Hello, everyone, and welcome to Whatever Happened To…, where we take a look at gaming's biggest busts, disastrous disappointments, and all of it’s failures, flops, and other alliterations. Games that could’ve been something, only to turn into nothing. And today, we’ll be talking about a little game that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist for reasons we will be getting into on this episode of Whatever Happened To…, and that game, in question, is Too Human.



Too Human was a game created da Silicon Knights, a company founded da the amazing Denis Dyack, and da amazing, I mean he’s one of the worst people in the early years of the gaming industry, with absurd expectations and pisspoor management of his company, what’s not to like about one Denis Dyack, except for everything. Silicon Knights was mostly known, before the creation of Too Human, for their Legacy of Kain game, and game that I have never played, so I have absolutely no idea what any of that is. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about their OTHER game… 2 Heugh, Man!
So in the glorious anno of 1999, where it was the turn of the century, with all sorts of new advancements, and everyone thought that The Matrix was the hottest shit around, Denis Dyack announced at this years E3 that they would be working on Too Human, and would have it released on the Playstation. It would be a cybernetic future taking place in 2450 AD, but was eventually changed to a science fiction alternate reality that would be a robotic retelling of Norse mythology. Being a huge game, it would take place on four PS1 discs, più than Final fantasy VII’s three discs, just to hold all that content. Things were going smoothly, until Silicon Knights and Nintendo made a deal to produce games for their new console at the time, the Gamecube, in 2000. Because of this, any plans of working on Too Human for the Playstation were out the window. During this time, Silicon Knights worked on two games for the Gamecube, those two being Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, both pretty good games. But there was no other news of Too Human during this time. Nothing but total… silence… That is until five years later.
2005, a anno of social advancements, the birth of a new age of Musica and technology, and the stella, star Wars prequels still proving how garbage they are with the release of Episode III. Finally, after five years of total silence, word of Too Human resurfaced. After the partnership with Nintendo ended, Silicon Knights proclaimed that it would start to work on Too Human once again, and have the game released on the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s new console at the time, and would use the Unreal Engine da Epic Games. The game was planned to actually be a whole trilogy, and would release in the anno 2006. However, another two years would be needed before the game was able to be finished, and so, it continued to work, and required a total of over sixty million dollars to produce. As of the time I wrote this article, Too Human is the seventh most expensive game ever made, just barely being più expensive than both Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption. During the development of the game, Silicon Knights released three short films to support the lore of Too Human, the three films in order being named Excavation, Examination, and Exhibition. After the demo for Too Human was shown off at E3 2008 and then being put on the Xbox Live Marketplace, the demo had over 900,000 downloads, being the fastest downloaded demo at the time. It seems that everything was working out in Silicon Knights favor… So, Whatever Happened to Too Human?
August, 2008. What a goddamn mess of a anno that was. While America’s economy was going down the shitter, only animated films were really memorable at the time. And just to superiore, in alto off the garbage anno of the late two thousands, Too Human was released on August 19th of that year. And in the end, after almost ten years of development, Too Human was released and, like they say in Brooklyn, it was a hot pile of fucking garbage. An uninteresting, boring world to explore, with bland gameplay, busted controls, and also, glitches. Glitches as far as the eye could see. I’ve heard rumors that some people actually couldn’t even play the game because there was a glitch that would destroy the game in the middle portion of it. It must be true because the Wikipedia articolo for this game only has a barebones descrizione of the main focus of the plot rather than the plot itself. A game this buggy and just complessivamente, generale fucked was supposed to be Silicon Knight’s bottiglione, magnum opus? And they wanted più of this. Well, don’t worry, their bottiglione, magnum opus would turn out to be the downfall for the entire franchise and perhaps, Silicon Knights themselves. Remember when I detto Silicon Knights would be using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Well, in 2007, due to the poor production of the game, Silicon Knights sued Epic Games for breaching contract and mismanagement of the game, stating that they failed to make a good copy of the game. Because of this, Epic Games counter-sued and, in the anno 2012, the supposed end of the world, Epic Games won the lawsuit and were to receive $4.45 million dollars. Along with that, Silicon Knights were forced to recall and destroy any and all unsold copies of any of their games that used the Unreal Engine. One of those games being Too Human. So, in the end, because of Denis Dyack’s arrogance to make this game perfect, what it only did was kill an entire franchise, waste nine years of the companies time, and in the end, because of this lawsuit, Silicon Knights were forced into bankruptcy and were defunct in 2014. Their biggest game ever, only to bring their downfall. There’s something metta in there, I swear.