I think we are finally off the list because some of the press have played it.
When the gamestop clerk tried to get me to pre-order spore… that pissed me off. That is really disingenuous as there is no way a firm date has been set or a price. Who knows, in 2009, games might be free as finally all that information gets its wish granted.
Chet
What a stupid lazy article. Manhunt2 isn’t vaporware under any definition of the word.
It’s pretty stupid to put a game that is effectively done (Manhunt 2) with a game that likely never really existed (Halo DS). What a random and dumb article.
Spore definitely exists. I am not in the midst of an existential crisis.
The weird thing about Spore is that I don’t actually think we’ve ever had a real release date. People just assumed it was ‘soon’ because the GDC demo looked polished.
Somebody should start a game studio named “Vaporware”. Then just post a lot of photoshop-made screenshots and collect VC money, and never write a single line of code.
Grimoire?
Yeah, that’s the funny thing. Wright shows off this monster making tool and various parts of a game and everyone thinks that the design is basically finished.
But at that point, it was basically a tech demo of a design document. A lot of people saw the “cool creature” thing (which looked almost completely developed even if it wasn’t) and extrapolated from that to fill in the blanks for the rest of the game.
Troy
I think EA gave a solid impression is was supposed to be out this year before the announced moving of the release date window from one fiscal year to the next (which implies that an anticipated release was in the previous year to begin with).
One train of thought is that the Spore tech demo sold the public on a product which at the end (its release) won’t even begin to resemble what we saw. Hence, in a way, one can construe it to be vaporware.
I don’t mean to say I don’t think Spore exists, of course it does. But one can take vaporware to mean any number of things, depending on how harsh you want to be.
That being said, defining Halo DS as vaporware is just odd.
— Alan
An urban legend being reserved for after the Apocalypse when the world has to run all of its games on Vic-20s.
Troy
I first heard of Spore back when it was called Sim Universe in December of 2001. At almost 8 years, not many games have been development much longer. Duke Nukem Forever and Too Human are the only two that come to mind.
Yea, but unlike those games, EA wisely didn’t announce Spore until fairly recently.
That article seriously smacks of wanting to write something brief about Manhunt 2, and then digging up some other stuff to fill space with - even things that frankly don’t have anything to do with it, like Spore, and Halo DS. Ugh.
Not much else to write about at Gamedaily?
What a crappy article: vaporware actually has specific connotations, which Chris has apparently stretched like taffy to fill three pages. Only two games on that list deserve the title: Ghost and DNF. The other four are a recently-delayed finished game (Manhunt 2); a game which is still relatively early in its development cycle (Spore); a game which was at best a proof-of-concept demo and at worst a figment of someone’s imagination (Halo DS); and a PS1 game which was canceled ages ago (Thrill Kill).
I think ‘development’ is a strong word for the Sim Universe idea. The Sims Online was Will’s last game and that only came out four and a bit years ago, and hardly any people started work on Spore until a few years after that.
Back when I was with Interplay in the mid-90s, when we were creating lots of new ‘labels’ and the company was the OEM king - I think we supplied something like 40% of all titles to OEMs at the time, as we OEMed delisted titles and demos for many other companies, too - I proposed we start a label named Shovelware, since that was basically what we were doing; shoveling as many titles as possible onto a CD and selling it to the likes of Nvidia and Dell. The label’s motto was to be “If it’s new, it can’t be Shovelware!”
I was pretty sure that most gamers would get it. Amazingly, the company declined…
Ah yes, Interplay would have imploded a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for Interplay OEM.
Since we’re on the subject of vaporware, and Interplay was mentioned, I have two words, and they ain’t Vulcan Fury. That’s right: Mean Time.