10 Video Games That Were Sold On Lies

Forget Banshees, armoured tanks and Metal Gears; the hype train is one of the most unstoppable vehicles in gaming history. No matter how hard we try to tame our excitement for the next big releases, most of us wind up buying a ticket on the railroad of disappointment.

Fans get burned time after time, drawn in by dazzling CGI cinematics or supposed 'in-engine teasers’ that don’t truly represent a given studio’s finished product. Though the end fault might lie with us as petulant and undiscerning consumers, it begins with the publishers and marketers who sell their wares based on pure fabrication.

While there’s no excuse for raving tantrums about how a dishonest video game trailer ‘ruined your life’, there’s also no defence for a company that brazenly lies to your face whilst pocketing your cash.

E3 alone has a sordid history when it comes to misleading trailers and soundbites, and while such practices might succeed in securing initially high sales, the resulting backlash is often far more trouble than it’s worth.

Peter Molyneux deserves his own section on this list, but for the sake of brevity, it’s best to focus on his most easily digestible untruths. The Fable creator has a long and depressing history when it comes to telling porkies.

Godus - Molyneux’s recent return to the god-game genre – spectacularly failed to deliver on its most infamous promise, that the winner of Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? would appear in the game as an all-powerful deity. Even the original Fable, a game that was otherwise very well received, shall forever be synonymous with broken promises.

While hyping his new fantasy franchise, Peter went a little off book, and proclaimed that if players knocked an acorn from a tree, a new tree would grow there in its place. The feature never materialised in the game, but it did serve as the seed for all of Molyneux’s future fibs.

His most blatant lie came while promoting Fable: The Journey, a Kinect exclusive game about riding a horse and cart. Molyneux claimed on several occasions that the game wouldn’t be ‘on rails’, but players were unsurprised to find that The Journey was indeed, completely linear.