5 Hilarious Stories From The Early Days Of Video Games

The developers probably reacted with laughter ... later tinged with existential despair when it turned out that they were seriously the only options he was giving them. With a Force-powered hard pass, the team scrapped the storyline until the sequel, by which time Lucas had forgotten all about it.

LucasArtsOne of the developers waved a hand in his face and said, "These are not the names you want."

And then Lucas did the exact same thing during the development of the sadly never-released Star Wars: 1313. The original vision of the game, which the developers had spent years and millions of dollars building, starred a brand-new bounty hunter character. Right before they were about to unveil the game for the first time, however, Lucas decided that 1313 had to star Boba Fett, i.e. the most useless "badass" in the galaxy.

LucasfilmHis special move.

Everything had to be completely redesigned midway through the development cycle in order to accommodate this insane request. All in the midst of a hiring freeze. By the time Disney acquired Star Wars, shuttered LucasArts, and cancelled 1313, it was less like a murder and more of a mercy kill.

He didn't.

Stainless GamesIf you look carefully, you can see that it says "100 credits" over his head.

Eventually, the developers received a visit from the police after worried locals called in reports of a man being tortured in a dingy parking lot. After listening to their story and confirming that this was all consensual, the police took off and the developers were left to wonder if this was a sign from the Universe about how the world would react to their vision.

During the development of one quest, the makers wanted players to follow a linear path, without distractions, and so coded all the doors in that area to lock. Once the quest was over, the game would then unlock said doors and allow gamers to carry on killing and fucking their way across the world. The only problem was that the game had no idea what doors were locked before the quest ... so it unlocked every door, from doors that you could go through to doors that needed a key to open to (crucially) doors that weren't supposed to open because there was no building attached to them, only the game's hellish void of nothingness.

A high-quality render of one such scene.

In order to stop players from consigning themselves to the sunken place, one member of the development had to recode the mechanics of every door in the game. Individually. All so that they'd keep their original state after that one troublesome quest. It's kinda poetic, in a way. The developers thought they were designing a quest, and thanks to that one piece of code, they did just that for one poor bastard, who presumably didn't see sunlight or their family for a week.

If the fiasco surrounding Superman 64 is anything to go by, it's a hearty combination of all three. With the possible exception of that other game starring a superpowered alien, Superman 64 is regarded as the worst video game ever made. It's a buggy mess of fog, un-fun mechanics, bad dialogue, more fog, and offensively blocky graphics, even for 1999.

Titus InteractiveNot a Minecraft recreation, believe it or not.

The worst thing is that it wasn't supposed to be this way. According to the developers in an interview with Playboy, the troubles began pretty much as soon as they signed a contract with Warner Bros. to make the game. The only reason they got the job in the first place was apathy. No one else was even remotely interested in making a video game based on a Superman animated series that wasn't even out yet.

Unfortunately, days after signing the deal, the Warner team that negotiated with the developers was fired and replaced with a team straight from Hell. Apparently, their mission was to sabotage the project in order to be able to fire the developers and sell the rights to some other, bigger studio. Of the many, many spiteful things they did -- including refusing to answer questions or talk to the team -- they suggested switching from an action game to a Sims-style game starring Superman as the mayor of Metropolis, as seen in issue #never, that's an awful idea. Meanwhile, they'd object to any little thing on the basis that "Superman would never do that," forcing the devs to look up pages from the comics to prove that, for instance, Superman has gone underwater.

DC ComicsHis ex is a mermaid, so he has come underwater too.

After the developers spent significant resources making a destructible environment for Superman to smash with his fists, Warner announced that he couldn't destroy things or cause property damage, because they didn't want people thinking that Superman was a "bad person." They must have had a fit when they saw the trailers for Batman v. Superman.

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