Eutechnyx's Ride to Hell: Retribution makes Digital Homicide's notoriously bad titles seem palatable. Released in 2013 by Deep Silver and considered one of the worst games ever made, it's a half-finished Road Rash-meets-Mafia II ripoff, and left a blight worse than Sacred 3 on the Saints' Row publisher's otherwise good name.

With that in mind, we turn to this heartbreaking interview with Martin Filipp, developer relations manager for Ride to Hell, the canceled game whose assets were later pillaged to make Ride to Hell: Retribution. He describes something pretty cool: an open-world biker title with a 1960s vibe that follows a jaded Vietnam veteran who joins a motorcycle gang in search of a sense of belonging. It's a shame we never got to play that game.

Ride to Hell: Retribution wasn't just a nightmare for its own designers; it had the potential to threaten the resolve of designers who didn't even work on it. In 2013, Pixel Dash Studios and EQ Games started work on Road Redemption, a modern take on the motorcycle combat of the arcade classic Road Rash. As its pivotal Early Access run got rolling, Road Redemption creator Ian Fisch grew concerned that his game might be confused with that other Road Rash-inspired game.

In an August 2013 dev blog post, which is worth reading in full, Fisch hazards a guess as to how Eutechnyx's game went so wrong. In his estimation, it boiled down to "poor planning, poor scheduling and unfocused design." That said, he wouldn't blame the worker bees for its failings. In the gaming industry, individual designers simply don't have much control over big projects. Fisch goes on to say that "[most] people in the game industry have worked on bad games. It's just a fact of life [for designers]," further compounding Michael Todd's dilemma of the developer's blues.

Whatever went wrong during its development, the released version of Ride to Hell: Retribution was such a disaster that it's been scrubbed from Eutechnyx's official site. Making it couldn't have been much fun for anyone involved.