10 INSANE Video Game Risks (That Totally Paid Off)

Sometimes, it feels as though the creative industries take place in a different universe to most other career choices. Whilst it sounds like a wonderful thing to produce art for a living, there are countless stories of the difficulties and doubt from those who craft video games.

After all, games are largely produced to a deadline and studios need to make a return on their investment.

As such, there are always tough decisions to make along the way, and potential risks to take to see a project through to its intended completion.

But sometimes, a risk is worth taking because the reward can be so great. Very few truly great games have totally smooth development periods and there are plenty of tales to pick from where devs were faced with truly unthinkable choices.

In this list we'll look at just a few stories from developers who have taken gambles on ideas that could've gone horribly wrong. In the end though, they wound creating memorable pieces of entertainment and fans should be thankful for their bravado. From creating stylistic changes in private to putting your livelihood on the line, the following games took huge risks in the name of artistic expression.

The history of Halo: Combat Evolved is one with a series of pretty hard shifts along the way. The game started life an RTS title developed for Apple computers, and somehow ended up as a tentpole first-person shooter for Microsoft's Xbox. Not only was making an FPS for a console in this time period a risk, where the formula was still being worked out, but doing so far an unproven machine was incredibly daring.

What's funny about Halo is that originally it was conceived with a multiplayer focus, and the story coming later. However, it almost released without it. Just four months before the game's launch, the current multiplayer was deemed not good enough.

So, with the real possibility of running out of time and shipping without a dedicated multiplayer mode, what the team had made was crumpled up and thrown to the devs from Bungie West who had just finished work on Oni.

Bungie called the multiplayer "shoe-horned in" in later interviews because of this but all the same it spoke to the power of Halo's engine, and the hard work put in thereafter, how good it turned out to be. Multiplayer became the reason many people flocked to Halo, and it crafted legions of LAN-party enthusiasts. It's sequel was pretty much the game that made Xbox's online services as big as they came to be.