Video games as an artistic medium have certainly earned their keep among the likes of novels, film, and the various other methods of storytelling as an exceptional, striking experience, complete with many masterful works of art that make of its use of player control and variance. However, for every truly great game that pushes the medium forward, there are also a handful of notoriously awful games, with some of the very worst being downright shocking in their complete lack of quality.
From awful relics from periods of growth and evolution for the medium to botched games with no budget or direction, several of these games manage to be nearly unplayable in their disastrous executions. The only legacy that they have achieved for themselves is that of downright failure, being arduous to play and completely going against everything that makes video games such a striking and long-lasting medium.
10
‘Ride to Hell: Retribution’ (2013)
Following the continued success of games like Grand Theft Auto, there were a wide array of games that wanted to try their own hand at a vast open world for the player to explore. While Ride to Hell: Retribution originally had plans of being a vast, open world with grueling roads and biker gangs, the final product abandoned this idea to instead tell a basic, linear story of revenge. Not that an open world would have really done much to save Ride to Hell, as its shoddy execution completely undoes anything that the game was actually trying to achieve.
Plagued by lackluster visuals, bad shooting mechanics, and awful writing and voice acting, Ride to Hell’s only real enjoyment comes from a place of unintentional so-bad-it’s-good comedy. However, with so many disastrous glitches that hinder the player from actually progressing, as well as an array of tasteless, abrupt sex scenes (featuring fully clothed characters), any fun had while playing the game quickly goes away.
9
‘The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’ (2023)
Licensed video games based on pre-existing pop culture can vary massively in terms of quality, as while it can result in exceptionally great games like Insomnia’s Spider-Man or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, it can also result in absolute disasters like The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. While Gollum is far from the only licensed game to appear on this list, it’s a massive outlier in being the only game released within the past 10 years.
Gollum was an idea that seemed effective as a concept, but as release drew closer players came to realize that it’s hard to imagine actually having fun playing as the meek, shifty creature. It didn’t make things better that the actual execution proved to be laughably bad, with terrible visuals worse than the decades-old movies and terrible stealth mechanics. Glitches on release also made the game nearly unplayable, as a buggy mess that constantly crashed and made the entire experience extremely unstable.
8
‘Shaq Fu’ (1994)
While Shaquille O’Neal is still widely celebrated as a beloved celebrity nowadays, his level of dominating star power as an NBA all-star was near inescapable in the 90s. This resulted in him being in a wide array of obnoxious, poorly-made pop culture films, and while films like Steel and Kazaam will forever be infamous as some of the worst 90s movies, Shaq Fu equally stands as one of the worst video games of the 90s.
Especially in an era where fighting games were arguably at their peak with the recent releases of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, Shaq Fu is one of the most uncomfortable and sluggish fighting game experiences of all time. It reaches a point where difficulty doesn’t come from any real balancing, but from the pain of actually making sense of the controls and trying to play the game. This doesn’t even go into the chaos of the game itself, where Shaq has to fight a bunch of interdimensional warriors to save a child from an evil mummy.
7
‘Bad Rats’ (2009)
Bad Rats has an interesting legacy as one of the most infamously well-known and surprisingly successful terrible games of the digital era, finding massive popularity as a gag gift for people to send to each other on Steam. The combination of its overwhelming lack of quality, shocking offensive material and bloody violence, and only costing $2 and frequently going on sale, many people bore witness to the complete failures of Bad Rats.
The game fundamentally fails at the structural elements of its core gameplay, being a physics-based puzzle game where the physics often don’t work at all. Without any actually functioning puzzles, the only thing the game has to fall back on is its visuals and presentation, which ironically manage to be even worse than the non-functional game itself. Between the low-quality 3D visuals and the array of racist caricature rats, Bad Rats is little more than a cheap gag whose comedy wears off quickly.
6
‘Bubsy 3D’ (1996)
While the jump from 2D to 3D gaming may have been massively successful for iconic franchises like Mario and Zelda, this massive leap in technological scope and scale wasn’t always met with success, as Bubsy 3D took an already middling platformer franchise and made one of the absolute worst platformers of all time. It features a sluggish, unintuitive method of character and camera control that makes even basic movement an arduous task to overcome.
If it were one of the earliest attempts at platforming in 3D, then maybe the game would have more legs to stand on, but the game is completely blown out of the water by Super Mario 64, which released in North America two months before Bubsy 3D. This direct comparison proved to make the glaring issues of Bubsy 3D all the more apparent, with its tank controls and laughably bad visuals most notably being picked apart by players of the era.
For many players, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is the go-to example of one of the worst video games ever made, being so disastrous in its execution that it nearly killed the entire video game industry. It is often touted as one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history and is the defining cautionary tale of rushed development and studio interference. The failure of the game has proven to be so large-scale and infamous that it inspired its own documentary on the topic, going into how unsold copies of the game were buried in the desert to save space.
It’s so ironic that this notoriously terrible game is an adaptation of a notoriously amazing movie, but it’s this exact excitement and beloved nature of the original movie that made the failure of the game that much more catastrophic. The game was confusing in its execution and far from the traditional, simple fun games that made Atari successful in the first place. With only five weeks of development time and all of the expectations in the world placed on it, the game was destined for failure more than any other game in history.
4
‘Superman: The New Superman Adventures’ (1999)
More commonly known as Superman 64 by gamers, Superman: The New Superman Adventures is one of the most glaring, annoying to play games ever made, almost feeling like it was meticulously made to annoy and enrage the player in its failures. For all of the high-flying action and prowess that Superman is capable of doing in the comics and the animated series this adapts, the overwhelming amount of content in Superman 64 is simply flying through rings in a barren, lifeless city full of fog.
This would be bad enough as is, but with unresponsive controls and overwhelming glitches that make the game near-unplayable at times, Superman 64 becomes a grueling test of patience and the absolute worst licensed video game ever made. It’s a game whose failures are not only overwhelmingly apparent and constantly in the player’s face, but these issues frequently and consistently get in the way of playing the game and actually progressing, making the entire experience a repetitive nightmare.
3
‘Action 52’ (1992)
One of the most classic styles of bootleg and unlicensed video gaming to draw in players throughout 20th century gaming was that of the multicart, a cartridge containing the files for multiple games, oftentimes previously released games, or in the case of unlicensed carts, pirated games. While it’s rare for a multicart in itself to attain notoriety, Action 52 has grown infamous thanks to its absolute failure of function and quality in all 52 of its attempted video games.
At best, games were incredibly generic vertical shooters that were indistinguishable from one another, yet at its worst, many of Action 52’s games were completely unplayable and crashed within minutes of booting them up. Made worse is that even though none of these games were worth even a 52nd of the quality of a traditional NES game, the game cost a staggering $199 when it was released, which was overwhelmingly high in price compared to every other game of the era.
2
‘Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing’ (2003)
One would hope that, as video games as an art form had grown throughout the 20th century, the style of bare-bones games completely lacking in care or content would be a thing of the past in the 21st century. However, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing spits in the face of the inherent quality of racing video games in creating one of the cheapest, most non-existent video game experiences possible. Every aspect of the game screams being incomplete, from basic text graphics to a lack of any physics to some of the worst graphics possible.
Initial releases of the game didn’t even have any real racing, as the opponent truck driver didn’t even begin driving to race and left the player to their own devices to drive on the track as they pleased. With no penalty for going out of bounds and no collision detection, the only bit of fun to be had with the game is by abusing its lack of fundamental features. However, by the time players are done having fun reaching infinitely increasing speeds by going backwards, the finish line treats players with the hilariously inept message of “You’re winner”, a message that is emblematic of the entire game.
1
‘Custer’s Revenge’ (1982)
The go-to example of a terrible video game is usually something with bad graphics and gameplay that is actively unfun to play and interact with as a player. While Custer’s Revenge certainly shares this level of bad, uncompelling gameplay, the real factor that makes it the worst video game of all time is its overwhelming offensive and disgusting content, with the very concept of the game feeling vile to even talk about. This pornographic game sees the player controlling General Armstrong Custer in the nude, with the goal of the game being to dodge obstacles to rape a Native American woman tied to a post.
It’s a clear relic of this early, unfiltered era of video game history that Custer’s Revenge was even allowed to be made, but even for the 80s, this type of gross, offensive content was too much for critics and players of the era to sit through. Some may be quick to write off the game’s content due to it being in seemingly innocuous pixels, but this degrading piece of digital sickness doesn’t deserve to be played by anyone, as its existence helped entirely ban many X-rated video games from many regions across the U.S.
