When A Video Game Reboot Goes Wrong

Ever since Pong arrived on the scene around four decades ago, there have been titles that stood out like a few golden needles in a massive stack of bland hay. This was possible by possessing unique, and sometimes original, features for such games, whether they involve gameplay, art style, or story. But as the years went by, such unique titles have been set aside as the video game industry moved on in technology and popularity; they are still remembered fondly by long-time gamers, sold in specialty stores, and sometimes re-released on anthology disks and in digital stores. Yet companies, often publishers, still search for ways to continue making money off of those titles. One fairly common way of doing so is by rebooting those titles. Reboots of this sort tend to be done by making considerable changes to gameplay mechanics, level design, graphics, art style, and storytelling while maintaining the core concepts of what made the original games special in the first place, reinvigorating them for both old fans and newcomers. While there have been success stories, there have also been many cases in which video game reboots went wrong, tarnishing the reputation of the franchises and, in the worst cases, destroyed the companies responsible for making them. As a more detailed description of this scenario, the following list contains of some the most infamous reboots in video game history, a good number of which have been mentioned in most top five or ten lists of the worst video game reboots around the Internet. It should also be noted that this list is not set in any particular order.

When will there actually be good video game movies?

Ever since Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon received Hollywood film adaptations that met with financial flops and critical scorn, video game movies have a reputation of being inferior to the video game source materials on which they are based with very few to no exceptions. Fans who are most familiar with that sort of reputation are sure to remember how the first Mortal Kombat movie tipped the tides of video games movies a little bit, how the Resident Evil films managed to get away with profits in spite of numerous negative reviews among critics and fans, and how Uwe Boll's filmography of House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and Bloodrayne left the foulest of tastes in the mouths of audiences who have seen them. Such movies were so bad that numerous top 10 lists have been made to determine the worst of the worst, like what WatchMojo and GameTrailers did for their lists. So why do movies based on video games tend to suck?