The Other 'Silksongs'
A history of infamous games that just refused to come out
After 7 long years it finally happened: Team Cherry swung open the gates and set Silksong free, crashing digital store fronts and spiking heart rates across the globe. It only took 7 years for Hollow Knight fans to be driven crazy by desire; in the grand scheme of gaming history, this was a relatively short wait.
Development hell is a familiar spot for many games, in the fires of the ‘To Be Determined’ release date abyss, some projects become classics, others are utterly ruined and many more never see the light of day.
Here is a collection of games that took years and years to release.
Halo Infinite - 6 Years
In the grand scheme of things, Halo Infinite didn’t really take that long to release but compared to the rest of the series? We waited an eternity for this one.
Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3 all released in the 6 year s from 2001-2007; from 2009 to 2012, Halo actually became something of an annual release with Halo 3: ODST and Halo Wars both releasing in 2009, then Halo Reach in 2010, Combat Evolved Remastered in 2011 and Halo 4 in 2012.
Then, things got interesting.
Halo 5: Guardians launched in 2015 and its campaign and trend-chasing new gameplay features were so utterly lambasted that the series was effectively put on ice for 6 years while Microsoft and 343 remembered how to make a good Halo game again.
Halo Infinite finally released in late-2021 and got off to a good start but since Microsoft relies on contracted employees and most of those employees were from Russia… you can see where this all went wrong. From early 2022 onwards the game’s live-service multiplayer languished and awaited features were scrapped altogether.
It never recovered.
The Last Guardian - 9 Years
The Last Guardian, developed by Team Ico, started development as a PlayStation 3 title in 2007 but didn’t end up releasing until about halfway through the PS4’s life-cycle in 2016.
Using design philosophy from the team’s previous games: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus (with the large creature climbing from the latter included) The Last Guardian sees the player navigating environments and puzzles with the half-cat, half-bird, all horrifying Torico: a creature that looks like something I’d dump half an AK magazine into in Stalker.
The Last Guardian took so long to come out due to a mixture of ambition and technical limitation. Team Ico had grand plans for the game, plans which the ageing and infamously difficult to develop for PlayStation 3 could no longer accommodate as development dragged on.
Duke Nukem Forever - 14 Years
Duke Nukem Forever had to be on this list because in my mind, this one is the most infamous and I remember the day it launched and the whole shitstorm this game kicked up.
Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997 but didn’t release until 2011, skipping almost 2 entire console generations and until recently it held the record for the video game that took the longest time to develop. The best part is… it turned out to be complete crap.
Duke Nukem 3D on DOS (and with some great console ports) became a hit for a number of reasons: its environments were naturalistic, detailed, full of interactability and unlike Doom for example, the level design had lots of verticality; of course, Duke Nukem 3D’s biggest asset was Duke himself. Duke Nukem was a hyper-masculine, ass-kicking badass, doling out quips and harsh language as you dealt death and divine punishment to the alien menace.
Duke 3D also contained nudity at a time when it was rare to see that kind of thing outside of film, no doubt adding to the allure.
On the surface, Duke 3D was just another Doom clone with an unusually inflated ego but once you started playing, you’d realise it was a bit more cerebral than other shooters of its day with the path forward requiring a fair bit of exploration and key hunting to figure out.
Duke Nukem Forever was being developed at a time in gaming where technology was experiencing rapid advances, supposedly, engine changes and the allure of restarting development to utilise the latest tech caused the project to be in a state of constant birth and rebirth, there are even trailers out there for several different versions of this game that never came to be.
Duke Nukem Forever turned Duke into a colossal and callous bellend, the humour was overly crass and childish (you can literally pick up logs of shit and throw them in this game) and the shooting was as bland as can be.
14 Years and they still couldn’t cook up a decent shooter.
Resident Evil 2 Remake - 17 Years (Sort Of)
Another post, another Resident Evil game, it’s not my fault this series is so damn interesting!
RE2R wasn’t technically announced but it was widely rumoured for years and was actually planned all the way back in the early 2000’s and would have been quite similar to the Resident Evil 1 remake on Gamecube: fixed camera angles, tank controls and classic survival-horror but with map layout changes, gameplay twists and all the new graphics technology that console could offer.
Unfortunately, Capcom decided that the RE1 remake’s poor sales were a sign that survival-horror was going out of fashion… when they released it exclusively for the kid-friendly Gamecube.
Thankfully for us all, Resident Evil 7 happened.
For those who aren’t as deep into the franchise, it’s important to know that RE7 basically stopped the series from dying. After RE6 was received very poorly by fans and the franchise’s plot had essentially been wrapped up there, RE7’s rebooted story and return to survival-horror roots after 12 years was considered a bit of a gamble, of course, it turned out to be the best Resident Evil since 4 and brought in loads of money and a new generation of fans. Lucky us.
The success of RE 7 and the positive reception to a return to survival-horror gave Capcom the assurance they needed to remake RE2.
In 2015, Capcom announced in a now beloved video message that RE2R was entering full development, it released at last in 2019 and it was awesome.
Dwarf Fortress - 20 Years
Dwarf Fortress is the stuff of indie game legend and it’s so niche that I never feel it gets the recognition it deserves.
Dwarf Fortress was developed over a period of twenty years by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams; the game has been playable by the public since 2006 but didn’t see official release on Steam until 2022. The original version of the game with ASCII graphics is still available today, completely for free.
Dwarf Fortress is best described as a colony/management sim but it has existed since long before these sorts of games became a dime a dozen.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post.
I understand that this month it’s kind of been list after list but don’t worry, this isn’t a permanent change, I’ve just been having a breather from the long-form reviews since October is going to be full of them… but that announcement will reach your inbox on Wednesday.
As always I’d be happy to chat with you in the comments below, don’t forget to like and subscribe for me and if you’re feeling generous, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi page via the ‘Support Scanlines’ button.
I was surprised at how long it took for Tears of the Kingdom to come out, especially with how much they could reuse from Breath of the Wild. But the new powers in that game are technically super impressive and probably took a lot of work to get right
To me the real prize goes to Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, a game that began development when the likely insane solo developer quit/was fired from Wizardry 8, and decided to make a Wizardry style game so epic that it would humiliate Sir-Tech. Development took so long [almost exactly 20 years] and was so uncoordinated that Cleve seems to have completely forgotten how undocumented parts of his own code worked, it took over a year for him to piece together a manual after release [which wasn't complete or totally correct] and it is still a genuinely impressive, if extremely intimidating and brutal example of the genre. It's virtually impossible to get into if you're not an old-school CRPG nerd already, and it's pretty hard to put down if you are.