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.

Video Games + American Cartoons = Bad Adoptations

In early 1990s America, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was at the height of its popularity, the Super NES and Sega Genesis were right around the corner, and arcades have experienced a revolution led by Capcom's Street Fighter II and Midway's Mortal Kombat. The rapidly growing popularity of video games made the game companies want to cash in by expanding their franchises into other products such as toys, comic books, novels, movies, and animated shows. In regard to animated shows, Japanese anime adaptations of popular video games made in Japan such as Capcom's Street Fighter and Darkstalkers have come to be regarded as the most faithful to the source material. On the other hand, American cartoon adaptations of popular video games have been reviled by fans as not only unfaithful to the source material but insulting to everything they cherish about their favorite games by using cheap (read poor quality) animations, degrading popular game characters in the day as what the contracted American studios deemed "tasteful" and "acceptable in the eyes of parents," and writing in cheap morality lessons/public service announcements that were in all likelihood ineffective. At their best, they were inferior knockoffs of the more well-known and better cartoons that were aired at the time. At their worst, they were canceled after only a few months, or even less than a week, of the first season.