Rise of the Robots

Described in The Bottom Line as "The nearest the software industry has yet come to robbing an elderly deaf woman in a wheelchair whose son has just died in a car accident returning from the funeral of his father and sister killed when their ancestral home burned to the ground and then severely beating her. With the diseased family pet" and summarised in the review as "farcially tedious", Rise of the Robots occupies a special place in the vault of Bad Things.

Going solely by marks, Rise of the Robots' 5% doesn't damn it as the worst game of all time (several others have received lower scores, most notably International Rugby Challenge's 2% and Kick Off '96's 1%, awarded, fittingly, in the final issue) but, significantly, these other, technically more terrible games didn't try to trick you into buying them beyond the usual round of glossy advertisements.

Put simply, Rise of the Robots was the subject of one of the largest ever marketing campaigns for a computer game. Readers of any games mag you could name had almost a year of interviews, diaries, makings-of, background features and lavishly-illustrated previews thundered at them before the game appeared. (Time Warner seemed peculiarly reticent to include AP in all this excitement, so we confined our coverage to a preview in AP32.) There were TV and cinema ads, billboard ads, mainstream-press ads and ads in Viz. There was even a novel.

And, of course, everyone expected it to be bad. Echoing the long trailer=crap movie rule, computer game hype beyond a certain density becomes inversely proportional to computer game quality. For example, World Cup Carnival was bad, as were Frontier and Mortal Kombat 2. But at least you could understand why: the original version of World Cup Carnival was hopelessly late, so US Gold bought a two-year-old football game and changed the title; Frontier was spectacularly bugged and unworkably tied up with trying to be "realistic"; Mortal Kombat 2 was an excellent conversion of a deliberately shallow, over-as-quick-as-possible coin-op. Rise of the Robots frankly defied explanation.

It also got off remarkably lightly. Not every reviewer seemed to notice you could win every time by using the flying kick, over half-a-million people entirely failed not to buy it, and the inevitable Rise of the Robots 2 had almost a year of interviews, diaries, makings-of, background features and lavishly-illustrated previews devoted to it by computer games magazines, all of which started their coverage with the words "Rise of the Robots was something of a disappointment, but Mirage say they've learned their lesson."

(Ironically, when Rise of the Robots 2 finally appeared, it was a competent, minorly enjoyable beat-'em-up with robots in. It sold about five copies.)

So little fuss was made, in fact, that Stuart, by now at Sensible Software and busily designing Cannon Fodder 2, composed an open letter to the software industry in general, sending it to, among others, trade magazines CTW and Edge, and every Amiga magazine.*

It has, until today, remained unpublished.