I worked at a Gamestop, back in the Xbox v PS2 v Gamecube days.
Our manager one day comes back from one of their monthly meetings and he is just full of news about this game called Black. He's got a video, he wants to show us, he is way way excited about this and just needs us to see this.
What he shows us looks like this fucking amazing game. It's a little rough but that's cool, it's not quite through development yet, but holy shit look at that.
We are watching a short demo of what appears to be a legitimate blockbuster console FPS. Not only does this game look beautiful - and I mean beautiful, the best looking graphics i had seen for the Xbox - and the demo itself is heavily showcasing this incredible idea: ricochet physics in a highly destructible game world.
The demo even slowed down to make sure we'd catch it - this was a major selling point, you open fire and all hell breaks loose. Missed shots would strike cars or bits of scenery which would break apart and set off massive chain reactions - so you could solve problems by either shooting people or just blowing up the entire world around them and let them fall away. So, yeah, a choice of violence or flashier violence, but the violence looked incredibly fun.
It really just looked like a really amazingly fun game to play.
We were told to sell as many pre-orders of Black as we could manage and I threw myself into this. This game looked incredible and I felt my employers were correct - this game is going to sell like schoolyard heroin, you want to get in on the ground floor.
And I even bought a pre-order copy myself.
Then the game came out and it was terrible.
Like really tremendously terrible. It had nothing but the graphics and the explosions in common with the demo I watched. The richochet physics had been completely ditched, any semblance of open-endedness was gone, leaving behind a literal straight line, A to B with invisible walls or impassible foot-high obstacles keeping you firmly bolted on the 'correct' and only path. The smart enemies that ran for cover I saw in the demos were gone, instead they just stood there and shot at me, rarely moving unless to run directly at me.
Even the graphics, while still fantastic, looked stained.
Every single point that had sold the game for me was just flat-out gone, and those were the exact points I'd used to sell that game, pre-order, to fifty-seven people.
Fifty. Seven. People. Purchased that game because of me.
They paid money up front for a game they knew nothing about, save that the guy who was right about 'Oddword: Stranger's Wrath' and 'Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem' was telling them to buy it.
The shame will never go away.
