Anticipated follow-ups that didn't deliver — examined in context, without cruelty
Zelda II replaced the original's free-roaming top-down exploration with a side-scrolling action RPG structure that discarded most of what players had valued in its predecessor, producing a sequel that felt like a different series wearing the Zelda name.
Mega Man 6 arrived in 1993 after both Mega Man and the NES were commercially past their peaks, delivering a technically polished but creatively exhausted entry that offered the most recognisable formula in the series without meaningful innovation.
Sonic 3D Blast replaced the series' defining momentum-based speed gameplay with isometric perspective exploration, producing a game that felt antithetical to the franchise's identity at the moment Sega needed a strong Genesis title.
Castlevania 64 attempted to translate the series' gothic action into three dimensions the year after Symphony of the Night had redefined what Castlevania could be, producing a 3D game with a distinctive atmosphere but significant control and camera problems.
Mystic Quest was Square's deliberate attempt to produce a simplified Final Fantasy for Western players assumed to find JRPGs too complex, resulting in a game that insulted its intended audience's intelligence without producing a genuinely accessible RPG.
Donkey Kong 64 expanded the Donkey Kong Country series into 3D with five playable characters and thousands of collectible items, producing a game whose ambition became a lesson in how collectathon design can undermine its own enjoyment.
Bubsy 3D attempted to ride the 3D platformer wave of 1996 while bringing none of the design understanding that made Super Mario 64 functional, producing a game widely cited as one of the worst commercial releases of the PlayStation era.
Earthworm Jim 3D attempted to translate the series' anarchic visual comedy into three dimensions but sacrificed the tight controls and visual invention of the 2D games for a sluggish 3D platformer that failed to distinguish itself in a crowded genre.
Duke Nukem Forever spent fifteen years in development, became the defining symbol of development hell in gaming, and arrived in 2011 as a game that would have been underwhelming in 2001 — a decade's design decisions frozen in amber and delivered to an audience that had moved on.
The Atari 5200 SuperSystem was a technically capable successor to the 2600 that undermined its advantages with a non-centering analogue joystick, no backwards compatibility with the 2600's library, and a retail price that the 2600's continued popularity made hard to justify.
Street Fighter: The Movie used digitised actors from the 1994 film rather than the animated sprites of the Capcom series, producing a fighting game that combined the worst elements of both the film and the Mortal Kombat digitisation trend.
Star Fox Adventures rebranded Rare's Dinosaur Planet into a Star Fox game at Nintendo's request, producing an action-adventure that used the Star Fox characters to tell a story in which the franchise's defining space combat was reduced to a brief, mandatory distraction.
John Romero followed Doom and Quake with a game whose advertising promised to "make you his bitch" — then spent years failing to deliver it, producing one of the most catastrophic reputational collapses in gaming history.
Lara Croft's ambitious next-generation reinvention was cut to pieces and forced out unfinished by a publisher desperate for cash — it nearly killed the franchise and did kill Core Design's hold on it.
Given five and a half weeks to build a game that normally took six to nine months, Howard Scott Warshaw produced the title that became the symbol of the 1983 crash — and ended up buried in a New Mexico landfill.
Peter Molyneux promised an acorn you could knock from a tree and watch grow. There was no acorn. There was no tree. He apologised within weeks of release, and never escaped it.
The sequel to one of the greatest PC games ever made was built to run on an Xbox — so the levels shrank, the skill system vanished, and the ammunition became universal.
It shipped with an hour of film footage shot by the Wachowskis specifically for it, sold five million copies — and one EGM reviewer called it the most obviously unfinished game he had seen in twenty years.