Awful Games That Became Cult Classics

There are bad video games, and then there are the truly awful, or utterly baffling, games. While some are just kind of dull and are quickly forgotten, you could argue that maybe they are the lucky ones. Who wants to be remembered for being bad? Well, some games have no choice. There is something about their strangeness or atrociousness that secures their place in history. Their infamy will live on, and on occasion their fame will surpass that of even good games.

However, some of these titles really hook into people. They get under their skin in one way or another. Suddenly, an affection, or at least a fascination, for them begins to form. The idea of a movie that is "so bad it's good" is a long standing tradition since before video games even got into people's homes. Video games are still lagging behind other elements of culture in terms of awful titles gaining cult status, but it does happen. Some truly bad games have indeed become cult classics. Here are ten of them.

Shaquille O'Neal was a great basketball player. People loved to watch him on the court. He was truly a dominant center, and he had some personality to match. However, Shaq-mania got a little too high in the '90s. He released a rap album. He starred in two terrible movies, Kazaam, where he played a rapping genie, and Steel. Then, there was Shaq Fu.

You know a game has a cult following when Know Your Meme has a page for it that literally uses the words "cult following." It would be one thing for Shaq to be the focal point of a basketball game, but Shaq Fu has basically nothing to do with basketball. It's a fighting game that begins with Shaq going to a dojo in Tokyo. It's like Mortal Kombat, but with Shaq, and also way worse than Mortal Kombat. In its 100th issue, Nintendo Power declared Shaq Fu the third-worst game of all time, stating it was "not possible to come up with a worse idea than this." When you combine a bad idea with an iconic celebrity, you get — guess what? — a cult following.

Finishing in second in that The Gamer list? That would be South Park. Now, over the years there have been a few video games based on the iconic Comedy Central cartoon. This was the first one, though, and it was released in 1998 when the show was just finding its footing. That makes the game feel like a cash in, and the "quality" of South Park seems to speak to that.

In GameSpot's review of the PlayStation version of the game (which they gave a 1.4 out of 10), they stated simply, "South Park is definitely one of those games that is bound to come up when you start thinking about the worst game you've ever played." It's cheap-looking and barely has anything to do with the show. It's a generic first-person shooter with the trappings of South Park.

However, it's still a South Park game, and that is a show with a deeply devoted fan base. Most Comedy Central shows last a couple seasons at most, while South Park has been around for decades at this point. Anything related to South Park is going to develop a cult following of some sort. This particular one is for one of the few misfires in the entire franchise.

In truth, Justin Smith, the man behind Enviro-Bear 2000, likely knows the game is bad. One look at the quality of the graphics makes that clear. Also, it's a game about a bear driving a car to collect fish and berries. It was also designed to be hard, at times ridiculously so. Kotaku called it "an exercise in absurd controls and fast-paced action," and that sums it up well.

EnviroBear 2000 is frantic and the rules, and physics, of the game change from level to level. Kotaku also said, "The changing conditions and the difficult control ensure that each round is mounting series of misfortunates that form a wonderful comedy of errors." Yes, that statement includes the word "errors," which feels apt, but also the word "wonderful." After all, even while saying all that, Kotaku was still recommending trying the game out. Not because it's well-made, but because it's fascinating and fun despite its insanity.

The Philips CD-i video game console was a straight up failure. When you look at their games, such as Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, it's not hard to tell why. People love Link and Zelda, but they can only love them ironically in their Philips versions. Since Nintendo had scrapped their plans for a CD-ROM gaming console, as Kotaku notes, they gave the rights to Mario and Zelda to Philips and let them make their games.

The people behind the Zelda games didn't know what they were doing and cut corners. Most regrettably, they outsourced their animated cutscenes to a Russian studio that created some truly atrocious animation. That said, those cutscenes are the reason these games are remembered to this day. They were terrible, and it's basically impossible to play them now, at least in their original version.

Since people love the world of Zelda so much, though, these games were destined to have a second life on the world of the internet. The animation has even entered the world of meme-dom, meaning that Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon will live on, even though the Philips CD-i did not.

Why would they make a video game out of the sitcom Home Improvement? The show was about Tim "The Toolman" Taylor having a TV show and dealing with family strife, while talking to his neighbor Wilson to get advice. None of this should have led to a video game, but yet it did. Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit made both the aforementioned Rolling Stone list, but also Mental Floss' list of bizarre video games that actually happened.

It turns out that Home Improvement didn't make for a good video game adaptation. It had nothing to do with the TV show. Instead, you used power tools to try and kill dinosaurs and mummies. It was all strange, and also confusing. The game did nothing to help with the confusion: while it included an instruction manual, all it said inside was "Real men don't need instructions." Now there's some of that classic machismo that Tim Allen made famous. That instruction manual, combined with the absurdity of a Home Improvement video game, has made sure Power Tool Pursuit has not been forgotten.

Although the side-scrolling mobile game phenomenon Flappy Bird arrived in May 2013, it wasn't until early 2014 that Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen's controversial title began to get attention. In fact, it was so popular in January 2014 that it topped the free app charts on the App Store. Unfortunately for Nguyen and the short-lived success of Flappy Bird, most of the attention surrounding the game was negative.

For one thing, the game garnered quite a few bad reviews. Said IGN in 2014, "Flappy Bird isn't a good video game. It's arguably not even a fun one." Criticisms ranged from its frustrating difficulty and pointlessness to claims of plagiarism from another developer. But that didn't stop over 18 million users from playing the game by February 2014. At its peak, Nguyen was making an average of $50,000 a day from in-game advertisements.

That's why what happened next is so shocking. Nguyen, claiming that Flappy Bird and the controversy surrounding it had "ruined his life," took the game off the App Store and Google Play in February 2014, which only helped boost the game's popularity. In mere days, listings for phones with pre-installed copies of Flappy Bird began to pop up on eBay, selling from $900 to $1500, proving that Flappy Bird mania was anything but over.

Eventually, Nguyen did re-release the game in August 2014 as Flappy Birds Family.

In 2006, Burger King launched a very unusual marketing campaign: a series of Xbox 360 games meant to promote the fast food chain restaurant. Developed by Blitz Games, the three titles — Pocketbike Racer, Big Bumpin', and Sneak King — were sold at $3.99 a copy with the purchase of any Burger King value meal, a steal if you valued price over quality.

While Pocketbike Racer and Big Bumpin' were largely forgettable entries in the Xbox 360s still young lineup (the BK games arrived about a year into the console's life in November 2006), it was Sneak King which demanded the attention of gamers, a title so bizarre that it had to be experienced to be believed. Sneak King stars the King, the restaurant's mascot, as he sneaks around delivering Burger King to unsuspecting people.

"It certainly isn't a deep game," said IGN in its tepid review. "Even so, the hilarity of watching the King creep around and then cap off a crazy dance by handing over some sort of food is worth it and you pretty much have to own it just so you can say that you do."

Although Sneak King is undoubtedly strange, it still helped Burger King sell over 3.2 million copies of its "advergames" in a six week period. Today, the game is treated as a "legendary" oddity and has even been featured in speedrun streams for charity.

You know when a game turns out to be exactly what's promised in the title? 2014's Goat Simulator is one of those games. A third-person "action" open-world game developed by Coffee Stain Studios, Goat Simulator allows you to experience the life of the beloved farm animal, as it prances around a little suburban town ... CAUSING DEATH AND DESTRUCTION.

For no rhyme or reason, the game stars the most dangerous goat known to man. Indeed, Goat Simulator is all about landing crazy stunts and blowing things up with the titular goat for points — and players LOVE it, despite negative reviews from sites like The Guardian: "The joke with Goat Simulator is that it's crap. And while this is a funny joke for ten minutes, it becomes a different thing when the game's on the front page of Steam for £7."

Tepid reviews didn't stop fans from buying Goat Simulator, though. The game had made more than $12 million for Coffee Stain by 2016. Not bad for a game that was basically released as a joke.

When the spy action RPG Alpha Protocol was announced in 2008, it seemed like a promising new IP for Obsidian Entertainment, the studio best known for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II — The Sith Lords and Fallout: New Vegas. But when the game dropped in 2010, it faired extremely poorly.

"If you want to save time, let's get this out in the open right now — Alpha Protocol isn't very good," said Destructoid. "In fact, it's absolutely dreadful and it should not have been released in the state it's in."

The game was criticized for its lackluster graphics, story, and gameplay — what does that even leave? — and low sales eventually killed any chances of a sequel. It seemed in the early 2010s that Alpha Protocol was born to be forgotten.

Recent years have been much kinder to Obsidian's spy game and Alpha Protocol has developed a bit of a cult following as the game has been reevaluated by outlets like Eurogamer (who called it the studio's "secret best RPG") and PC Gamer.

"It's funny that with time and distance it's been getting the recognition that it almost deserves," Matt MacLean, who served as lead systems designer on the game, told Eurogamer in 2017, "because it is a fun, quirky, bizarre game."

2004's Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines from short-lived developer Troika Games never really got a fair shake. This action RPG put you in the boots of a vampire joining a clan of bloodsuckers in 21st-Century Los Angeles. You then proceed to live the full life of a creature of the night, as you investigate the history behind an ancient relic that threatens to destroy the world of vampires.

While the game received decent reviews upon its release, getting special praise for the writing, it was criticized for its combat system and level design. Said Eurogamer: "The combat, as noted above, isn't that great ... What's more frustrating is that the further you progress into the game, the more you wander from what made the opening so intoxicating." The low sales were the nail in the coffin for this vampire game. Released the same day as Valve's Half-Life 2, Vampire never stood a chance and Troika closed soon after.

That's not stopped fans of the game from releasing patches that fix many of the original version's flaws, even over a decade after its release. Plus, modders are adding new content to the game all the time. Clearly, Vampire was doing something right all along: it's just that people didn't see it at first.