| (Images property of Nintendo, Bethesda Softworks, THQ and Microsoft Game Studios) However, for some games, things get even more complicated. In addition to all of the usual problems, some games have to jump through truly extraordinary hoops before they are even allowed to exist. Here are just a few of my favourite examples of games that had to do some seriously weird things in order to be released. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess The Legend of Zelda is a series with some serious pedigree to it. If it was a dog, it would be one of the fluffiest, fastest and most inbred dogs the world has ever seen. Despite this clean-cut image though, things haven't always gone to plan on the road from a game's concept to its full release.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) No game embodies this idea more clearly than 2006's Twilight Princess. Following the trend of the era by making its graphics about 50% browner than necessary, Twilight Princess promised to be a stoic and serious Zelda story in contrast to 2002's colourfully cartoony Wind Waker. However, while the game was a surefire hit with fans of the series, the developers still had to make some bizarre changes to get it released. You see, originally Twilight Princess was planned for release on the GameCube in 2005 but, in order to boost the profile of their new console, the game was delayed until 2006 so that it could be a launch title on the Wii. No big deal, you might be thinking. As any plastic rod enthusiast can tell you, the Wii was all about the Wiimote controller and flailing it around wildly to make things happen in your games. In Twilight Princess, Link would be able to swing his sword in the game according to whatever terrible air traffic controller impression you were doing in real life. It was a match made in heaven. In theory.
 | | (Image property of Nintendo) |
The problem, you see, was that, quite famously, Link was left-handed. Most of the world's population is right-handed. Not a problem in a normal game, a big problem in a Wii game. As a result, Nintendo were faced with a harsh choice; scrap the game on Wii because player's sword hands wouldn't line up with Link's or change Link's whole model and animations in order to make him right-handed. So, which did they do? Well, neither. Instead, Nintendo went for the much more radical third option. Rather than scrapping the game or reversing Link's model, they decided to flip the entire game horizontally for the Wii release so that Link's dominant hand was on the right. This meant that if you went from the GameCube version of Twilight Princess to the Wii version, you'd effectively be playing them the other way around like a mirror image. Besides being totally insane in concept, this was a fairly innovative way of solving the right-handedness problem while keeping the core of the game technically the same.  | | (Image property of Nintendo) Ever since Twilight Princess, I have never heard of another game needing to flip itself horizontally in order to get released making this both a very successful and wholly unique concept for a change made during the development cycle. What's more, with the death of the Wii and most of the industry outside of VR beginning to shun motion controls, I'd be hard pushed to say that I could see this ever happening again. Prey (2017) Over the last couple of decades, as games have matured and become more widely recognised as an artistic medium, various long-running franchises have felt the need to reboot their images. Tomb Raider (2013), God of War (2018), Doom (2016), the list goes on. However, while all of these games either followed the same characters as the original or, in some cases, continued the story with new settings and gameplay design, one game in particular stands out as a particularly odd duck.  | | (Image property of Arkane Austin and Bethesda Softworks) Prey released in 2017 to a broadly positive reception and, in recent years, has been looked back on by many as one of the best immersive sims of modern times. Prey comes across as a little like Bioshock in space where you fight black spaghetti monsters that look like they come from the same family tree as Spider-man 2's Venom. The game takes inspiration from various things that came before it for its world and gameplay design. One game, however, that it very much did not take inspiration from was the original Prey (2006), you know, the game it was supposedly a reboot of. This is not a particularly hot take as many players and critics at the time remarked upon the fact that Prey (2017)'s gameplay and plot bore very little resemblance to Prey (2006)'s. Where Prey (2017) focused on survival aboard a human space station full of horrible cosmic horror monsters with stealth and RPG upgrades, Prey (2006) was an action game about blasting through an alien spaceship with the ability to also disconnect your spirit from your body. The centre of the Venn diagram between the two is fairly minute and only contains the word 'space'.  | | (Image property of Human Head Studios and 2K Games) So, how the hell did this happen? Why do we have two games released 11 years apart with the same name that are almost completely different? Well, the short answer is marketing! You see the original Prey's developers 3D Realms, you know, the ingenious business minds that created and then lost Duke Nukem? Well, they screwed up holding onto the Prey IP too. They were supposed to make a Prey 2, but due to copyright messiness, the rights went over to Bethesda who put a new studio on the project. After about a decade of car accidents in the development process, Prey 2 was canned by Bethesda in 2014. Despite binning the one that they had though, Bethesda still thought a Prey game could sell. At the same time, Arkane Studios, creators of Prey (2017), were pitching the game. So, as you would expect from the stellar paternal instincts of the company that published Fallout 76, they decided to kill two birds with one stone, even if it made no bloody sense. Arkane's game got the green light on the one condition that it had to be called Prey even though, as established, it had about as much in common with Prey (2006) as it did with tv's Father Ted.
 | | (Image property of Arkane Austin and Bethesda Softworks) |
As such, what we have here is the strange case of a game being forcibly renamed in order to justify its own existence. Unlike Twilight Princess however, this example of the bizarre things developers have to do to get their games made is less of a quirky problem-solving story and more of an indictment of the industry as a whole. Had Bethesda not had the name Prey lying around, we may never have seen any of the genuinely great ideas that Prey (2017) had to offer because they probably wouldn't have published it without a known name attached. It makes you wonder what other games never got made because publishers didn't have any conveniently dormant IPs at their disposal... Ratatouille on Xbox From one kind of artistic bankruptcy to another, we have the case study of the Ratatouille video game adaptation. Just in case that wasn't oddly specific enough though, I'm only referring to the version of the game for the original Xbox.  | | (Image property of Disney and Pixar) Releasing in 2007, Ratatouille was part of the era when all family friendly films were required under the constitution to release on every video game platform ever made. Not only did this mean the handhelds of the day with the PSP, DS and GameBoy Advance but also every home console on the market at the time. The PS3 and Xbox 360 got their versions as the current generation consoles of the day. Additionally, the PS2 also got a look-in because it still had a strong install base and similar hardware to the hyper-popular Wii that was bound to receive a port.  | | (Image property of THQ) |
At this point, the logical, strategic minds over at the now bankrupt publisher THQ decided that they might as well spit out something for the original Xbox audience as well seeing as it had fairly similar hardware to the PS2 and Wii and at least three people willing to fork out money for a Disney Pixar tie-in game. That should have been the happily ever after for Ratatouille but, as you might expect from its inclusion on this list, there was one more bump in the road. The exact reasons behind what happened next are unclear. Maybe one of the three Ratatouille fans on Xbox got sick just before the game came out. Maybe someone at THQ or Disney stopped sniffing paint thinners for long enough to notice that an at best okay kids game on a last gen console that already didn't sell staggering numbers might not do all that well. Unfortunately, we'll never know. What we do know however, is that someone on the publishing side quickly pivoted and sold the game to Gamestop as an exclusive game in the hopes of recouping at least some costs from the process.  | | (Image property of THQ) As a result, Ratatouille became a Gamestop exclusive game, exclusively on the original Xbox. The irony of this story is that its exclusivity and poor sales have made it a fairly sought-after game for Xbox collectors thanks to its rarity. If only THQ had held onto those original Xbox discs for another decade and a half, they could have made a mint. Devil's Third and Bayonetta 2 It's the mid-2010s and Nintendo are struggling, again. The Wii U is struggling to connect with audiences, executives are having to take pay cuts to keep developers employed and the PS4 and Xbox One have launched, leaving Nintendo so buried in the dust that they need a JCB to dig them out. Things were looking fairly dire for the iconic Japanese company and they needed to turn things around. So, what did they do?  | | (Image property of Nintendo) Did they fast-track some first party exclusive games from their iconic series like Zelda or Metroid? No. Did they reform the Wii U's marketing or hardware to make it clear that it wasn't just an upgraded Wii and that its screen controller wasn't just an overpriced Etch-a-Sketch? Not that either. Nope, instead Nintendo decided that the problem the Wii U had was that it didn't have enough mature games to appeal to mature audiences, you know, the ones that already bought a PS4 instead. Thankfully for old man Nintendo, not one but two solutions to their Wii U woes presented themselves in providential fashion. Devil's Third and Bayonetta 2 were mature games from established industry names that were both struggling to find funding thanks to a mixture of development trouble and a lack of publisher support. Naturally then, Nintendo stepped in to plug the funding gap that the games were facing and promised to publish the games on the condition that the games became Nintendo exclusives to revitalise the Wii U.  | | (Image property of PlatinumGames and Nintendo) As such, both Bayonetta and Devil's Third joined the legendary ranks of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pikmin and Pokemon as Nintendo-published exclusive games, or at least Bayonetta did. Like much of the Wii U's library, the games were a mixed bag. Bayonetta 2 was celebrated as a triumphant return for the beloved series while Devil's Third was lambasted as one of the worst games of the year and was codified as a symbol of the Wii U's total desperation for any releasable games.  | | (Image property of Valhalla Game Studios and Nintendo) What is odd in the examples of Bayonetta and Devil's Third is not the nature of the deals that Nintendo made with the developers, these kinds of agreements are fairly common in the industry. Rather, what was strange was the idea that two mature games had to tie themselves to the family friendly Wii U of all things. Being a mature game on a Nintendo platform has always been a strange experience but I don't think it's ever looked stranger than when Bayonetta and Devil's Third had to bear the crown. Crackdown Remember Crackdown? Yeah, it was that open world sandbox series about gathering floating orbs and breaking big things. It's probably safe to say that the series is dead at this point seeing as Crackdown 3 was commercially and critically panned thanks to it being delayed so many times that it's game design was outdated by the time it released.  | | (Image property of Realtime Worlds and Microsoft Game Studios) Well, if you cast your mind back to before Terry Cruz blessed the series with his voice and likeness, the first game came to a more humble start on the Xbox 360. Back then, the series was not marketed as a loud and proud Xbox exclusive. Rather, upon its release, Microsoft felt like the game needed a bit of a sales boost. So, how did Microsoft go about solving this problem? They gave it a Siamese twin. Famously, buying the first Crackdown gave players not only access to the game but also to the beta for Halo 3, the last game in Bungie's Master Chief trilogy and the first game in the Halo series to be released on Xbox 360. Predictably, Crackdown sold very well for an original IP thanks to all of the people buying the game purely for the Halo beta. For many, they got a free game with their Halo 3 beta.  | | (Image property of Realtime Worlds and Microsoft Game Studios) Crackdown makes for an interesting case study because, while some games like Prey may have been hurt by the pre-launch shenanigans that I've highlighted here, Crackdown did incredibly well at that time thanks to its bed-sharing with Halo. In fact, the game did so well out of this arrangement that Crackdown 2 and 3 actually under-performed thanks to the bar being set too high by the first game in the series. Conclusion Overall, I love stories like these. They're weird and wonderful and shed some light on some of the truly bizarre creative and business decisions that are made in the process of helping a game to get released. While I've hopefully made it clear that some of these decisions were more baffling than beneficial, like with Prey, it's hard to hold a grudge over them seeing as, without these choices being made, some of these incredible games (and Devil's Third) would never have been released at all. All images belong to their respective rights holders and are utilised here for the purpose of criticism and review.
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