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Cracked has beaten up on the game before, so I won't do too much of that here. (OK, just a bit: It was buggy and uninspired, had mediocre graphics, wasn't very fun and was awful.) But remembered just as much as its awfulness is how long it was delayed; from 1997 to 2000, Daikatana blew past at least three of its claimed release dates.

There were a few reasons for these increasing delays, many of them having to do with incompetence. But by far the biggest reason was the decision to switch game engines halfway through the development process. First a primer for the less nerdy: An engine is essentially the brains of a video game. It's the part that knows what should or shouldn't be on the screen, and can tell when something is about to hit something, and what that something should look like when it happens. The engine doesn't care much what's hitting what; that's left for the artists and game play designers to plug in later. Take an engine, plug "rocket" and "grayish/green space marine" and "shower of meat blobs" into it, and you've basically made a video game.

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The problem the guys who made Daikatana had was that the new engine they switched to was so wildly different from the old one that most of the game play and content they had created wouldn't work anymore. They had to start from scratch, creating all their rockets and meat blobs again. This ended up taking a year longer than they'd expected, and by the time they had caught up, they were apparently so tired of making video games that they just stopped. "Fuck it," I imagine a lot of people saying around the office those last couple months. "Fuck everything."

The Likelihood of This Happening Again: Low

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This hasn't seemed to be too much of a problem lately. Engines have become friendlier to work with since Daikatana came out and are a bit easier to upgrade between new versions. More importantly, project management in the video game industry has matured significantly since the '90s, when development teams and budgets often quickly outgrew their managers' ability to control them.