5 Video Games That Were Sabotaged By Hardware Limits

Even the most ambitious video game project is confined to the technical limitations of its intended hardware. Developers can strive to push the boundaries of what's possible on a given console, but not every game will stick the landing within those confines. This extends to games that received perfectly functional releases on some consoles but suffered from lackluster ports on others.

In a lot of cases, the games themselves were fine, but technical issues with the platforms completely derailed the overall experience. The most heinous examples of consoles stopping a game from running smoothly have turned out to be unintentionally hilarious. Here are five video games that were sabotaged by hardware limits during their initial launch.

The 1992 sports comedy "White Men Can't Jump" received a movie tie-in game for the Atari Jaguar in 1995, more specifically for the console's CD-ROM game peripheral. The game revolves around 2v2 pickup basketball games, not unlike its popular contemporary "NBA Jam." Two players can go head-to-head or play cooperatively against a computer-controlled team, and there is also a four-player competitive mode. The main game has players enter a streetball tournament and use their winnings to pay off loan sharks that the characters are indebted to.

There were a lot of reasons why the Atari Jaguar CD was a complete disaster beyond "White Men Can't Jump," but this game really highlights its faults. Even running on the console's CD-ROM drive, the visuals look terrible and its overall performance is spotty at best. While a release on the PlayStation or Sega Saturn may not have fared much better, it likely couldn't have performed much worse. An odd late-stage Atari Jaguar title, "White Men Can't Jump" demonstrates how unreliable the console's CD-ROM drive was.

Before Nintendo lost Rare to Microsoft, the fan-favorite developer created the acclaimed Nintendo 64 first-person shooter "Perfect Dark." The spiritual successor to Rare's 1997 game "GoldenEye 007," the title is an original science fiction adventure set in the then-future of 2023. Protagonist Joanna Dark uncovers a conspiracy — the megacorporation DataDyne is in league with rogue NSA Director Trent Easton, along with the hostile extraterrestrial race known as the Skedar. This leads to Joanna defending the President of the United States and raiding Area 51 to team up with the Skedar's opposing race, the Maians, to save the Earth.

Released late in the Nintendo 64's lifecycle, "Perfect Dark" required the Expansion Pak peripheral to experience in full. However, unlike "Donkey Kong 64" or "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask," it's possible to play "Perfect Dark" without the peripheral. This provides a laughably stripped down version of the game. There's a sole multiplayer stage with minimalistic customization options and no single-player campaign whatsoever. "Perfect Dark" is one of the best games on the N64 but trying to play it without an Expansion Pak highlights how intensively it ran on the console.

One of Bethesda Softworks' enduring franchises is its fantasy series "The Elder Scrolls," including the beloved 2011 installment "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." Taking place a couple of centuries after the events of its predecessor (2006's "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion") in the "Elder Scrolls" timeline, "Skyrim" plunges players in the titular mountainous region while it's gripped by a civil war. The player character is a Dragonborn, an individual capable of absorbing the souls of slain dragons to enhance their own abilities. Using this power, the protagonist navigates the fantasy realm and tries to restore peace while battling the evil dragon Alduin.

"Skyrim" is a fantastic entry in the overall "Elder Scrolls" franchise and has been remastered and ported to virtually every major modern gaming platform. It's widely considered to be an absolute classic these days, but people tend to forget that, at launch, the PlayStation 3 version of the game left a lot to be desired compared to its Xbox 360 and PC counterparts. When save files exceeded a certain size, the game's performance on the PS3 suffered considerably, impacting the frame rate and causing severe lag. Patches eventually remedied these issues but left a hauntingly bad first impression for "Skyrim" on the console.

True to its title, "Mortal Kombat 1" reflected a new beginning for the venerable fighting game franchise when it launched in 2023. The game sees the timeline restarted by Liu Kang, now a deity after the events of "Mortal Kombat 11," reimagining its iconic characters. However, after this reality's Shang Tsung is empowered by a mysterious benefactor, the timeline grows out of Liu Kang's control. This escalates into a bloody conflict that spans multiple realities as they all come colliding at once.

From a technical standpoint, "Mortal Kombat 1" is one of the most visually impressive fighting games ever made, with lush environments and detailed character designs. However, this is only true of the versions of the game on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and higher-end PCs. A drastically inferior version of the game was ported to the Nintendo Switch and left fans furious with its laughably bad character models. The Switch version of "Mortal Kombat 1" highlighted how far the technical performance between the Switch and newer consoles had become in a way the developers hadn't hoped for.

To be clear, "Cyberpunk 2077" has transformed enormously since its disastrous launch, but let's talk about the game's rough early days. A sprawling, neon-lit adventure from CD Projekt, the game takes place in the futuristic dystopian metropolis of Night City. After a botched heist on the sinister corporation Arasaka, the player character, named V, ends up with an experimental biochip containing the digital persona of dead revolutionary Johnny Silverhand (the voice and likeness of Keanu Reeves) in their head. The idea behind the chip is that people can be resurrected by overriding the consciousness of host bodies. V tries to find a way to remove the chip and stop Johnny from taking over their body all while trying to make it to the top in Night City as a mercenary.

The sheer ambition of Night City and presentation of "Cyberpunk 2077" meant only top-of-line machines could play it coherently at launch. Versions of the game released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were reviewed significantly worse than their counterparts on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The amount of bugs in the PS4 launch version led to "Cyberpunk 2077" being booted from the PlayStation Store until patches could resolve its issues. The initial backlash was so bad that it was discounted immediately after its launch, though the post-release fixes improved its reputation significantly.