The concept of rebooting a fictional universe or franchise is much older than you might realize– DC comics did it way back in the 1950s with the “Silver Age,” for instance. It used to be that a significant amount of time had to pass before something was rebooted, but that stopped being the case once the Batman and Spider-Man film series. Those saw subsequent reboots in fairly rapid succession, sometimes only a couple of years after the release of the last instalment of the previous version.
If the sentence that ended the last paragraph was confusing, well that’s appropriate given the topic at hand since the idea of what constitutes a brand reboot has gotten extremely murky these days. Whereas it once typically meant a complete refresh of an intellectual property back to the beginning– redoing the origin story, having older characters revert to their younger selves, and so on– the term “reboot” has now become much broader, and can basically mean any attempt at reinvigorating a fictional character or universe after some period of stagnation.
That brings us to video games, where rebooting a game franchise can mean a variety of things. Sometimes, a reboot is exactly what a floundering franchise needed– Mortal Kombat (2011), Tales of Monkey Island, and Metroid Prime say hello. But just as often, a reboot completely misses the point of what made its predecessors great, and the IP is damaged so badly that it would’ve been better off just leaving it alone to retire with dignity.
20 Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness [2003, PlayStation 2]
Games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed have become punchlines for cranking out annual instalments. But Tomb Raider was doing that 20 years ago, starting with the 1996 landmark original that made a megastar out of its curvy heroine.
Publisher Eidos wasn’t going to squander Lara Croft’s newfound fame.
From 1997 to 2000, four annual Tomb Raider sequels were pumped out to ever-diminishing creative and commercial returns, especially since they all were built using the same basic 1995 engine. Taking three years off from console releases and letting TR fatigue subside a bit, Lara returned with the disastrous Angel of Darkness, the long-delayed, completely-misguided attempt to make Lara relevant again by adding terrible stealth portions and a dorky sidekick named Kurtis.
Fortunately, after another three year break, reboot #2 of 3 (so far)- Tomb Raider: Legend– was released and managed to revive the TR franchise.
19 Duke Nukem Forever [2011, PlayStation 3]
The development problems behind Duke Nukem Forever are legendary, a game that was first announced in 1997 and didn’t see release until 2011. During that time, Forever’s original developer went out of business and the game changed hands multiple times before finally landing at Borderlands developer Gearbox, who somehow managed to tie together over a decade of scattered design work into a finished, releasable product.
Is it possible that a game could be trapped in such spectacular development heck and still end up being great? It’s possible, but that certainly didn’t happen here. Forever plays like a game that would’ve been amazing when it was originally supposed to come out, but in 2011 it felt outdated at best, and downright embarrassing at worst.
Forever was fun to mock as a game that was seemingly never coming out. Too bad it finally did– now the game itself is the joke.
18 DmC: Devil May Cry [2010, PlayStation 3]
After two high-profile examples of companies trying to change an existing character’s look for a sequel only to have to change it back after fan outcry– Infamous 2 and Klonoa for Wii– you’d think others wouldn’t be so bold as to try that again. Not to mention how outraged people were over Daniel Craig’s hair color when he accepted the role of Bond.
And yet, in 2010, there was a new-look, dark-haired Dante.
How did Devil May Cry fans take the re-imagined character for the reboot? Not well. Nor did they appreciate the title– DmC– capitalized like someone’s AOL instant messenger name circa-1997. As for the game itself, it was criticized for being too short and too predictable, with boring platforming sections, a lagging camera, and a yawn-inducing final boss.
Now that DMC blew it, maybe Onimusha or Dino Crisis can have a shot at a comeback. Please, Capcom?
17 Gauntlet Legends [2000, PlayStation]
The original Gauntlet was a groundbreaking title in that it was one of the first games to feature four-player simultaneous co-op play. Anyone who has enjoyed a fun co-op gaming experience in the last 30 years owes a debt of gratitude to the iconic Gauntlet.
Ironically, Gauntlet Legends likely isn’t one of those fun experiences.
Following the terrible trend pioneered by Rampage World Tour of taking a golden-age arcade classic and reinventing it with the worst kind of late-90s 3D graphics, Gauntlet Legends takes the original, doesn’t add a single bit of depth to modernize it, and turns it into an ugly, shallow mess with awful character models– including ridiculously balloon-chested females – that already looked dated two years before the game came out.
Worse yet, to even halfway enjoy the game you needed four players– which required the overpriced PS1 multitap that almost nobody owned.
16 Silent Hill: Origins [2007, PSP]
Here’s a great idea: Take a game franchise that is known for its disturbing atmosphere and is best played in a dark room with the sound cranked way up, and put it on a handheld system that people play on loud buses and in crowded airports!
Silent Hill and PSP go together like chocolate and toothaches.
Beyond the poor choice of platform, Origins marked the first SH game not developed by Team Silent and without sound design work by Akira Yamaoka, and it shows– the basic pieces are there, but there is no art to how they are put together.
Subsequent SH games were made without Team Silent, each one as damaging to the franchise’s legacy as the last. We very nearly had the SH reboot we deserved in 2014 with Hideo Kojima’s “P.T.,” but Konami buried it as part of their temper tantrum over Kojima’s departure from the company.
15 Twisted Metal [2012, PlayStation 3]
Twisted Metal was, for a time, one of the PlayStation brand’s most important properties. The original was an early standout exclusive for the PS1, Black was one of the PS2’s first truly great games, and Head-On helped to show just what the PSP was capable of.
In the six years it took for the PS3 to get a TM game, the public stopped caring.
And worse, by the time of 2012’s simply-named Twisted Metal, the developers seemed to have stopped caring as well– not long after launch, it was announced that there’d be no DLC ever, and series creator David Jaffe quit the development team shortly after. The game itself feels very much like the product of people who got bored with it halfway through: only four characters have a story mode, the flying vehicles needed more balance-tuning, and the tiered boss battles don’t live up to their potential.
14 Guitar Hero Live [2015, PlayStation 3/PlayStation 4]
Plastic-instrument-based music games never actually got bad– the problem was that the genre got so huge, so quickly that it was milked to the end and everyone got burnt out on it.
In an effort to take one last shot at bringing them back, Activision took the idea of rebooting a little too literally when it released Guitar Hero Live, a game that brought the genre all the way back to its guitar-only roots. That’s right: no drums, some half-baked singing, and not even the option to play with a second guitar! The star of the show– the always-online “Guitar Hero TV” mode– is terribly buggy and will probably be shut down any day now, leaving players to settle for the boring offline modes and weird FMV footage of fake concerts by fictional bands.
Rather than being music games’ triumphant return, Live ended up being their embarrassing, quickly-canceled reunion tour.
13 The 3rd Birthday [2011, PSP]
Back in the PS1 days and when they were still known primarily as Squaresoft, the house that Final Fantasy built was at its most prolific and creatively-daring. Sometimes, they would even change up genres in the middle of a series, as the action/RPG Parasite Eve turned into a survival horror game for its first sequel.
Like Valkyria Chronicles, Parasite Eve’s PSP reinvention did everything wrong.
The 3rd Birthday sees Aya Brea take on the most boring genre imaginable– bland third-person action, made worse by the PSP’s lack of a second analog stick. You know things are bad when the game’s biggest selling point is that Aya has “destructible clothing,” which essentially just means that as she takes damage, her outfits rip in the most fan-service-y way possible. Still, no amount of exposed underwear or backside make Birthday feel like anything less than the most disappointing party imaginable.
12 Warhawk [2007, PlayStation 3]
SingleTrac was one of the PlayStation 1’s key developers, creating such hit franchises as Twisted Metal and Jet Moto. But their very first game was the first-year PS1 flight combat game WarHawk, which served as one of the early 3D showpieces for the system.
Other than a cameo appearance by its titular helicopter in Twisted Metal: Black, WarHawk would go dormant for over a decade. SingleTrac eventually evolved into Incognito Entertainment, which not only kept Twisted Metal alive into the PS2 era but eventually revived Warhawk on the PS3.
Despite some early positive buzz, Warhawk’s online-multiplayer-only premise soon bit it on the rear when the game was fraught with connection issues. Even once those were ironed out, players discovered that Warhawk– with its bland, shoehorned on-foot sections– wasn’t very good, quickly moving on to much better online shooters and sending Warhawk back to its dusty hangar for another 11 years (and counting).
11 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 [2015, PlayStation 3/PlayStation 4]
It’s tough to imagine now, but there was a time when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’s massive success was seen as something of a surprise. It not only sparked an entire blockbuster franchise, but made extreme sports games as a whole one of video games’ most successful genres for years to come.
When the basic THPS formula began to stagnate, Activision tried a variety of creative left-turns for the series that were largely hit or miss– and gradually missed more and more. After the disasters that were the various peripheral-based Tony Hawk games, the franchise’s last shot was to go back to basics.
And thus came Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, one of the worst, most broken games of the modern era. It’s a sad end to a once-great franchise, such a disaster that even Tony Hawk himself has finally distanced himself from the series, effectively ending it for good.
10 Medal Of Honor [2010, PlayStation 3]
Before Call of Duty, there was Medal of Honor– not the first WWII game, but definitely the one that turned WWII action games into one of gaming’s top genres for years. It also, along with GoldenEye before it and Halo after, helped to finally legitimize the concept of console-exclusive FPSs.
To have it eventually become a CoD rip-off is both ironic and unfortunate.
It’s not surprising that Medal of Honor eventually lost its spark once creator Steven Spielberg stopped being involved, but it was still heartbreaking to watch the series become increasingly irrelevant with a parade of lackluster sequels. When it finally attempted its big comeback in 2010, hopes were high– and were immediately dashed when it turned out to just be a second-rate, modern-day-based CoD clone rather than trying to do its own thing.
Instead, CoD did several years later what the MoH reboot should have– go back to WWII.
9 Narc [2005, PlayStation 2]
The original 1988 Narc arcade game was much like some of its film peers of the time– Robocop, The Running Man, and so on– in that it seemed on its surface to be mindless, violent entertainment but was actually poking fun at mindless, violent entertainment. Beneath the satire– and exploded limbs– was also a strong anti-drug message, which is the first place that the dreadful reboot goes wrong.
In Narc for PS2, you are encouraged to not only play both sides of the war on illegal substances, but to actually partake in the stuff you’re supposed to be taking off the streets– complete with effects that essentially turn narcotics into cool power-ups. In addition, the social commentary is completely gone, in its place a game that is exactly the kind of humorless action fest that the original was mocking– and without even bothering to be any fun.
8 Alone In The Dark: Inferno [2008, PlayStation 3]
Resident Evil gets most of the credit for pioneering “survival horror,” but the foundations for much of what RE was came from the Alone in the Dark game series that preceded it. Everything from the tense atmosphere, sparse soundtrack, focus on escaping danger rather than taking it on, and cinematic camera angles were taken directly from AinD, years before RE would do any of that.
So, not unlike the tragic flip-flop of Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, it’s not entirely fair that Alone in the Dark had no choice but to imitate its far more relevant imitator in order to try and make a comeback. Still, there are a fair amount of good to great games that successfully took the RE formula and made it their own, so there really is nobody to blame but Inferno’s developers that the game was such garbage.
7 Thief [2014, PlayStation 3]
After the surprisingly great Deus Ex reboot Human Revolution, it was only a matter of time before Square Enix looked at another of the old Looking Glass properties they now owned and attempted to replicate that success. So they set about reviving the pioneering stealth/action franchise Thief.
Some games are best left in the shadows.
To be fair, stealth gameplay is hard to get right, and the new Thief did that very well. Unforunately, even the best stealth mechanics are meaningless when they’re dropped into terribly-designed levels. Who cares how effectively you can sneak around when the environments you’re sneaking around in are boring and far too linear? Couple that with an awful story, flat dialogue, brain-absent AI, and a poor selection of weapons and you have a game that is a dishonor among thieves.
6 Leisure Suit Larry’s Sequel [2004, PlayStation 2]
The original computer Leisure Suit Larry series definitely featured adult humor, but despite the innuendo there still wasn’t much in the way of on-screen “action”– and there were certainly no exposed female body parts. Part of the charm was that you didn’t see much, and that protagonist Larry would usually strike out in hilarious fashion.
When the franchise returned in 2004, it was as if the developers were making a game based on what they thought the originals were like rather than how they actually were. The result was essentially American Pie: The Game, only without any of the cleverness (and far more exposed flesh), and none of the actual fun of the original games.
The girls in this game barely require any effort to get them out of their clothes, and just like real life, it makes it that much less interesting to do so.
5 Final Fight: Streetwise [2006, PlayStation 2]
It’s no big secret that the beat-em-up brawler genre hasn’t had the best track record at making the transition to 3D. The exceptions have been few and far between– Dynamite Cop, The Warriors, and Yakuza are a few rare highlights.
For the most part, the genre is just better in 2D.
Still, this hasn’t stopped game companies from trying to make 3D brawlers a thing, and a lot of classic franchises have been tarnished because of it. Capcom took its iconic Final Fight series and brought it to the third dimension by way of Streetwise, a late PS2 title that not only featured poor gameplay mechanics but a completely unnecessary M-rated overhaul that sucked all the charm out of the franchise and turned it into yet another generic “gritty” action game of that era.
Just play God Hand instead if you want a good 3D Capcom brawler.
4 Frogger: He’s Back! [1997, PlayStation]
A lot of the earliest video games were essentially perfect from the get-go; there really wasn’t much room to improve on the basic formulas of golden age arcade games, and developers smartly didn’t bother trying to make sequels to many late-70s and early-80s hits.
Everything changed when 3D came along.
Suddenly, game companies thought that their classic properties could find new life in three dimensions. Even Pong got a 3D makeover for PS1, and it actually wasn’t half-bad! Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Frogger: He’s Back!, which fails spectacularly in two ways: it has a 3D version of the original that is too clunky and ugly to be any fun, and it has a new adventure mode that is even worse.
There is a reason why retro compilations exist: So we can just replay the classic originals and not have to bother with junk like this.
3 Golden Axe: Beast Rider [2008, PlayStation 3]
Apparently, someone at Sega played Final Fight: Streetwise, loved it, and decided that Golden Axe “deserved” the same treatment. Thus, we got Golden Axe: Beast Rider, which followed Streetwise’s formula of taking a classic beat-em-up and turning into into a generic “mature” game for no good reason.
Forgoing the rest of Golden Axe’s pesky male characters, Beast Rider stars only Tyrus Flare, who takes on all manner of giant beasts while wearing very little. Naturally, the camera always seems to find the best view of Tyrus’ assests, which is just as well since the actual action at hand is bland, repetitive, buggy, and not remotely fun.
When a character’s backside is the only good thing about a game– which is definitely the case here– you’re better off just Googling pictures of it rather than bothering with the game itself.
2 C: The Contra Adventure [1998, PlayStation]
Technically, the previous PS1 Contra game, Legacy of War, might be considered the reboot and this its follow up. But C: The Contra Adventure seemingly set out to make things right after Legacy all but ruined the Contra name. It still had some of Legacy’s ill-advised 3D, but it also interspersed that with side-scrolling “classic levels.“Too bad those side-scrolling levels still took place within the game’s dreadful 3D engine, meaning it didn’t look and play all that much better.
Adventure also took out one of Contra’s most iconic features: multiplayer.
A Contra game without multiplayer is almost as pointless as Contra game without guns. Then again, asking a friend to play this with you is one surefire way to lose that friend.
Konami was so ashamed of this American-made Contra game that it never bothered to release it in Japan or Europe. Lucky them.
1 Bubsy 3D [1996, PlayStation]
If you think it’s hard to tell what is happening in the screenshot above, don’t think that it’s any easier while actually playing the game. In fact, it’s much, much harder.
Bubsy 3D is legendarily bad, and frequently makes– and often tops– lists of the worst games ever made. The developers would later say that when they were making the game, there wasn’t yet a model for how to properly make a 3D platformer– in other words, Mario 64 wasn’t out yet– so they were kind of just winging it.
That’s still no excuse for this absolutely unplayable travesty of a game.
One might argue that Bubsy wasn’t previously anything special to ruin, but keep in mind that there were some fairly unremarkable 2D games that came into their own in 3D– Gex, Duke Nukem, some would even say Rayman– so it wasn’t without precedent. Bubsy…not so much.
