In the article "The Games That Really Ruined The Atari 2600", I focused solely on Atari's main contributions to the American game market implosion of 1984 -- the 2600 Pac-Man that failed to live up to gamers' expectations as far as home ports of arcade games were concerned; the 2600 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game that tried to cash in on a popular 1982 Steven Spielberg movie and bombed big time; and the 2600 Swordquest series that, in addition to its failure of bringing a suitable Dungeons & Dragons-type successor series of games in the vein of Adventure, also held a contest that never reached its ultimate-playoff climax due to both the market implosion and the Tramiel takeover of Atari. Yet the curse of really bad games for game systems pretty much hangs over every game system ever produced. Some companies, including Atari, that brought out game systems had nothing but a steady stream of garbage games and rarely had any good ones, if ever some of them did. Other game systems have the occasional "black sheep" kind of game among games that were of better quality. Here in this article are just a few examples of games that had such shameful reputations among those who bought them:

1. Donkey Kong (Coleco/Intellivision) -- Prior to 1982, the Intellivision's really big software-selling focus was on sports games; having the best-looking, best-sounding, and overall best-playing versions of baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, and whatever kind of sport they could emulate for the hard-core sports-playing fan. Although Mattel didn't ignore the arcade-action category of games completely, for they had also released Astrosmash, Space Armada, Space Hawk, Star Strike, and Night Stalker, more people found that kind of gaming on the Atari 2600 and found their games to be more enjoyable than their Intellivision counterparts. Up until 1982, Mattel provided the bulk of Intellivision's software support, but over time would also accrue third-party developers such as Imagic, Activision, Coleco, and even their rival Atari that would give their neglected arcade-action game category a boost in titles. Coleco, in particular, had the boldest marketing strategy of supplying gameware for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision in addition to their newly-released ColecoVision, and one of their debut titles was a home rendition of Nintendo's classic arcade game of 1981, Donkey Kong, for all three systems.

While I personally champion the idea of making versions of a popular game available for multiple game systems, one can only wonder what happened with the Intellivision port of Donkey Kong that made people suspect that Coleco had deliberately sabotaged the programming of that version in order to make the ColecoVision version look better (the same criticism which was also aimed at the 2600 version). First of all, there are only two screens in this version -- the ramps and the rivets -- and both of them look like the ColecoVision version's done using those old honeycombed popsicle sticks that children could build little houses and stuff from. Mario, his girlfriend, and Donkey Kong look worse than they do on the 2600, almost to the point of being unrecognizable. The sound effects were a weak imitation of the arcade original's that also included music, and the game's controls were barely responsive enough to let Mario climb up and down these screens and jump over the barrels and fireballs that were hurled down at him by the crazy ape. Even having four skill levels and a one- or two-player option added to this version wasn't enough to exonerate this failure.

The really sad part about Coleco's Donkey Kong for the Intellivision was that it had tainted people's view of this third-party company, not just in the release of this game but also in the release of other coin-op games such as Carnival, Venture, Mousetrap, Ladybug, Zaxxon, and Donkey Kong Junior, whose translations ranged from passable to mediocre. Interestingly, Donkey Kong, Carnival, Venture, and Mousetrap were rendered inoperable on the Intellivision II that Mattel released in 1982, so if Coleco was considered guilty for allegedly sabotaging their non-ColecoVision game releases in order to make their own system's games look better, Mattel would share similar culpability in allegedly sabotaging Coleco's first release of games.

2. Back To The Future (LJN/NES) -- When Nintendo revived the American market and interest in videogames in the late 1980s, the company garnered enough help from third-party software developers through its "quality assurance" licensing system that would, in theory, prevent a repeat of the market implosion of the mid-1980s from the uncontrolled glut of games (most of them bad) that customers and sellers got swamped with. In practice, however, it didn't entirely stop bad games from coming out by companies whose goal was to make good profits rather than good games. LJN, a formerly independent toy company that became part of Acclaim, started out in the NES game business with games based on popular movies such as Jaws, Friday The 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Beetlejuice, and The Karate Kid, with varying degrees of quality. However, one particular specimen, an adaptation of Universal's 1985 sci-fi/comedy Back To The Future, repeated the same sin that E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial had committed on the Atari 2600 -- the sin of trying to market a game based on a great movie that doesn't have anything that could be adequately turned into a workable, let alone enjoyable, game experience.

The resulting game of Back To The Future had this as its plot: the player-character Marty McFly walked through the neighborhoods of Hill Valley in 1955 avoiding giant bees, workmen, bullies, and various other obstacles laid out in a manner similar to Xevious and other sundry scrolling-shooter games, all in his quest to reunite his future parents in 1955 and to get back to 1985. Marty is not only working against a level clock that gives him bonus points at the completion of the level, but also against a constantly fading picture of himself and his siblings, and the only way he can keep them from completely fading out is to pick up clocks that are strewn along the way. There are some locations along the way that provide different types of mini-games that Marty must complete in order to proceed further, such as throwing milkshakes at Biff Tannen and his goons at Lou's Cafe, blocking Loraine Baines' kisses at the high school, catching musical notes with Marty's guitar at the dance, and racing to the clock tower in Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine while dodging lightning bolts. If this wasn't bad enough on the scale of lameness and total incongruity with the movie, the game's difficulty level made this movie adaptation even less enjoyable, and the annoying music that played throughout the game didn't improve things that much.

NES Back To The Future II & III game screen

Being one that bought LJN's combined adaptation of the movie sequels, Back To The Future II & III, around 1990 for my birthday, I was treated to a game that made more sense as a movie adaptation (Marty did more time-traveling in Back To The Future Part II and Part III than he did in the original) and yet also came off as a really long and not-quite-entertaining imitation of the Super Mario Bros. games, even with creatures that looked like they were inspired from those games. I didn't even try to get through the Part II section of the game until I had a third-party game-cheating device called the Game Action Replay on my NES to let me save my position in the game, and Part III looks like it wasn't finished in time since it had mini-games like in the Part II section that had some really difficult challenges that made me suspect that this product had to go to market even after LJN originally scrapped the idea of releasing it as Back To The Future Part II in order to fit the Part III section in.

Probably the only good thing that happened was that in time Acclaim had snapped up LJN and started releasing games for the NES, Super NES, and Gameboy under both labels for a time until they decided to drop the LJN label for good. Then again, Acclaim began to acquire a nasty reputation for releasing really bad games, most of them being movie and comic book adaptations, the first of such being the NES version of the 1990 sci-fi movie Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger. At this writing, Acclaim has declared bankruptcy and has closed down its various worldwide offices after years of disappointing gamers who were constantly allured by the company's advertising promises and then let down by constant poor delivery.

3. Mortal Kombat (Acclaim/Super NES) -- Competing against Capcom's Street Fighter II in the arcades was Midway's own one-on-one fighting game which featured not only digitized actors playing the various fighting characters in the game (a technique used previously with Atari Games' Pit Fighter), but over-the-top blood spews when certain hits are used and gruesome finishing moves better known as "fatalities" that could be activated by entering in a controller code at the right time when the player beats his opponent in two rounds. The game's notoriety would also make Mortal Kombat a target for parent groups who decry the increasingly-graphic visuals in all forms of entertainment as a sign of American society's increasing downfall -- so much so that it had affected the release of the game for home use on the Super NES and Genesis systems.

Nintendo and Sega, the parent companies of the respectively mentioned game systems, were of two different mindsets concerning Acclaim releasing Mortal Kombat for their systems. Nintendo had such a way with game companies to not only keep their Super NES and Gameboy releases "family-friendly" and "kid-friendly", but also to keep them as non-offensive as possible, which included the alteration of a graphic still shot of a gravestone in Super Castlevania IV by removing a cross that adorned it. With Mortal Kombat, the game was graphically altered by not only replacing the blood spews with sweat, but also by altering some of the character's finishing moves (the decapitation that Johnny Cage would inflict upon his beaten opponent, for example, would be changed over into a super-powerful kick that went straight through his opponent's body -- gruesome enough, but rather tame in comparison). While the Super NES version admittedly looked better than its Genesis counterpart, Sega had won over prospective buyers by allowing Acclaim to keep the blood and finishing moves intact in its Genesis release -- yet in order to see this in all its gory...I mean, glory...the player had to enter in a controller code at a certain point in one of the game's introduction screens talking about "codes". The same thing was also done with the Game Gear version of Mortal Kombat, keeping the arcade-rich elements hidden and only accessible through a controller code.

In the end, Nintendo realized its blunder of forcing its Super NES Mortal Kombat to go without the popular arcade elements when they received angry letters not only from game fans but from parents who were seeing Nintendo setting itself up as censors doing the job that parents and free-minded individuals could have done on the consumer level. Ultimately, this and the diminished sales of the Super NES version (the Gameboy version is bad enough to not make many mention of it in this article) led Nintendo a year later to allow Acclaim to publish the arcade sequel Mortal Kombat II for the Super NES with all its gruesome elements intact, though it now came with a label that warned of such content being in the game. With the Entertainment Software Ratings Board system in place a year later, the issue of censoring out violent material became moot.