I’ve been cultivating my passion for gaming for about thirty years, and I vividly remember the moment I transitioned to a more conscious approach to gaming. It happened during the Christmas season of 1997 when I discovered and purchased my first specialized gaming magazine.
Since then, gaming articles, reviews, and reports have never ceased to satisfy my curiosity about the gaming industry, which has gone through and surpassed entire eras, evolving, changing its face, methods, and top players.
Even back in the days of print media, many reports and news articles raised expectations for upcoming releases of highly anticipated titles—whether because they were sequels to acclaimed games or because the development studio or some of its members had already made a name for themselves with remarkable previous projects. Occasionally, some of these titles fell victim to their own hype (a term that didn’t exist back then), generating tons of negative reviews and outraged articles about their poor performance.
I’d be lying if I said that some of these examples didn’t hold a peculiar fascination for me, driven by unique circumstances that allowed me, much to my delight, to enjoy certain titles that were despised by the specialized press due to their overall quality falling below expectations and being undermined by concrete issues.
The concept behind my “gaming fetish” is simpler than one might think and boils down to two fundamental ideas: challenge and potential.
I certainly admire the challenges that some development studios set for themselves—failing in many aspects but certainly not in their courage—especially when compared to today’s landscape, where studios working on AA and AAA titles play it safe, sometimes excessively so, in hopes of attracting the largest possible audience. Too often, this results in the opposite effect: pleasing no one.
These titles, released on the market clearly before their completion, crash onto gamers’ hard drives carrying immense untapped potential. Often, they are ahead of their time, featuring revolutionary ideas whose implementation at launch is rough and unpolished due to additional development time that was denied by publishers.
To better explain these two concepts, I’ll list four games that I played with great pleasure, despite their disastrous launches and scathing reviews.
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
The gaming world had just emerged from an era where Lara Croft had successfully broken the barrier between cinema, gaming, and pop culture. The general fatigue at the end of Tomb Raider: Chronicles inevitably led to a structural revolution in the franchise. Unfortunately, the game’s release coincided with the second (rather poor) film in the series. The rushed development and the ambition of the team resulted in a broken, incomplete game at launch—one that hinted at interesting mechanics without actually developing them properly. The stunning environments and a graphical overhaul that finally moved away from the old PS1 engine couldn’t hide the glaring gameplay flaws, starting with a control system that wouldn’t have passed even the worst QA team—suggesting that QA was practically nonexistent at Core Design.
And yet, the atmosphere of this title was phenomenal, the story intriguing, and it finally promised an unprecedented narrative continuity with past and future episodes! The ambition behind this game was off the charts, and the Tomb Raider formula had finally been modernized. A unique case in gaming history followed: despite the passionate work of fans who kept interest in the game alive over the years, Saber Interactive finally fixed the title by releasing a beautiful remastered version in 2025 (after 20+ years!), making it playable on modern platforms and refining the aspects that made it unplayable—especially the control system. Needless to say, I adore this little gaming “miracle.”
Duke Nukem Forever
Anticipated for 15 years, repeatedly announced with misleading trailers, and becoming the ultimate vaporware, this title only saw concrete development about a year before its release—confirmed just a few months prior by a new player, Gearbox, which had entered the troubled development chain. In hindsight, it was revealed that actual development only progressed for about six months after more than a decade of stagnation.
Gearbox, fresh off the success of Borderlands, voluntarily stepped into this development hell to restart the production process from scratch. The story behind this decision is fascinating: Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, had started his career at 3D Realms, the original developer and creator of the IP, and years later, he admitted that his decision to save Forever was largely sentimental. The game and Gearbox were harshly criticized by the press at the time.
Was it perfect? No. Was it up to modern standards? No, especially considering the rise of Call of Duty, Halo, and immersive sims like BioShock, which raised the bar for first-person shooters. Was it what we were promised? Yes and no at the same time. If the exact same game had been released in 2003, around the time of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, despite its evident inferiority, no one would have turned down a fun, chaotic session with the Duke between a serious resonance cascade and a hellish invasion from Mars. It would have been an 8.5/10 game. And that’s how I choose to see it—a great game, released too late, already feeling like retro gaming upon its 2011 release. None of these aspects ever stopped me from enjoying it fully.
Pro tip: playing it portably on Steam Deck is an infinitely satisfying experience for fans of the series!
Final Fantasy XV
A project that started with a different title and purpose. A development team replaced mid-production. A grand vision spanning multiple titles in the Fabula Nova Crystallis saga—miserably abandoned in favor of curious experiments reshaped by player feedback (see the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy). And yet, this game saw the light of day. A new development team changed its title and mechanics, retained some aspects of the established lore, but heavily reworked the story—hence the title change.
The structure became half open-world, an omnipresent trend at the time of its release, but the tight development schedule prevented the team from properly refining the game. As a result, it was only half successful in its intentions, with an open first half and a second half clearly suffering from cut content, making it linear and poorly managed.
At launch, the game functioned well, and the shift in combat system was well received, especially in its open-world implementation. But the story struggled due to missing cutscenes. The world was well-built in its premise but lacked cohesion due to rushed design choices. From a narrative standpoint, the game barely held together, yet its lore was undeniably fascinating. The potential was immense—the makings of a perfect Final Fantasy were all there.
After launch, the development team continued working on the game, releasing paid DLCs and free patches that finally did justice to some of its missing aspects. When these updates reached their final form, I decided to replay it, and the experience confirmed my initial belief: the game had significantly improved, even if it took a year.
Patience is a virtue!
Metal Gear Solid V
I have written an entire post about this game, which I love deeply. I invite you to read it here.
There are countless other titles I could apply the same reasoning to (Trespasser, No Man’s Sky, Prince of Persia 3D and many others).
Time passes, but my conviction only grows stronger: what fascinates me about the gaming industry isn’t guaranteed successes or flashy numbers—it’s risk, adventure, sweat, and the struggle of developers who believed in innovative projects, even if resulting in falling victim to their own wax wings.
