This isn’t exactly the sort of ad that inspires one to purchase said game. One of those things that made Sony seem like less of a threat in the games industry than they turned out to be.
Because nothing says “hey check out this awesome new system” like a video game based on a game show.
One of the reasons that Sony wasn’t seen as much of a threat in the video game sector when the PlayStation was being prepared was because most of their output on consoles and computers up to that point was rubbish. One such game was ESPN Baseball Tonight, which attempted to leverage the name of the biggest sports television network on a rather poor baseball sim.
Cliffhanger is another ghastly Sony Imagesoft published effort, this time based on the 1993 action movie starring Sylvester Stallone as a mountain climbing rescue ranger or something along those lines.
The film Last Action Hero is, in my opinion, an unfairly derided satire of the action movie genre. A game based on the concept could have been a lot more interesting than what we got, but the project was, to my understanding, thrown together on a ridiculously short schedule and ended up being godawful as a result. You can read a pretty good article about that here.
Sometimes I think it’s amazing that the people who managed Sony Imagesoft as it put out one godawful game after another were the very same people who fostered the success of the PlayStation. ESPN Baseball Tonight was one such “gem”.
Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse is a platformer where each level is based around a classic Mickey Mouse cartoon released between 1928 and 1990. The game was later updated and brought to the PlayStation as Mickey’s Wild Adventure.
