For many of the absolute classics and major design works we’ve seen in the fighting game community over the past 30 years, there are as many (if not more) stinks that have been forgotten in the annals of history.
Matt McCamless He’s back to continue his quest through the bottom of the never-ending barrel to find the worst fighting game ever created, and his latest journey leads him to the desolate shores of the ominous Gods of War.
In an effort to capitalize on the massive success of Mortal Kombat, Midway would seek to create another fighting game that would print them a lot of money, which certainly didn’t work out as well as they had hoped.
Matt manages to talk to George Petro, co-leader of the War God project, who reveals that the team was working on a 3D tank game until they saw Sega’s Virtua Fighter and decided to try their hand at the new subgenre using the same 3D technology as Cruisi’n USA ( And not the new arcade board that would later power Mortal Kombat 4).
The development team consisted mostly of younger employees with no fighting game experience, and motion capture testing to try to turn real actors into 3D models required a lot of work and trial and error.
Although War Gods had a new look when it was in development, the game’s delay until 1996 meant that it faced stiffer competition in terms of 3D graphics and animation since War Gods looked pretty…well, tough.
“If we could turn back the clock, as soon as we saw Tekken 2, we should have scrapped the grid idea and redesigned everything with articulated skeletons,” Petro said. “This is where the fighting world was headed and we were way behind the times. Well, live and learn.”
As for what became of the final product, and if it’s actually worse than the current standout of “The Worst Fighting Game,” Expect No Mercy, we recommend checking out Matt McMuscles’ latest video below.
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