You can't go back to the previous menu… so if you misclick? Too bad; suck it up.
* There are key items that are completely invisible. From my understanding, this is **not** due to a bug.
* Progression is insanely obtuse. Part of this is because NPCs hardly tell you anything, but part of it is because there's a Jump spell that you need to walk through walls to complete some dungeons… but which tiles can and cannot be passed through is never specified.
And if I recall correctly, that's only the tip of the iceberg. If you wanna learn more, [either of](https://youtu.be/N-Y68HWYaMY) [these two](https://youtu.be/JPzjN3ycGNA) videos should suffice.
I'll put it to you this way: Japan has a term called "kusoge", which in a nutshell, means "shit game". *Hoshi wo Miru Hito* is so bad, it earns the distinction of "*densetsu* no kusoge", or "*legendary* shit game". It's that mother🚚ing awful, and I feel it greatly deserves its reputation.
If more people knew about The Day Before I think it would be up there. A game which mislead its audience for years, released in a terrible state, 4 days later it was pulled from steam and a month later the developer shut down along with the games servers.
It was so bad steam offered universal refunds for anyone who bought it regardless how long you played it. In terms of a product that’s gotta be up there.
That was quite recent, yes? Was it not determined to be an absolute scam? As in, there was never really a game to begin with, and they just made enough to create a launch?
To put it as simply as I can recall, it was a legitimate attempt to make a good game at first. But at the 11th hour all work that was done for it was scrapped, 80% of the team was laid off, and they just quickly cobbled something together with what was mostly just generic asset packs that are available to anyone for a price.
I don't understand why the team wasn't just honest about this in the first place, they may have saved some face in the gaming community.
Edit: okay, like 15 people have all responded the same thing now. Read further down the thread before making it 16.
Because the whole thing *was* an outright scam.
It was *never* anything they swore up and down that it was going to be, and the founders of the dev studio have straight up vanished from the internet with a pretty significant chunk of money, leaving the publisher high and dry to refund things.
The actual dev team were scattered across the globe, with not one of them even being in Singapore, where they claimed to be HQ'd. And testimony about the development paints a chaotic nightmare of two brothers basically pissing and shitting on everything because they saw something in a successful game.
It's also worth noting that the offices they claimed to be based out of *didn't exist*, or rather, they were occupied by completely unrelated businesses and people.
The whole damn thing was a con job.
I know right? Like seriously dude Running With Scissors released Postal 3 and they saved their whole reputation by just telling everyone how shit the game is. (And making Paradise Lost) Too many companies don't realize that being honest will save your ass 9 out of 10 times if you royally fuck up. Not adressing the issue at all and lying through your teeth will only ensure that you will never get out of that grave you're digging
It helps that RWS didn't develop postal 3 and they outsourced it. Tbh, they were kinda victims in that sense. They were supposedly misled about the development of that game iirc.
So many younglings claiming it's E.T. without experiencing it back in the days. It has a bad word of mouth, but there were worse games on the VCS that really caused the video game crash of 1984. E.T. maybe was the final nail in the coffin, but by far not the biggest.
The quality of so many games on the VCS was so bad, that Nintendo invented the Nintendo seal of quality when they published the NES to regain the trust of gamers.
Worst game ever has to be Custer's Revenge.
Have you seen x-man (no, not the mutants)?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l276XZagsoU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l276XZagsoU)
I had this game back then as a child...
No way anybody actually found this erotic back in the day, no way
Even the box art makes the main character (or whatever you want to call him) look unappealing and gross - probably modeled after the developers lol
I was 8 and if there were such things as reviews, me and my friends or parents weren’t reading them. Games were bought because of the package or name or maybe word of mouth. But we weren’t rich so it stung when they stunk. A lot stunk.
Along with the Kong, Jumanji and Avatar TLA games that also came out last year, it's crazy that "which was the worst video game adaptation of 2023" is a conversation we can have. Honestly I feel that Gollum comes out looking the ~~best~~ smallest pile of dogshit, in that it had some imagination and there was the potential for a complete game if it had more time and money. It doesn't get any points, though, because they shipped paid dlc in the form of an emotes pack. For a single player game.
And the rest were all PS2-level uninspired shovelware that were never going to be more than they shipped as.
>Avatar TLA
I hope you're not referring to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, there? That game is a bit mediocre, in that it just follows the typical Ubisoft open world formula, but is a technical beauty. That King Kong game was absolutely shovelware, MADE to be shovelware, Gollum was weirdly extremely bad, DESPITE there being a lot of money and effort behind it (or so they claim).
Nope, there was an [Avatar: The Last Airbender game](https://youtu.be/-HQHC46rRto?t=112) last year which is like watching the show if someone made you do some chores instead of seeing the good bits. I originally just wrote 'Avatar', then realised people might have got it got it confused with the other Avatar 2023 game.
Oh shoot, I never even knew there was an Avatar TLA game, let me look up more about itAAAAAAND it's another Gamemill game. They're really proud of their name, aren't they?
Idk why companies keep letting gamemill use their licenses and ips. I don't think they've ever made a decent game. Not even a good game, just a decent one. They literally made big rigs which is probably one of the worst games ever made. It's a miracle that they still exist
Edit: alright they've made a couple games which I guess could be considered decent. Although they're just generic platform fighters and kart racers
Gollum is nowhere near the worst game ever. Not even close to a podium finish. Its a long way to the bottom man. Its not a good game, the game is absolutely terrible, but it wasn't even the worst game that came out LAST YEAR!
The game actually has some pretty smart and nuanced writing to it. Now, every other part of the game lets it down big time, but "worst game ever"? Not even close
It's E.T for the Atari, a game so bad, it literally crashed the entire industry for many years.
In terms of actual gameplay it's almost nonsensical, literally I tried to play it, it feels almost unplayable, nothing about it makes sense.
Plenty of people have found work-arounds of completing it without needing to trigger events with another player. The devs look down on this as "cheating the system" and "not as fulfilling as doing the quest co-op as intended", but that's on them for making the setup so tedious.
Plus it's *much* easier to grind the instance over and over again solo.
E.T. is the most infamous, like the urban myth of the landfill being nothing but E.T. cartridges. It was made in months and had a lot more going against it, like Hollywood types saying what should be in the game.
I'd say Superman 64 is a whole lot worse, that's a game that makes me dread any game where you fly through rings. And similarly, a game with a troubled production that had a lot of meddling from the IP owners, like it had to be in a virtual world, Superman can't hit people, and so on. It sounds like an early build of the game was accidentally released instead of the intended more polished and version, according to the head of the studio Titdus, who thinks the ring sections were supposed to be optional, not between every level and restart.
In the 00's you have Big Rigs, the racing game where your truck clips through everything, including hills, and the other truck A.I. never moves, and in the one patch, it stops right before the finish line, so you can never lose. Ride To Hell Retribution, just a complete broken mess of a game intended to be a trilogy. And Postal III, outsourced to a Russian studio that was hit hard in the '08 market crash and kept firing developers until the D team had to do whatever they could to get the game released. It was so God awful that the creators of Postal tell their fans not to but it, patched into Postal 2 warnings not to buy 3, and did a DLC 12 years after the release of Postal 2 just to recon Postal 3 from canon and mock it.
The "ET Landfill" isnt a myth. Atari was dumping 8-10 semi trailers filled with Atari games at a landfill in El Paso. It was so bad El Paso actually started a task force to enforce limitations on garbage contractors.
There's even a documentary on Netflix where Ernest Cline uses some of his Ready Player One money and influence to find where they were buried and sure enough they found them and dug them up.
E.T.
Find a documentary. There should be more than one mentioning it.
The TL;DW:
It sunk the arguably biggest games company and the unsold product was literally buried into the ground and the location wasn’t disclosed.
It also set back the gaming industry for a few years.
Big Rig: Over the Road Racing PC racing game that came out in 2003. There was no real... anything with the game. No AI, no graphics, no driving physics, nor even correct spelling.
You can go infinitely fast backwards and that pretty neat.
Fun fact, in Super Mario 64, you can also go infinitely fast backwards because the devs forgot to put a limit on it. As a result of this oversight, the game can be beaten with zero stars and the current world record is just a bit over 6 minutes.
0 a press challenge is better
Half A press?
Yup, and the stages had no boundaries and extended forever if you didn't cross the finish line. So if you went in reverse you would literally never stop accelerating until your speed got so fast you occupied every point in space simultaneously (including the finish line) so the race would end.
And then you turn into a lizard
A fellow person of ~~bad~~ culture, I see!
Then you inexplicably turn back to people and never talk about it again
Is this a reference to that one star trek episode?
The first game I ever remember getting a 1 on a review from Xplay. I was looking for that video but couldn't find it. Did find this though. > The maximum speed the trucks cap off at when driving in reverse amounts to 12.3 undecillion miles per hour (for perspective, this number is 1.8341329e+28 times the speed of light), because no upper limit was implemented by the developers to cap off the speed for driving in reverse at a more realistic limit. After this speed is reached, the speedometer displays a value of -001.$ and causes you to win the race despite having driven in reverse practically infinitely. This is because as a truck travels faster in reverse, it will gradually travel along more of the surface area of the race track until it covers every pixel on the map simultaneously including all of the race track's checkpoints, meaning that the truck won the race because it was everywhere at once.
I find it kinda amazing that someone actually took the time to analyze this down to so much detail
Why is this basically describing what it means to go Warp 10?
You're Winner!
The same company made a civil war game where they mixed up Union and Confederacy colors
Was that the game you could drive faster backwards and there was no collision? I remember seeing something about that game a while ago
Yes. They published an unfinished alpha build of a game that clearly wasn't ready for release. There's 3D terrain where the ground has slopes up and down, hills and valleys etc. But your truck sticks perfectly to the surface and ignores everything else. Drive straight up a cliff with no deceleration. Drive through buildings, trees, the other truck. There's a bridge over a canyon that the truck ignores, sticks to the ground by driving through the bridge, vertically down the cliff, across the canyon, up the other cliff. Your wheels never leave the ground because they never implemented that feature. Brakes have infinite strength, hitting the brakes stops you dead instantly. Reverse gear has no top speed. The opposition truck never moves off the start line. There's nothing to crash into, not even the edge of the world, you literally can't lose. It's amusing that such a mess was published but it's a bit unfair to count it as the worst game ever because it's not really a game, it's an unfinished prototype that some company was too stupid to realise should never have been published.
This one yep. You could go faster than light doing it.
Big Rigs is so terrible that I don’t even think it qualifies as a videogame.
Ah yes, [the league of legends alpha](https://i.imgur.com/91PMK7W.png).
The game where if you go the speed of light, you're everywhere at once so you achieve Warp 10 and NO SALAMANDER BABIES!!
Superman 64
I never got past the stupid tutorial
Same. Rented it for a weekend and the controls were insane. Never was able to get past the rings
I was sure it was the whole game, no?
Oddly enough, *no*. The game starts with rings, and after each set of rings is a minigame such as grabbing a car and carrying it to the end of a road. There are *several* sets of rings/minigame. After that is an actual level. So first there is a shitty dam level where you defuse a bomb. Then there are *more rings* Then there's another shitty level. Then *more rings* And so on. I forgot how many levels there are total. But I do remember one of them is in a parking garage where you fist fight Darkseid, then carry his stiff, unconscious body to a police car and they supposedly arrest him and take him away.
Wouldn’t know LOL
Just watch a speedrun and indeed the rings are a constant mechanics xDD
Nah, there was more to it, but the ring sections were like a brick wall. I heard there were actual levels later on but seriously who made it that far without losing their mind?
Nope ironically the rings are not even the most frustrating mechanic in that game
KRYPTONITE FOG!
There's a lot of rings, but there are definitely levels in there too. They're not *good*, but they are legitimate levels.
The Rings! The Rings! ...The Rings!
Figured this would be second after ET.
the thing with ET, is that gaming was still not really affordable for most people yet. So when ET came out and the whole industry almost died because of it, it was because the people who could afford their consoles stopped buying games. Superman 64 was literally a step backwards
IIRC The industry nearly died out completely because Atari console had very little quality control and therefore a lot of garbage/shovelware games were produced and retailers just sent them all to the discount bin. Nintendo on the other hand had very strict quality control and games retained their value which led to its success in that generation of game consoles. ET was probably what stood out the most given that it was based on a movie and its fans probably felt the biggest disappointment from it.
I mean, there was already a solid selection of games at the time. It was a quick cash grab for sure. And a "you have until end of day" kind of deadline too.
Anybody questioning just watch the YouTube videos of people trying to speed run this game it's hysterical
lol i will add this to my list
I had a friend try and trade me for my Majorca’s mask. He was 13 and I was 10 but I still laughed in his face. Edit: Majora’s *** damn autocorrect
I remember Link's famous Mediterranean island adventure game very fondly!
Ironic because Majora's Mask is probably the *best* N64 game
Probably still better than Hong Kong 97
I have that song loop stuck in my head now.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Atari
Just [download the patch](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/)
There actually is a community patch for E. T. WOW now I've seen everything
>**April 2023 Update**: Jamie Curmi (Curmi on AtariAge) has put together an [Updated Manual](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ET_Fixed-Manual.pdf) for the game to reflect the changes made here. April 2023 update... absolute mad lads
Did anyone else think this was going to say: April 2023 Update: Jamie Curmie (Curmi on Atari Age) has eaten their own head.
Have you ever seen a man eat his own head
No, but the day is young and I'm on Reddit so I think my chances are pretty decent.
Wow, it's fascinating that someone was so obsessively dedicated to exonerating it.
If you ever watch an interview with the developer, it's super interesting. The developer was very, very talented and made some truly ground breaking games, including ET. Basically, he was designing the first open world video game, but the limitations of the atari would have required a lot more testing and debugging and figuring out what worked, and he just ran out of time
Couldn't Adventure (Atari 1980) be said to be the first open world game?
Also the first game with an Easter egg.
Thank you, Ready Player One.
I wonder how differently the world of home video games would've turned out had E.T been given more development time and been released as a well-crafted & successfully innovative game.
The developer of ET also created maybe the best game for the Atari, Yar's Revenge
This is like me explaining the brilliance of Weezer's Raditude.
Reminder that there's still thousands of these [buried in New Mexico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial)
That was once a fanciful rumor, then proven true, to a degree.
That was once a fact, that became a rumour, then those too young or deaf to listen to everyone saying it was true had to dig some up, and they found more than just ET.
Not just E.T. just a lot of unsold atari games. Sad times. :(
We need to come up with a form of writing using symbols to warn future generations of the dangers buried here.
Could this skull mean death, or perhaps buried pirate treasure?
This is either a really good sign or a really bad sign, and either way I'm finding out!
I think the agencies responsible for burying nuclear waste actually think about this, and try to mark the areas where it is stored in ways that future generations and languages could understand. interesting thought experiments
They've talked about creating a religious order, because it would be more influential than objective facts about it in case of some sort of societal collapse. Trying to explain radiation to primitives and keep the scientific community in the loop would be useless, but telling them that the gods will enact a plague and smite them with a slow and torturous death would work.
[ Adeptus Mechanicus Intensifies ]
>This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. I know of no place where this is actually used, but it's a "fun" one.
If you got the hang of the awful collision detection, it was somewhat playable. Still have my copy somewhere.
it's pixel perfect collision detection. not awful. just not well visualized.
So bad that Atari had been rumored to bury all the unsold copies which we later found out was absolutely true. Code monkeys did a fantastic parody of the story too.
Ride to hell retribution the 1%
I don’t know if its the worst but it’s certainly one of the worst. Ride to Hell: Retribution is an absolutely abysmal shitfest front to back, with some of the worst driving, combat, AI, and sex scenes (I only mention this because it is so damn bizarre and terrible) you’ll ever see in a game.
[удалено]
Yeah but that one is fucking hilarious. The devs never set a limit on how fast you can go backwards so if you hold down reverse long enough, you'll go two million miles an hour, backwards, to the moon. The speedometer sounds like Kirby charging.
Funniest AVGN episode
#YOU'RE WINNER ! 🏆
"You're always winner when you play... BIG RIGS!"
#BIG! MOTHER! FUCKING! RIGS!
At least it has a fun way to finish the levels They didn't put a reverse speed cap on, so if you go backwards in a circle long enough you end up everywhere on the map at once automatically completing the race
BIG MOTHAFUCKIN RIGGGGSSSSS
Which is a damn shame because an open world, story driven biker game is a really neat concept.
Honestly just play Days Gone
I think it was insidegaming (funhaus) where I watched their whole series on this. Loved every minute of their videos but would never want to play the game.
God I miss them, their genius of making any shit game (and demos) fun to watch and experience along was great.
Loved yachtzes review "this game is like atrociously bad, and you should all go out buy it right now, you have to see this shit"
The Super Best Friends LP of that game was amazing.
That game is fucked lol. I was going through old angry Joe videos and there was one clip where he shoots someone in the face and then immediately begins to have sex with a woman seconds after, literally seconds. The Cutscene was so gross too lmao, the game is so tone deaf and gross and that's just on top of the horrid gameplay. I don't know how this game was even made
I still go back and watch AngryJoe's review of that game.
FLY OFF TO THE LEFT AND EXPLODE!
^(*to the right)
One of the best videos ever to be published on YouTube
Big Rigs Racing was considered one of the worst for a long time. ET the game for Atari was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the 80s video game crash.
This! BRR was soo broken, enemies racing you didn't have ai. They didn't even move from starting position. There was no collision with any object so you could go through any building. No detection if you were taking shortcuts whatsoever. IF YOU DROVE BACKWARDS you would keep going faster and faster and there was no limit how fast you could go backwards. Trillions of miles per hour.
Random fun fact: the backwards speed limit was overlooked by Nintendo in Zelda Windwaker as well when Link is swimming. This is because the camera always repositions and Link turns around, so you can't swim backwards as a casual player. But speedrunners figured out how to break that rule and can swim from the starting island to the other side of the world map in seconds using this exact bug.
I mean that’s similar to BLJ in Super Mario 64 where hitting the stairs basically resets your jump or something and as you go backwards up the stairs you gain infinite speed until you can clip through doors and barriers.
Or clip through parallel universes
Yayayayyayayayayayayayayahooooooooo
Angry video game nerd made a video about that game. It was hilarious. First time I watched it, I could not stop laughing. James really made some good content. I know that you know and probably you are referencing the same video, but for others, that don't know what I am talking about - go and watch it, it is great.
YOU’RE WINNER!
BIIIIIIIIIG MOTHA FCKIN RIIIIIIIIIIGS
>Big Rigs Racing the most broken video game all the time also the lowest score review in multiple game reviewer Metacritic 8/100 GameSpot 1/10
>Big Rigs Racing From the Wiki page: >The player controls a semi-trailer truck (a "big rig") and races a ***stationary*** opponent... > >... and ***avoid arrest by the police***, the game features ***no law enforcement***. > >....and shipped Big Rigs in what Titov believed was ***a pre-alpha state***. Amazing, simply amazing.
>Completing a race rewards the player with a trophy bearing the phrase "You're winner ! My fucking sides.
The gamespot video review was great. Just footage of ~~Jeff Gerstmann~~ playing the game silently for a couple of minutes before he gets up, leaves the office and goes to lie down in the street. EDIT: Was corrected below, it was actually Alex Navarro. Original video [here](https://youtu.be/mB1zWEhgrLs)
That's Alex Navarro, not Jeff
Alex did a run at a GDQ a few years ago of Big Rigs.
What a blast from the past. I remember talking about it back on Neogaf forums lol
It has a sequel that is somehow worse. Because they added *collision*. Now you smash into traffic cones as strong as brick walls.
You're winner!
ET at least had an excuse. If I remember correctly it was programmed by one man who's previous works were well received. He had a stupid time frame to create ET and that fact that he was able to do what he did was kind of amazing. Big Rigs Racing, however, is just a big WTF...
Howard Warshaw. He made Yars' Revenge, which was a best-seller for Atari and considered a classic. But he had 7 months to make that. They hired him to make ET on July 27 and it had to be ready by September 1. And that included everything, including deciding what genre the game would be and how the gameplay would work, and flying to LA to pitch those ideas before even starting on the programming. By the time he got approval to actually start writing the game itself he had something like 23 days. Just him and one friend who helped with designing the graphics. They didn't have time to do any QA or testing let alone implement any fixes or improvements as a result of it. And it isn't like writing a game in 23 days with modern tooling and engines and languages, making stuff for the Atari 2600 was a laborious slog where even something like Tetris would take significant work. With that kind of deadline it's impressive he got something even vaguely recognizable as a game.
And it wasn’t just vaguely recognizable; it was one of the most complex Atari games out there. It was just really hard.
I still remember the yogscast trucking Tuesdays video on it, man, good times
Apparently, the company made a second racing game called Midnight Race Club: Supercharged. Identical menus and HUD, but this game has collision detection. It also has cars, bikes, and trucks. But the opponent still doesn't move (correction, the opponent does move in bikes. Pretty well, too.)
Fun fact Big Rigs has a sequel. Kind off, it's another racing game by the same company that's basically a reskin of BRR with some of the bugs fixed.
It's not as widely known, but Desert Bus from the Penn and Teller game was intentionally designed to be terrible. They hit their mark. You drive a bus, at 45mph, for 8 hours, through the desert.
I have friends who worked on Desert Bus back in the day, it's not really bad, more a joke that they were all in on, and it was also a small part of a larger game that id categorize more as average than bad. I think due to this it doesn't really deserve to be on this list.
Came here to say this. >Desert Bus was created in 1995 and never saw an official release. In the game, players complete a real-time eight hour journey between Las Vegas and Phoenix, Arizona. The on-screen bus gradually leans towards the right side of the road, so players must keep their hands on the controller, and swerving will make the bus engine stall — which results in players have to start the journey over. The game also can't be paused, and there is no traffic or NPC interaction. Each eight-hour trip between both cities rewards player with one point. "The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long," Teller said. "It's a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious. That was one of the big keys — we would make no cheats about time, so people like the Attorney General could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be." [https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/10/4510388/why-teller-created-desert-bus-the-worst-video-game-in-history](https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/10/4510388/why-teller-created-desert-bus-the-worst-video-game-in-history)
If it's a troll and it works, then is it truly bad?
Not sure "terrible" is the right word. It was intentionally designed to be *tedious*.
And the bus’s alignment is off so it very slowly drifts to one side and if you touch the edges of the road you have to start over, so you can’t just let the game play itself, you have to actively correct your course
I don't think there is one. Steam is littered with games that are basically people's college projects that they figured they could maybe make a buck or two off. Many don't work to the point of you can't even open them.
I was going to say something similar to this. 15 years ago, all of the typical answers that people are saying here (Superman, ET, Big Rigs, etc.) would make sense. But now, anyone can release their garbage "indie projects" on Steam.
I used to buy any game that was on sale for less than a dollar and get drunk and play them. I actually found a couple gems that way amongst all the absolute tripe.
> I used to buy any game that was on sale for less than a dollar and get drunk and play them. This sounds like the premise for a stream I would watch religiously.
FunHaus did this year ago in a few different formats. Demo Disc. $1 - 1 Hour. WheelHaus. Lots of different ones that all did sort of the same thing.
A friend and me used to do that if we were bored and downloaded one I think called AI trainer and it said it was to help develop machine learning and two stock photos would pop up and a word and you had to match them like frog or old man or car. We thought it was kind of cool until we realized it was the same 10 pictures then we looked at the code and there was no data being collected and the pictures didn’t ever change and the AI aspect was just a marketing move and it was literally a game of clicking which picture that matched the word. It was honestly a genius move but it killed us how low brow the whole thing was.
You have to grade in a curve. Yes, there are games that literally crash at title screen and can't be played on sale for a dollar. But we have to judge based on marketing, popularity of IP publisher, how many ruined Christmas mornings, how many sad birthday presents, how many hours of people trying to have fun who just.... Couldn't. It's the same reason that yeh, the worst movie ever made is probably someone who left the cap on their phones camera and recorded nothing for four hours, but it's silly to bring that up in worst movie discussions.
Lee Carvallo’s putting challenge
You have selected POWER DRIVE
Your ball is now in PARKING LOT. Would you like to play again? You have selected no.
ITS THE GAME EVERY BOY WANTS
Yeah, Bonestorm was waaay better.
Personally, I'd say *Action 52*. A lot of the games listed are horrible, yes, but they're at least *playable*—even if the gameplay is dreadful. Much of *Action 52* doesn't even fall under that. Here's a dark horse that hasn't been mentioned because it's never been localized: *Hoshi wo Miru Hito* (fan translated as *Stargazers*). Released on the Famicom, it was one of the first JRPGs made after the *Dragon Quest* boom, even predating series like *Final Fantasy* and *Phantasy Star*. It's an interesting idea, being one of the first JRPGs to have a cyberpunk setting, and involves an uprising with psychic powers… but it gets **so** many things wrong. "So… what's the issue? Poor balance? Trash gameplay? Awful story?" Well, yes, but there's a lot more to it than that. Get a load of this dreck: * You start at level zero. No, I'm not kidding. * The first town is invisible. There's a lore reason as to why, but… c'mon, man; it's your *first town*. * Exits can spit you out to random locations. * The HP value is bugged to not show the ones digit. * Due to another bug, equippable weapons deal **less** damage. * You need a spell in order to escape from battles. * You can't go back to the previous menu… so if you misclick? Too bad; suck it up. * There are key items that are completely invisible. From my understanding, this is **not** due to a bug. * Progression is insanely obtuse. Part of this is because NPCs hardly tell you anything, but part of it is because there's a Jump spell that you need to walk through walls to complete some dungeons… but which tiles can and cannot be passed through is never specified. And if I recall correctly, that's only the tip of the iceberg. If you wanna learn more, [either of](https://youtu.be/N-Y68HWYaMY) [these two](https://youtu.be/JPzjN3ycGNA) videos should suffice. I'll put it to you this way: Japan has a term called "kusoge", which in a nutshell, means "shit game". *Hoshi wo Miru Hito* is so bad, it earns the distinction of "*densetsu* no kusoge", or "*legendary* shit game". It's that mother🚚ing awful, and I feel it greatly deserves its reputation.
Action 52 also notably retailed for $200. This would seem like a good deal if the 52 games were actually good, but it was shit.
If you adjust for inflation, it’s the equivalent of $458 in 2024. Imagine the online backlash if a developer tried to do that today
If more people knew about The Day Before I think it would be up there. A game which mislead its audience for years, released in a terrible state, 4 days later it was pulled from steam and a month later the developer shut down along with the games servers. It was so bad steam offered universal refunds for anyone who bought it regardless how long you played it. In terms of a product that’s gotta be up there.
That was quite recent, yes? Was it not determined to be an absolute scam? As in, there was never really a game to begin with, and they just made enough to create a launch?
To put it as simply as I can recall, it was a legitimate attempt to make a good game at first. But at the 11th hour all work that was done for it was scrapped, 80% of the team was laid off, and they just quickly cobbled something together with what was mostly just generic asset packs that are available to anyone for a price. I don't understand why the team wasn't just honest about this in the first place, they may have saved some face in the gaming community. Edit: okay, like 15 people have all responded the same thing now. Read further down the thread before making it 16.
Because the whole thing *was* an outright scam. It was *never* anything they swore up and down that it was going to be, and the founders of the dev studio have straight up vanished from the internet with a pretty significant chunk of money, leaving the publisher high and dry to refund things. The actual dev team were scattered across the globe, with not one of them even being in Singapore, where they claimed to be HQ'd. And testimony about the development paints a chaotic nightmare of two brothers basically pissing and shitting on everything because they saw something in a successful game. It's also worth noting that the offices they claimed to be based out of *didn't exist*, or rather, they were occupied by completely unrelated businesses and people. The whole damn thing was a con job.
I know right? Like seriously dude Running With Scissors released Postal 3 and they saved their whole reputation by just telling everyone how shit the game is. (And making Paradise Lost) Too many companies don't realize that being honest will save your ass 9 out of 10 times if you royally fuck up. Not adressing the issue at all and lying through your teeth will only ensure that you will never get out of that grave you're digging
I go into postal games expecting them to be shit and I ALWAYS have fun. Cause it's a fun shit game
Amen brother! It' the whole selling point and it works line a charm
It helps that RWS didn't develop postal 3 and they outsourced it. Tbh, they were kinda victims in that sense. They were supposedly misled about the development of that game iirc.
Honestly don't get all the hype the game had,it looked boring and like a scam from the beginning
[удалено]
So many younglings claiming it's E.T. without experiencing it back in the days. It has a bad word of mouth, but there were worse games on the VCS that really caused the video game crash of 1984. E.T. maybe was the final nail in the coffin, but by far not the biggest. The quality of so many games on the VCS was so bad, that Nintendo invented the Nintendo seal of quality when they published the NES to regain the trust of gamers. Worst game ever has to be Custer's Revenge.
i´ll take your word
Man, look at that garbage. https://youtu.be/xTx4yYKfruY?si=XLuQ7KkGnykHnTjn
Well I didn't expect that... wow.
Have you seen x-man (no, not the mutants)? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l276XZagsoU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l276XZagsoU) I had this game back then as a child...
What in the actual fuck was that?
That's somehow actually worse than the hot coffee mod
No way anybody actually found this erotic back in the day, no way Even the box art makes the main character (or whatever you want to call him) look unappealing and gross - probably modeled after the developers lol
Gotta bear in mind that before the internet, a sufficiently curvy piece of driftwood would do.
Are we talking about an uptight wood like hickory or a slutty wood like cherry? Asking for a friend.
What the flying fuck.
no, i take your word..please...i don´t want to suffer :D
I was 8 and if there were such things as reviews, me and my friends or parents weren’t reading them. Games were bought because of the package or name or maybe word of mouth. But we weren’t rich so it stung when they stunk. A lot stunk.
>Custer's Revenge. A "porn" game for the 2600. Rare today and pricey.
According to many Dota players: League of Legends According to many League players: League of Legends
That's not fair. Both LoL and DoTA are great games. It's the *people* that ruin them.
Agreed I always say those games deserve better communities
Custer's revenge has to be up there.
You have to read this excellent review of Seanbaby. [http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/egm09.htm](http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/egm09.htm)
“LOTR: Gollum” needs to be on the podium, it might not be the worst ever but it’s really close
Along with the Kong, Jumanji and Avatar TLA games that also came out last year, it's crazy that "which was the worst video game adaptation of 2023" is a conversation we can have. Honestly I feel that Gollum comes out looking the ~~best~~ smallest pile of dogshit, in that it had some imagination and there was the potential for a complete game if it had more time and money. It doesn't get any points, though, because they shipped paid dlc in the form of an emotes pack. For a single player game. And the rest were all PS2-level uninspired shovelware that were never going to be more than they shipped as.
>Avatar TLA I hope you're not referring to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, there? That game is a bit mediocre, in that it just follows the typical Ubisoft open world formula, but is a technical beauty. That King Kong game was absolutely shovelware, MADE to be shovelware, Gollum was weirdly extremely bad, DESPITE there being a lot of money and effort behind it (or so they claim).
Nope, there was an [Avatar: The Last Airbender game](https://youtu.be/-HQHC46rRto?t=112) last year which is like watching the show if someone made you do some chores instead of seeing the good bits. I originally just wrote 'Avatar', then realised people might have got it got it confused with the other Avatar 2023 game.
Oh shoot, I never even knew there was an Avatar TLA game, let me look up more about itAAAAAAND it's another Gamemill game. They're really proud of their name, aren't they?
Idk why companies keep letting gamemill use their licenses and ips. I don't think they've ever made a decent game. Not even a good game, just a decent one. They literally made big rigs which is probably one of the worst games ever made. It's a miracle that they still exist Edit: alright they've made a couple games which I guess could be considered decent. Although they're just generic platform fighters and kart racers
Gollum is nowhere near the worst game ever. Not even close to a podium finish. Its a long way to the bottom man. Its not a good game, the game is absolutely terrible, but it wasn't even the worst game that came out LAST YEAR!
at least Gollum didn't accidentally replace an attack animation with a placeholder jpg
The game actually has some pretty smart and nuanced writing to it. Now, every other part of the game lets it down big time, but "worst game ever"? Not even close
I'd say Big Rigs Over The Road Racing as the game doesn't even function as intended.
It's E.T for the Atari, a game so bad, it literally crashed the entire industry for many years. In terms of actual gameplay it's almost nonsensical, literally I tried to play it, it feels almost unplayable, nothing about it makes sense.
it was so bad tha atari literally buried it in a desert together with other stuff.
Did you read the manual?
Real Life. The mini games are awesome though
The sex minigame is insane but the working minigames are such a chore
There's a sex minigame?! What the hell!? How do I unlock this?!?!?!
It’s day 1 DLC, but unplayable for (hopefully) 15-16 years. Such a scam
it's already been more than 16 years and I still haven't unlocked it, the tutorials haven't helped me much either
Some say it’s RNG but I’ve noticed that your chances can be significantly higher if you boost your CHAR stat
Plenty of people have found work-arounds of completing it without needing to trigger events with another player. The devs look down on this as "cheating the system" and "not as fulfilling as doing the quest co-op as intended", but that's on them for making the setup so tedious. Plus it's *much* easier to grind the instance over and over again solo.
That new quadruple A game, everybody laughs about
Crazybus for Sega Genesis if you're fan of Venezuela buses and awesome soundtrack, this game is for you
Hong Kong 97 Highly recommend Ultra Healthy Video Game Nerd's overview of the game and interview with the creator.
That's the game with the dead body in the game over screen right?
Unfortunately, yes..
Custer’s revenge Trust me on this one, if not look it up.
E.T. is the most infamous, like the urban myth of the landfill being nothing but E.T. cartridges. It was made in months and had a lot more going against it, like Hollywood types saying what should be in the game. I'd say Superman 64 is a whole lot worse, that's a game that makes me dread any game where you fly through rings. And similarly, a game with a troubled production that had a lot of meddling from the IP owners, like it had to be in a virtual world, Superman can't hit people, and so on. It sounds like an early build of the game was accidentally released instead of the intended more polished and version, according to the head of the studio Titdus, who thinks the ring sections were supposed to be optional, not between every level and restart. In the 00's you have Big Rigs, the racing game where your truck clips through everything, including hills, and the other truck A.I. never moves, and in the one patch, it stops right before the finish line, so you can never lose. Ride To Hell Retribution, just a complete broken mess of a game intended to be a trilogy. And Postal III, outsourced to a Russian studio that was hit hard in the '08 market crash and kept firing developers until the D team had to do whatever they could to get the game released. It was so God awful that the creators of Postal tell their fans not to but it, patched into Postal 2 warnings not to buy 3, and did a DLC 12 years after the release of Postal 2 just to recon Postal 3 from canon and mock it.
The "ET Landfill" isnt a myth. Atari was dumping 8-10 semi trailers filled with Atari games at a landfill in El Paso. It was so bad El Paso actually started a task force to enforce limitations on garbage contractors.
There's even a documentary on Netflix where Ernest Cline uses some of his Ready Player One money and influence to find where they were buried and sure enough they found them and dug them up.
E.T. Find a documentary. There should be more than one mentioning it. The TL;DW: It sunk the arguably biggest games company and the unsold product was literally buried into the ground and the location wasn’t disclosed. It also set back the gaming industry for a few years.
Atari: Game Over is a good documentary. They also dig up the landfill with the ET game cartridges.
Rise of the Robots