Big Budget Disasters

Shenmue

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Estimated budget: $70m

Legendary Sega designer Yu Suzuki created classics like OutRun, Space Harrier and Virtua Fighter before turning his attention to the adventure genre in this spectacular epic. For years it stood as the most expensive video game ever made, and it was single-handedly responsible for selling at least seven of Sega's equally ill-fated Dreamcast consoles. Was it any good? Eh, depends on who you ask. Some heralded it as the greatest console RPG ever made. Others just couldn't dig its free-form storytelling and repetitive gameplay. It was originally intended to be a trilogy, but the series looks to have ground to a halt after its second episode. If you've ever wanted to drive a forklift round a Japanese town looking for sailors, give it a go.

The Getaway

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Estimated budget: City-sized

Pop quiz: It's 2000, and you want to make a free-roaming driving game. Do you: a) start by hammering together a plot, a quick generic cityscape and a few gangster-type characters, or b) attempt to model 70 square miles of one of the world's busiest and most chaotic cities in exhaustive detail? If you answered mostly As, well done: you have what it takes to be a top games developer. If you answered mostly Bs, well done: you are probably already a top games developer, and you worked on The Getaway. The team trimmed back their ambitions to a "mere" ten square miles of central London, and it eventually saw the light of day in 2002 - a year after Grand Theft Auto 3's release, by which time everything The Getaway did had already been done, and better. Its sequel fared even worse, and a planned PS3 version was canned just days ago.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

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Estimated budget: over $50m (inflation-adjusted)

No list of video game flops would be complete without the game that's widely credited with causing the great videogame crash of 1983. Atari paid somewhere around $25 million for the movie license, then had their programmers hammer out a game in a mere five weeks. The video games industry celebrated its release by disappearing into a recession that took years to cure, and Atari was broken up and sold just a year later. E.T. is still remembered as the worst game ever made. Still, if that hasn't put you off (perhaps you are a masochist or otherwise insane) head for the desert and start digging: untold millions of unsold E.T. cartridges were dumped in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill where they remain to this day. Best place for 'em.