Was anyone here genuinely fooled by the Rise of the Robots hype?

[Stoppy2000]

Watched a video about Rise of the Robots earlier. I remember being blown away by the very early images of it and probably some footage of the fighter intros. As soon as the actual gameplay was shown it was clearly utter garbage though. Did any of you poor souls actually buy it? (Or worse - get it for your birthday/Xmas)

[Nathan Wind]

Was it Nostalgia Nerd’s video from the other day? None of my mates were fooled by it, no. But one of them had more money than sense (said a reformed Jaguar collector), and took a hit for us with the DOS version. We all expected it to be terrible and it certainly didn’t disappoint.

[Clipper]

I remember the hype at the time and the full page ads and the multi part features and I wasn't fooled at all. DIdn't buy a copy. I was a little older at the time and I think they did sell shit tons to the younger audience who hadn't yet grown the cynical calluses you need when videogaming is your hobby.

 

EDIT - those cynical calluses are how I avoided the Jaguar Nate  - ok I am actually jealous as I could've played the original Tempest2000 on release and (having now played that original version) that would have been worth any price at the time.

 

I also watched the nostalgia nerd video, it was a good one so here it is

 

 

 

Just to say that I link here as I like his videos and thinkt hey are mostly pretty great and well researched. If it turns out he is part of a cabal or evil or stealing material or or or then let me know and I'll remove it. It is exhausting keeping up with who is a good guy in the retro community.

[Qazimod]

I don't remember owning it - I definitely emulated it after the fact - but I feel like we played it? I know that there were times where someone in the family would know someone else who had a bunch of Mega Drive games and we would arrange to borrow carts for a while, so it might have been come from that kind of agreement. Also, we were a little late to that generation, so if we did play it, it would have been long after the launch and reviews.

 

I was a dumb kid who didn't know a lot about fighting games, so I never understood why I would always lose going up against Player 1's Cyborg, or that he had one busted move that could be used to beat anything in the game. 🤔

[Oh Danny Boy]

I think graphically on the PC it looked great, if very bland. The console ports wasn’t up for it at all and looked like trash and of course it played as bad as it looked. Embarrassingly as a young kid with a £15 in his pocket I went to the local Dixons to buy a new snes game being too young to know any better and seeing Rise of the Robots reduced to £15 I bought it. Had to squeeze whatever entertainment I could out of it. 

 

I watched this vid previously which I found interesting. 
 

 

[Stoppy2000]

It was indeed Nostalgia Nerds video that prompted this topic. I don't think I even played the game until about 10 years after its release. 

It must have conned enough people as it got a sequel. 

[SeanR]

Not only was I not fooled by it, but I also condemned Killer Instinct to the same shite pile ahead of release.

[Stoppy2000]

2 minutes ago, SeanR said:

Not only was I not fooled by it, but I also condemned Killer Instinct to the same shite pile ahead of release.

Killer Instinct was a million times better though. I actually got a fair few hours of fun out of the SNES version. 

[mash]

Nope, wasn't fooled at all. It always looked shit. Even in the screenshots. Used to have an Amiga owning friend however, who insisted it was better than Street Fighter 2. If I remember correct you could beat the game by holding fire and pushing the joystick in the down/left direction.

[Down by Law]

I was 9 when it came out and everyone at school knew of the game but we all knew its shit reception in magazines so nobody got it. Not even my mate Dave who asked for Ballz for christmas thinking it would be like Virtua Fighter. 

Wasn't some of the character rendering part of the intro of Bad Influence? That's what I always think of when ROTR is mentioned, and that industrial music that went over the top of it. 

[Oaf]

Mirage were based in Congleton. As a spotty teenager, I lived in Congleton too. My dad would regularly play darts with Mirage’s MD. “I could get you a job there if you like”. I politely declined.

[merrychan]

I had a CD32 at the time.

 

Of course I bought it

 

"Music by Brian May"!

[AK Bell]

I wouldn't blame anyone for buying it after all the coverage it got at the time.

 

Something smelled funny by it being Amiga/PC lead (so I saw even more positive promotion being an amiga owner) and I hated swapping disks for fighters so wasn't interested. 13 of them! 

 

Most amiga mags gave it a kicking except for CU Amiga, my favourite at the time. For shame! 

[Oaf]

I remember the magazines at the time saying the game had complex AI written by a judo black belt or something. AI that was defeated by jumping over your opponent as it couldn’t turn round.

[bplus]

Even 11 year old me thought it looked shite from the start, or maybe it's when I saw it on TV and realised it looked awful!

[phillv85]

A kid down the road from me got it and came over to tell me he had “the best game ever”. He must have gotten suckered into the hype, but I hadn’t heard of it. I was only 9 and didn’t have regular access to magazines. I went over and remember asking how it’s the best game ever. He said he didn’t know why it was, but all the magazines were saying it was. No idea what he read, but he had it on the Mega Drive so I assume it was mags covering Sega in some form that he’d seen it in. 
 

I do remember thinking it was fucking shite. I think a few days after he got it he also realised it was shite and was really disappointed. It’s all I really remember about the game from back in the day.

[Mr Do 71]

I was. I bought EDGE issue 1. 😉

[Stoppy2000]

4 minutes ago, Mr Do 71 said:

I was. I bought EDGE issue 1. 😉

It was issue 3 that went all in on it though...

[merrychan]

2 hours ago, Oaf said:

I remember the magazines at the time saying the game had complex AI written by a judo black belt or something. AI that was defeated by jumping over your opponent as it couldn’t turn round.

I'm sure there was a segment on Bad Influence where they demo'd the adaptive AI pre release and it just stood there...then did a kick

[bplus]

45 minutes ago, Stoppy2000 said:

It was issue 3 that went all in on it though...

What score did edge give it? 10?

[Stoppy2000]

3 hours ago, Oaf said:

I remember the magazines at the time saying the game had complex AI written by a judo black belt or something. AI that was defeated by jumping over your opponent as it couldn’t turn round.

You couldn't jump over the opponent on most versions I believe. That was another sign it was surely going to be a stinker. 

[Anne Summers]

When was it actually released? I remember it seemed like it was hype fuel for the new upcoming CD machines like the 3D0 and CD32 which no one actually bought in the end, rather than a serious proposition on the Amiga/SNESs that everyone actually owned. If I'd had one of those CD machines I might have been tempted, I guess, but there was no way I was interested in what was clearly a severely cut-down Amiga version. On 10 disks or whatever it was. 

I expect the only version which actually sold anything would have been PC CD? By the time I had a PC with a CD drive this was old hat. 

 

Edit: Just checked out the wikipedia page and it says that the lead developer was "Bitmap Brother" Sean Griffiths. Which I never knew before, and obviously Bitmaps have quite a good pedigree so I am surprised to find they were associated with this. However Sean Griffiths is not listed under "key people" on the actual Bitmap Brothers wikipedia page. So ... was he actually part of the Bitmps, i.e the legendary development team responsible for epoch-defining games like Speedball 2 and Chaos Engine?

[Unofficial Who]

I had a CD32 but I was also an avid reader of magazines. I think CD32 Gamer rated it highly but they also had a playable demo on the cover disc so I could see exactly how crap a game it was.

 

I spent my money on better CD32 games.

[bplus]

13 minutes ago, Unofficial Who said:

I had a CD32 but I was also an avid reader of magazines. I think CD32 Gamer rated it highly but they also had a playable demo on the cover disc so I could see exactly how crap a game it was.

 

I spent my money on better CD32 games.

They released a demo!?! What were they thinking!

[Unofficial Who]

21 minutes ago, bplus said:

They released a demo!?! What were they thinking!

I think they thought people would be wowed by the shinies. If I remember rightly there was also a demo of the excellent Ultimate Body Blows mounted on an earlier issue. 

[dumpster]

I was working in.an indie store at the time and that era (for us at least) was a real learning curve which , in hindsight, we should have handled differently.  It was this weird time between the Spectrum/C64/Amiga era and the Playstation/Saturn era.  It was that strange space in the middle with the new technology of CD-Rom built into consoles with no real processing power ; loads of storage space in an era when games came on a floppy disk.  It took the power of the Playstation to shift 3D worlds around properly.  The 3DO, CDi, JaguarCD, Mega CD, CD32, all seemed to be offering standard games with a load of FMV and CD music, rather than being something revolutionary. 

 

But back in those days we never really observed release dates.  We would order in games based on the new release list and bang them out onto the shelves and hope they sold.  I remember many new releases in that era where we would buy a handful of copies in and if they sold we would get more.  We didn't do launch days and preorders - a different time.  I don't remember us getting more than 10 of any game on day one until the PS1 era (later I'd go to game and see they had 175 copies of Actua Soccer for launch day and I released how massive the industry has become without us changing our processes). 

 

Anyway, someone (Brett Savage from Active Distribution I think) called up daily and we'd order over the phone.  He knew my boss well and I'd gone to London to meet him one time.  He called up and spoke to the boss and basically explained this was a whole new concept.  It would have a proper launch, a release date, people would be queueing at 9am to snap their copy up.  The music was by Brian May. This was a really big deal, make no bones about it.  I think he really believed that too.  So the boss ordered 20 of each format.  Of course, we didn't realise it was coming out on every fucking format under the sun (Gamegear, Gameboy, Atari etc... Brian May's music and all those shiny FMV robots would be perfectly suited) and the next day the biggest delivery we'd ever seen arrived with CDi, 3D0 etc - I mean, were there even 20 CDi owners in the UK? I think we made a big display of them and tried to make a fuss over it in the hope that people would buy a console then buy RotR to play on it.

 

However I do remember that even with all the hype, the impressive packaging and the fact that we had a nice display ( remember this is back in the days of just sticking stuff on the shelf and hoping someone would buy it) , the launch event didn't seem to happen. I remember someone pretending to have a phone call, "yes sir, we have a few Rise of the Robots in stock but they are selling so quickly I can't reserve them" in the hope someone in the store would overhear and snap one up for themselves.  I don't know about anywhere else but we didn't sell many at all, and then some came back the same afternoon for a refund. I think we ended up sending them all back to the supplier.  

 

Having said that, with hindsight it should have been obvious.  They were releasing a game on systems with one fire button, claiming it was a SF2 beater.  Nonsense.  But I think the Rise of the Robots experience scared my boss because they never bought in those quantities again, even when the industry moved on to Playstation.  We'd get 3 or 4 copies of a new release that we could have sold 100 of if we had known.  The shop closed down when Game opened and I went to work there.  If is knew then what I know now, the indie could have made a fortune.

 

Edit: seems my memory is wrong here as different formats released at different dates.  The gist is the same though; we rarely if ever bought more than 10 copies of a new title at once and we had shitloads of RotR, and we ended up sending them all back, with the few sales we made becoming returns as quickly as same day.

 

 

 

[Goemon]

I picked it up…although I wasn’t hyped for it.

 

I went to my local import indie shop with my friend most weeks as they had a crazy trade system where you could get new games for £7 (as long as you had a previous receipt to the value of the game).

 

That week Batman & Robin and Rise of the Robots had both come in on US import. After mooching around the shop I figured I would get Batman & Robin but on going to the counter I found out my friend had just got the last one.

 

Slightly annoyed I decided to give Rise of the Robots a try as the other ‘new game out’ and picked it up.

 

Needless to say I was back to the shop the very next week.

[Droo]

I got it for the game gear, and it was pish!  Might have been a birthday present. 
 

later, it was bargain bin stuff on the pc. Think it was £1/2 per disk copy and it spanned a lot of disks. 
 

I think i bought a couple of copies to format the disks!

[Droo]

Quick google confirms!

 

also, this resales at £100!!

[klargon]

I didn’t buy it, but I committed the 13 disks necessary to have it copied. It probably cost me some cash on top of that. I remember it being a big deal in the build up to release, but then it was immediately apparent that it was crap. So I suppose I fell for it, but didn’t have the money to buy a legitimate copy. Think I repurposed the disks pretty quickly. I think it taught a few of us how easy it was to pay for hype and that the graphics don’t make the game.