| (Image property of Atari) After some examination, I've discovered that this is a deceptively difficult question to answer because, depending on how you choose to cut it, there are a whole number of games that could be considered the worst of all time. As such, I want to dig into this topic a bit today and talk about my candidates for the worst games of all time. What's old is new... In recent years, games like Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Skull Island: Rise of Kong have garnered attention for being as devastatingly awful as being waterboarded with depleted uranium. While I'm not sure I agree that this makes them contenders to the faecal throne of worst game ever, I still think it's at least worth examining.  | | (Image property of Daedelic Entertainment) The argument goes that, while there have been plenty of worse games in the industry's history, Gollum and Rise of Kong are especially bad because they should have learned their lessons from the past. It's one thing to make a buggy, boring, poorly conceived game when the industry is still new and fresh but when you've watched countless other lemmings jump off that cliff before, you can't claim you didn't know what would happen. As such, these games deserve more credit for their achievements in unpleasantness because they had the answers to the test paper and still managed to fail. On the other hand, as I highlighted in my piece the other day, a lot of the rhetoric around these games is deliberately leaning on the side of hyperbole because that's what garners attention on the internet and saves you from the barren wastelands of the YouTube algorithm. In reality, nobody expected these games to be good and most of their barefaced terribleness is down to short production times and slashed budgets by publishers more than it is outright incompetence or a willingness to make something awful. As such, it's quite difficult to make a case for these actually being the worst games ever made, even if lessons should've been learned and someone should've stamped these games to death before release to put them out of their misery.  | | (Image property of IguanaBee and GameMill Entertainment) E.T. : Enormously Terrible In general, when asked what the worst game of all time is, the default answer that I go to is E.T. for the Atari 2600. By comparison, if Rise of Kong is the gaming equivalent of a stubbed toe then E.T. is like going to the doctor for a prostate exam and coming out missing three limbs. Gollum and Rise of Kong might be bad but at least they weren't responsible for crashing the entire western games industry. E.T. does not have that privilege.  | | (Image property of Atari) To briefly summarise for anyone who might not know, E.T. for the Atari 2600 was released in 1982 to coincide with the Christmas sales window following the incredibly popular film's release. It was rushed out like an Olympic sprinter trying to hide his mistress with only five weeks in development before cartridges needed to be produced. The game was painfully awful and the combination of Atari printing millions too many cartridges and many families returning the game because it was so terrible led to Atari having to bury all of the leftover cartridges in a landfill rather than selling them. Not long after, in 1983, the whole video game industry crashed in no small part because of Atari's financial failures. As you can see, it's easy to understand why E.T. is oft considered the worst of all time. It wasn't just a god-awful game but it was equally god-awful for the entire industry. However, allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment. Was E.T. that much worse than most of the painfully derivative tripe being released at the time? Can one game alone crash an entire industry?  | | (Image property of Microsoft via TIME) While it is funny to blame Atari's staggering incompetence with regards to E.T. for the 1983 crash, I'm not convinced it's wholly fair. If you compare E.T. alongside most of the other cartridge-bound garbage that Atari was pushing at the time, they all seem equally incomprehensible. The same can also be said of all of the innovationless knock-offs that other companies like Activision were shovelling onto shelves at the time. E.T. was an unusually bad game but, in practice, blaming the crash on it is like blaming gravity for plane crashes. Yes, it's a factor, but something else had to go wrong for it to come into effect. Therefore, while E.T. is our most viable candidate so far, it might not be wholly without merit. So, what would it take to make something worse? How about a game that is absolutely awful in intentions as well as in gameplay? Custer's Revenge (eww) For those of you that have not heard of Custer's Revenge, firstly, congratulations, secondly, I apologise for what I am about to tell you. Also released in late 1982, Custer's Revenge is an adults only Atari game where you play as one of history's Native American murderers de jour, General Custer, trying to sexually assault a Native American woman, Revenge, who is tied to a post on the other side of the screen.  | | (Image property of American Multiple Industries and Atari) Okay... A lot to unpack here. First of all, as I alluded to in the E.T. section, the game is awful in the same way that most games of that era for Atari were awful because they played like crap. The gameplay is just about crossing from one side of the screen to another to avoid obstacles but, honestly, the gameplay is not the main issue. Secondly, and far more importantly, the game has more -ists than a drunk uncle at a Columbus Day parade. Adult only Atari games are already the least erotic media existing on planet earth. If you're desperate enough to resort to an Atari 2600 for sexualised imagery, you might as well make stick figures out of grains of sand and make them rub together because it'll achieve the same effect. You then add on top of this themes of sexual assault and racially motivated violence against women and you have a cocktail of one of the worst games ever made on its intentions alone.  | | (Image property of American Multiple Industries and Atari) As if that wasn't enough reasons to hate this game and all that it stood for, we also need to consider its impact on the industry because, while I hate to say it, it had one. The racist, sexist theming was deliberately chosen during development to maximise public outrage, the same reason why the game was demoed to women's rights and Native American groups where it went down like a lead balloon. This was no small part of the reason why, come the 1990s and 2000s, many members of the public saw video games as something potentially dangerous for their kids to own. As such, if you have ever been bored stiff by a lecture about games being too violent or poisoning the minds of the youth, you have games like this one to blame. So, job done right? Custer's Revenge is the worst game of all time for not only being a terrible game but also for representing a decent chunk of things that are already wrong with society. Right? Well, possibly. You see, the problem is that, while Custer's Revenge is all of these things, that is entirely on purpose. It was meant to be cheap, it was meant to be racist and it was meant to be abominable because that was what would make it sell. I could easily call it a day and say that it's the worst game of all time but then I'd be giving it exactly what it wanted when it was made forty years ago, attention. With that in mind, if there is any game that I don't want to give the last laugh to, it's this one. Conclusion Hopefully, what I've outlined here gives you some idea of what I mean about it being difficult to say what makes a game the worst of all time. There are the games with the biggest impacts like E.T., games that are awful despite having history on their side like Gollum and you have games that are deliberately and transparently unpleasant like Custer's Revenge. This is before we even get into my eternal sparring partner of the Triple-A industry where games are made for nefarious purposes like stinging players for microtransactions and capitalising on brands rather than usual the piles of money required to actually innovate or drive the industry forward. With all of these factors at play, it is hard to nail down what makes a game the 'worst' ever.  | | (Image property of IguanaBee and GameMill Entertainment) As such, I find it too difficult to pin down specifically which of these is the worst on offer, for which I apologise. Instead, I'd like to invite a more nuanced conversation around this question. Rather than organising games into worthies and unworthies, best or worst, why don't we start to develop a more specific language around our favourite and least favourite games to say what exactly is so wrong with them? Is it intentions? Execution? Development issues? Maybe looking at bad games like this might help us to understand each other a little better and pressure publishers a little more efficiently with specific complaints of what we want them to stop doing. Or maybe they'll just keep ignoring us. Who knows? Either way, I'm going to go back to playing something good. All images and properties belong to their respective rights holders and are utilised here for the purposes of criticism and review.
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