It’s a shame when a new game is trying something original and exciting, but then doesn’t sell well and never gets a second chance. Here are a few examples of games with unique ideas, but never got the chance to refine them.
At E3 1999 Silicon Knights took to the stage and revealed a brand new N64 game, this was Eternal Darkness. Despite being heavily delayed until after the Gamecube launch, there was very little coverage of its development until the release date of 23 June 2002 for North America drew nearer. Several publications gave rave reviews and said the series had a bright future.
Unfortunately, this was not the case as Eternal Darkness was a bomb sales wise only shifting 90,000 copies in Europe and 17,000 in Japan. The only high point was the North American market where it sold a respectable 340,000 copies.
With its spiritual successor Shadow of the Eternals having an indefinite hiatus the future looks bleak for a sequel, but who knows, maybe we will get a follow up to this cult classic.
Back in 1997 Rare’s Blast Corps team had finished that project and turned to their next challenge. Inspired by several pieces of sci-fi media they started work on what would be known as Jet Force Gemini.
Released in 1999 Jet Force Gemini received positive reviews. Rare at the time were one of the members of the dream team and were clearly pushing the N64 as far as it could go. The game looked amazing. (Although this had a negative effect on the framerate). With its run and gun style gameplay, it is easy to see how it would go on to inspire later games like the Ratchet and Clank series.
The game performed really well with worldwide sells of 1.16 million copies. However, with Rare in the dark underbelly of Microsoft I really doubt we will ever see a successor on a Nintendo platform.
I really hate it when a sequel is teased at the end of a game but nothing ever happens. This was the case for Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans, developed by Monolith Soft and published by Namco Bandai and released in 2009.
Being a Monolith Soft RPG the game is really well made with high quality graphics and audio. This is the best use of the DBZ license since The Legacy of Goku games. However, it is easy to see why this series never continued, sales for North America and Europe is just over 12,000 copies combined while Japan pushed over 21,000 units. I am still hopeful for Monolith to create a follow up, but it is really unlikely with these sales.
These are my personal picks, which sequels would you like to see or which games do you wish never had sequels?
