Loud Mouths

I'm not going to call this a "chicken and the egg" scenario because anyone paying attention knows the egg came first. But this particular question remains unanswered: are the loudest, most pretentious game developers such idiots because they cannot release games on time or of good quality, or are the games delayed and of poor quality because they never shut up? A quick look:

Lorne Lanning: Never shut up, got humiliated by Ed Fries on a Discovery TV special ("nobody wants to play as a fish"), Microsoft dropped publishing rights, his studio goes under. How did someone who created such an irrellevant series of games get the idea that anyone really cared what he had to say about anything?

American McGee: The fact that this guy gets his name on the front of a box is pretty much the largest insult imaginable to talented developers everywhere. Bad Day L.A. is going in the same bargain bin scrap heap as Scapland.

Crater face pedophile @ Tecmo: Makes a career of deriding Namco and AM2, yet his joke of a fighting game franchise wouldn't exist without Virtua Fighter 2 and the Model 2 arcade board. Can't face (haha can't face) direct competition in the arcade or on console platforms. Sales of DOA4 have bottomed out and leprosy will encompass the rest of his frame before he makes a fighting game as good as what AM2 and Namco produce.

Denis Dyack: I'll start by saying that unlike the previous three, his team actually has made a good game: Legacy of Kain - Blood Omen. Eternal Darkness was by no means a bad game, but was a total mismatch for the Gamecube audience. But then he somehow manages to ruin a game that was already great with Twin Snakes, and he somehow spends more time talking up "Too Human" rather than just working on the game. Now his team is ditching the Unreal 3 engine because it is a nice scapegoat for the fact that his game has been in development since the original PlayStation and will now not likely see release before 2008. He's not exactly the next name on the list as he can actually ship a product from time to time, but even 3DR was a good developer once...

George Broussard: Again, this guy has shipped a good game. In fact, he's shipped a few great games. The last of which came out a year before the frog paparazzi killed Princess Diania in a Paris car crash. Seriously. TEN YEARS. Remember when (the most aptly titled game ever) Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to come out at the same time as Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time? Remember when it was switched from the Quake 2 engine to Unreal engine and would be out in 1999? Remember when it was supposed to be out in 2001? Just think about this: Half-Life 2 was not even announced until four and half years after the release of the original. It was subsequently delayed, delayed, and delayed. It finally came out in November 2004. It won "Game of the Year" all over the place. It has sold millions of copies. The first expansion episode has already been released, with the second one hitting before the end of this year. The other terminally delayed PC games, Team Fortress 2, will be out with that expansion pack. For as badly as Valve bobbled the released date of Half-Life 2, it is still going to be at least three years and three expansion packs ahead of Duke Nukem Forever. They also managed to bring Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat to their new engine in the mean time, develop a new content delivery system, design a 3D engine themselves, and have another dormant franchise (SiN) released on their deliverly platform. Oh yeah, they've also got Portal coming out at the end of the year as well. This reminds me of the phrase "The Germans were so bad in WW2 that the Soviets were one of the good guys." Valve, one of the most perpetually delaying developers out there, is still light years ahead of 3D Realms (who, hilariously, have yet to ship a game that is actually 3D). Before this name alone turns into an endless essay, I'll defer your attention to the Duke Nukem Forever list. It is truly extraordinary how inept they are. Oh yeah, Prey had to be handed off to another developer completely in order to be finished - nay - redeveloped from the ground up, only to became a pale immitation of what it was supposed to be in the first place.

There are many more that could go on this list, but it illustrates the question well enough: why not just shut the hell up and start making some quality games? Or in 3DR's case, ship a game every decade.