The Longest Game Delay Countdown

I’m writing this article because the unthinkable has happened. The most notoriously delayed game in software development history has been delayed again. If you know your games at all, I don’t need to say any more. For those who don’t, you’ll know it when you see it.

The following list attempts to run down the list of the top 5 longest announcement to release date waits for highly anticipated titles. One difficulty in compiling the list has been defining exactly what passes for an ‘announcement’, so yes, the list won’t be 100% accurate. I’ve also excluded titles like Starcraft Ghost which currently lack any significant ‘proof of life’.

5. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : 1952 days

Russian developers have a reputation for ambitious projects as full of glitches as they are saturated with incredible raw vision. Originally announced with the subtitle ‘Oblivion Lost’, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is pretty much the archetype of that assumption. Epic in size and visually resplendent, even having slipped four years from its first initial release date it emerged virtually unplayable in 2007. Even now, amateurs are modding the game to enhance it to a playable state.

4. Mother 3 (Earthbound 64): 3244 days

Flashback to the late 90s: Nintendo has found itself in a peculiar situation: having always been the king of the console RPG, it has watched aghast as its biggest partners have taken their biggest franchises to Sony’s Playstation and left the N64 completely barren. And to add insult to injury, the entire world suddenly cares about console Role Playing Games. Nintendo needs a Final Fantasy 7 killer and it picks one of its most important SNES era RPG franchises to do the job. ‘Mother’, known as ‘Earthbound’ in North America.

But to compete with the full motion video world of Final Fantasy 7 new hardware was needed. And when the N64’s CD addon, the N64DD inevitably failed Mother 3 had to be scaled down for the system’s 256 megabit cartridges. The 3D inexperienced development team failed to come up with the goods and the game was said to be cancelled. However, six years after cancellation, Mother 3 was released in Japan on the Gameboy Advance, built from the ground up as a 2D game, but with many of the scenarios and characters of the N64 version intact.

3. Team Fortress 2: 3418 days

Valve has a long history of hiring talent from early education and amateur groups, essentially building its entire Portal franchise off the back of a school project and bringing Counter Strike (arguably the most important user created content in the history of the internet) in house. But it all began with the hiring of Robin Walker and John Cook in 1998. Contracted to make a version of their Quake mod for Half-Life, they soon started work on Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms.

Then Valve went quiet, developed their business and online infrastructure and not much else. Half-Life 2 came and Team Fortress 2 remained silent: it didn’t re-emerge until 2006, and boy did it look different.

But best of all, Team Fortress 2 is a game that hasn’t really ever stopped being developed. The version of the game released in late 2007 seems almost minimalistic compared to the version people play today.

2. Prey: 4165 days
Four years ago Prey would have surprisingly been top of this list, despite the following 3D Realms title being gaming’s synonym for ‘delayed indefinitely’. Prey was actually first announced in 1995, its game design built around the use of portals and pushing the company’s in-house technology forward by leaps and bounds. But development continued mostly in house, the outside world barely hearing about it. Prey was released in mid 2006, just in time for Valve to upstage it by merely announcing Portal.

1. Duke Nukem Forever: 5156 days

The new release date may only be a month or so later, but it all adds up. Duke Nukem Forever has been delayed so many times that mentioning even the irony of its title has gone far beyond tediousness. The fantastic http://duke.a-13.net/ summarises the leaps and bounds society has made in its absence and those things that have simply taken less time throughout history. June 10^th Internationally. June 14^th in the United States. Or so they say.

Special Mentions: Diablo III and Half-Life 2 Episode Three

Technically, Diablo III wasn’t ‘announced’ until the Blizzard Paris event in June 2008 and despite numerous references to a Half-Life 2 Episodes ‘Trilogy’ and two pieces of concept art showing a scene from the upcoming game, Half-Life 2 Episode Three has never been seen in public. But come on. We know the later is out there somewhere and Blizzard’s game has been a certainty for about five years longer than it has been official.

Both games don’t rank on the list, but we know they ought to and there’s a worryingly good chance they will do in a couple of years time. Neither has a release date, both are known to be at least third on their production lines. Of course, when both come out they’ll make sliced bread look like the pretentious non-event it truly is, but that only makes the wait even more excruciating.

Steph Wood is a copywriter and gaming blogger writing on behalf of Vanquis who provide credit cards for bad credit score.

The Longest Game Delay Countdown is a post from: Dragon Blogger Technology and Entertainment Copyright 2009 Justin Germino. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
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