In that regard, I don't think there's any better place to start this third foray than with the console port of one of the most infamous PC games ever made.
Getting his first game published in the Apple II-focused inCider Magazine back in 1984, John Romero would find his most iconic & influential time as a game designer & programmer after co-founding id Software in 1991 alongside Adrian Carmack, John Carmack (no relation), & Tom Hall. Romero would be a massive part of the development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom I & II, and the original Quake, before leaving id in 1996 to co-found Ion Storm with Tom Hall, after having various creative differences with his fellow co-founders, especially John Carmack. As part of the public unveiling of this new game studio in 1997, a game was announced: John Romero's Daikatana. An ambitious first-person shooter that took influence after games like Chrono Trigger & The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, in particular the idea of travelling through different time periods & having sidekicks to fight alongside you, Daikatana was originally made with the Quake engine in mind, but after seeing id's new engine for Quake II get shown off, Romero decided to switch engines... not realizing that the two engines were more or less incompatible, resulting in the game essentially needing to be started over from scratch & necessitating numerous delays; it's entirely possible that Carmack made the engines so different so as to screw over Romero. Anyway, after so many delays (& an infamous piece of advertising, based on Romero's penchant for trash talk during multiplayer games, that Romero has since regretted approving), the game finally saw release for Windows PC on May 22, 2000, where it was understandably trounced by all; that being said, though, it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.
However, during all of that development time, Ion Storm managed to work a deal with Japanese developer/publisher Kemco to produce ports of the game to console. Wildly enough, this resulted in the first version of the game to actually come out being Daikatana for the Nintendo 64, as the port first saw release in Japan on April 7, 2000, over a month prior to the PC original's initial release in North America! Europe would get the N64 port about a week prior to their PC release, too, while North America wouldn't get the console version until later that July. There was also a Game Boy Color version developed by Will (Juggernaut, Robopon), but that was made as a Zelda clone, as per Romero's request, & was much better received, but only ever saw release in Europe & Japan. Developed in-house at Kemco, the N64 version is about as accurate to the PC original as it could possibly be considering the hardware differences, though it is still compromised in many ways, like the lack of voice work during cutscenes, fewer stages (18, instead of the original's 24), & even the complete removal of the sidekicks during gameplay (though some would argue that's an improvement, as they weren't programmed all too well for the PC); this version also apparently uses older textures that would be changed for the final PC release. Kemco also included support for the N64 Expansion Pak, which allowed for higher resolution visuals (at the expense of performance) & even a (faked) widescreen option, & local split-screen multiplayer for up to 4, including an exclusive gem collection mode. While the PC original has since received fan patches that have improved the game & made it better to play (not to mention is still easy to purchase, digitally), the N64 version remains notorious to this day, & has even only gotten more expensive to get a hold of, due to said notoriety.
As infamous as Daikatana has always been, and as rough as the N64 port is, it is still quite an accomplishment that Kemco somehow managed to release the game on console, and even technically beat Ion Storm to market (in Japan & Europe, at least)! As for why the N64 was chosen, I'd say it's likely because Kemco was primarily a Nintendo-focused developer/publisher up to that point (with very few exceptions), though a PS1 port of Daikatana was apparently announced but never came to be. Also, in a mostly unrelated bit, the word "Daikatana" itself (a misreading of the word kanji "大刀/Daitou/Long Sword"), wound up becoming an "actual" Japanese word, sort of, via Goblin Slayer Side Story II: Dai Katana, a prequel light novel & manga of the Goblin Slayer light novel series; maybe creator Kumo Kagyu was a fan of John Romero's game back in the day.
There's always one specific game that gets me inspired to make this kind of list, & for this third entry it's this handheld port of a classic point-&-click adventure game, the first of two to be seen here for the genre. The idea of releasing a game in a genre literally designed around using a computer mouse for home console, some of which don't even have mice, has been around at least since the NES, and the idea of porting them to handhelds has been around since the Game Boy. To be fair, the idea of releasing a P&C adventure game on the Nintendo DS actually made some sense, as the bottom touch screen was admittedly a decent replacement for a mouse, at least conceptually. However, while there were a few original games in that genre, the DS did not become home to many ports of actual adventure games of PC origin. There was a port of Myst & the "Director's Cut" of Broken Sword (spoiler: we'll be coming back to the latter later in this list), but the one that always makes me tilt my head & think "OK, how did they do that?!" would have to be Benoît Sokal's Syberia for the Nintendo DS. Unlike those other two games, which came out in the 90s, Syberia first came out on Windows PCs in 2002, a mere two years before the DS actually came out. If that doesn't indicate a difference in expectations between making a game for PCs, even an adventure game, & making a game for the DS, then I don't know what else to say.
Released in 2008, Syberia on the DS, which was ported over by TetraEdge Games, is a perfect example of a company (or companies) becaming so focused on whether or not they could actually do such a port that they didn't seem to consider whether or not they should actually do it. On the one hand, it is rather impressive that this port actually came out as well as it did. The pre-rendered environments look rather decent on the smaller DS screen (& even scale OK on something like a 3DS XL screen), though the polygonal characters don't hold up well up close, the actual video clips used for certain cutscenes were transferred over fine enough via MobiClip, and while there isn't any voice work now the script itself is kept intact. On the other hand, though... this is NOT a good way to experience Syberia, unless you're truly curious. It's a literal touch-screen only game, with the buttons doing absolutely nothing, and while in some ways it works (like interacting with some stuff), it also makes actual screen investigating tricky. You see, since there's no on-screen cursor (or even a pop-up contextual one, if you were using a d-pad), the only way to know if something on screen can be interacted with is by either first pressing on an eye icon & then dragging across the screen... or by simply tapping on the screen & hoping it does something other than move protagonist Kate Walker around; I couldn't even figure out how to actually read documents, despite there being an option. It makes the actual gameplay aspect of this port more cumbersome than intended, & the fact that you seemingly can't make Kate run makes everything move slowly. Finally, when not in a pre-rendered cutscene, there's almost no sound to be heard at all outside of the rare interaction sound effect & a constantly repeating music track, like the main theme to Syberia; while that song is excellent, you will quickly prefer absolute silence after a few minutes.
In some ways, Syberia on the DS is a truly astonishing port, delivering as accurate an experience as possible on hardware that really shouldn't be able to handle it as well as it does. However, the actual experience of playing this port is a chore, the biggest of which was making it touch-only; if there was an option to use the d-pad & buttons, it'd be much more tolerable (though only in silence). Still, the project manager for this DS port, Emmanuel Zaza, would eventually move on to have the same role over at Koalabs & would work on both ports of Syberia II & the main release of Syberia 3, so at least something good came out of this port for one person.
We return to another FPS that John Romero played a part in creating, and this time it's the one where his decapitated head on a stake is actually the final boss! Yeah, while the original Doom is legendary as one of the most ported games ever made, both official & unofficial, the same cannot be said of its sequel, 1994's Doom II. Prior to the new millennium, the straight-to-stores follow-up to one of the most influential video games of all time only ever saw direct ports to Mac OS & even the PC-98 in 1995, while it was bundled together with the first game for the PS1 & Saturn ports in 1995, & 1997, respectively. However, those two console ports did see some levels & enemy types removed, due to hardware limitations, with the most notable being the removal of the Arch-vile, due to its numerous frames of animation being too much for the PS1 to handle (& the Saturn version was a straight port of the PS1 version). In late 2001, the original Doom saw release on the Game Boy Advance, barely half a year after the GBA first launched in Japan that March, & the while work done by David A. Palmer Productions was no doubt impressive, it was also yet another port based around the Atari Jaguar port, which featured numerous changes & removals to be doable on console hardware back in the 90s. However, the following year would see a second Doom port for the GBA, and this one was not just even more impressive, but also mind blowing in just how close to the PC original it was.
Released on October 28, 2002 (& November 15, in Europe), nearly one year to the day after the first game, Activision released Doom II for the Game Boy Advance, with the development this time being handled by Torus Games. Running off of Torus' proprietary Southpaw Engine (which also powered Duke Nukem Advance & Ice Nine), the GBA port of Doom II is essentially the entire PC campaign, with nothing cut out aside from two music tracks, likely for cartridge space reasons; even the two bonus Wolf 3D stages are included. Being a different engine, there are understandably some differences in execution from the PC original, including two stages (Industrial Zone & The Chasm) being split into two maps each for processing reasons, but this is literally Doom II in all of its glory on the GBA... mostly. As you can see, this is a T-rated game, so there is censorship (green blood, removal of gibs, etc.), but when you consider how much of the OG game is here, including the Arch-vile & even sound propagation (so enemies can hunt after you based on gunfire), that's a small thing to complain about; there's even co-op & competitive multiplayer via link cable. Another port of Doom II would come out two years later on the Tapwave Zodiac in 2004, but there's no doubt that the Game Boy Advance version is truly a prime example of a "miracle port", and the fact that it's highly valued by collectors today shows that value.
This next entry is a bit of a twist on the concept of these lists I've been doing, as this specific game isn't really a case of a game being released on hardware that arguably had no right to actually play it. Rather, this is more a case of a company taking a concept that was more or less defined by a specific era & taking it to such an extreme that it makes you question whether or not it was actually worth going that far. Released on August 24, 1995 for MS-DOS & Windows PCs, Phantasmagoria by Sierra On-Line was something that the legendary Roberta Williams had wanted to make for literally years: A horror game. Taking full advantage of the CD-ROM format & the FMV craze that was still relatively strong at the time, the game would take more than two years to develop, four months to film, & in the end cost $4.5 million to make. Luckily, the time & money was well spent, as it went on to become Sierra's best-selling title as of that point, grossing over $12,000,000 in its first week alone from 300,000 copies sold, and reportedly sold over 1,000,000 copies after a year on the market. Roberta Williams has even called Phantasmagoria "the game that best represented her career as a game designer", & the game would receive an unrelated sequel, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, in 1996.
The success of Phantasmagoria seemingly caught the eye of Outrigger, a small Japanese publisher which (from what I can find) had only ever released a single game beforehand, 1995 RPG Shiki Eiyuden for the Super Famicom. With a fully localized Japanese release in the works for both Windows & Mac in 1997, Outrigger teamed with developer Infini Entertainment Technology, which had previously ported PC games Jewels of the Oracle & Quarantine to the PS1 & Saturn for Japan, to bring Phantasmagoria to console. The end result of this was Phantasm for the Sega Saturn, released on August 8, 1997, the title being the same as what Sierra called both Phantasmagoria games in Japan, which retains the fully dubbed over Japanese voice work from the PC localization. However, the game's more gruesome & violent scenes had to be censored by way of silhouettes, likely due to consoles being put under higher scrutiny than PCs, even in Japan. To (sort of?) make up for this, though, Outrigger also managed to score two X Japan songs, "Heath" & "Traitor", to act as exclusive ending themes for the Saturn port, so that's neat. Unfortunately, Phantasm was the last game Outrigger & Infini ever put out, as both companies looked to have gone out of business following the Saturn port's release.
However, why is Phantasm on this list? Simple: Disc Count. While the PC original was already pushing the boundaries of good taste by needing to be released on 7 CDs, even that wasn't enough for the Saturn port. No, Phantasm on the Saturn came on 8 CDs, requiring two chubby jewel cases to contain! (Yes, "chubby" is apparently what those double-decker cases are actually called; that's adorable) While the PS1 & Saturn generation was known for multi-disc games, & the concept would continue on with DVDs to a much smaller extent up through the Xbox 360, no other game ever needed as many discs as Phantasm on the Saturn did... at least until 2020, when Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) came out on 10 DVDs; Battlefield 1942: The Complete Collection allegedly was 13 CDs, but that's including expansion packs, i.e. "cheating". However, when it comes to consoles, Phantasm still reigns supreme, & with digital downloads being a thing it will never be dethroned.
OK, so earlier we went over the idea of porting a point-&-click adventure game from the PC to the Nintendo DS... but what about the Nintendo handheld that came before it? Yes, the Game Boy Advance was also home to a literal couple of P&C adventure game ports, and while 2001's Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion is a port of a more recent game (the PC original came out in 2000), I think it's much more impressive & mind blowing that there's a port of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars for the Game Boy Advance. Developed by Revolution Software (Beneath a Steel Sky, In Cold Blood, Beyond a Steel Sky), Broken Sword was originally released on September 30, 1996 for Windows & Mac OS, where it was originally titled Circle of Blood in North America, & would go on to launch a franchise that's still around to this day, with the latest entry, Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse, coming out in 2013 after a Kickstarter campaign in 2012. While it wasn't Revolution's first game to see release on CD-ROM, it was the first one to be exclusive to the format, due to the usage of high quality 2D artwork & sprites, plus all of the voice work; I mean, Beneath a Steel Sky was released on 13 floppy disks, so there are limits, people. Broken Sword would also see a port to the PlayStation later in 1996 in Europe (followed by a North American release in 1998 by THQ, where it got to keep its original title), which included support for the PS1 mouse, effectively allowing it to be played as intended.
However, while developing the third game in the series, 2003's The Sleeping Dragon, it was decided to port Shadow of the Templars to another piece of hardware: The GBA. While the idea does sound a bt absurd, it also did make some sense for the time, as re-releasing the first game on something like the PS2, Xbox, or GameCube would likely have been received poorly, due to its "outdated" visuals, while it would have theoretically fit just fine on Nintendo's new handheld, which was often considered a perfect home for 2D sprite-based games at the time. Still, in some ways, this sounds like trying to port Myst to the GBA, i.e. a game based heavily around the CD-ROM format being released on a cartridge. Luckily, while the publishing would be handled by bam! Entertainment, Revolution Software actually handled the GBA port of Templars in-house, which meant that it could be given the type of proper care & treatment that only the creators of the original game could really handle. Released on March 17, 2002 (March 22 in Europe), the end result is actually an astoundingly great port from the moment you start playing it. While the voice work & animated cutscenes are gone, the script is kept intact via text boxes, very nice quality stills from the cutscenes are used in place of the animation, the music is transferred over rather well to the GBA, and both the backgrounds & even the character animation is still rather nice looking, if obviously lower quality. The game is also rather accommodating in terms of gameplay, as while you can simply move main character George Stobbart around until you see a contextual icon for interaction, you can also just press R repeatedly, which will automatically move between each spot that can be interacted with, making it easy to see what areas of each screen you should focus on; very handy.
This would also be one of the last ports of the original version of this game, with a Palm OS & Windows Mobile port in 2006, as in 2009 Revolution would release Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut for the Wii & DS, which expanded on the game with new content, most notably brand new sections starring Nico Collard, George's partner (& later girlfriend) who was important to the plot but never playable until now. This new version would then get ported to Windows, OS X, Android, & even Linux between 2010 & 2013, effectively supplanting the original version in the timeline, though Revolution still offers the OG game as an option for people who buy The Director's Cut on services like Steam or GOG. The GBA port, though, is just like the PS1 port in that it has never seen any sort of re-release, but those who do still buy GBA carts should definitely have this port in their collection, as it is truly an astonishing port, nonetheless.
Back in the 80s & 90s, one of the most prevalent genres in video games was the "shooter", which today is now known by a variety of names (shoot-em-up, "shmup", scrolling shooter, STG, etc.) to differentiate the genre from third or first-person shooters. Within the shooter genre, though, is a variety of sub-genres, and the one that has arguably become the most prevalent is "bullet hell" (a.k.a. danmaku or manic shooter), which is known for literally filling the screen with enemy fire, with the primary focus being on figuring out the patterns they follow to maneuver through them (or managing to force the opposition to fire in ways that benefit you), and your character/ship's hitbox being smaller than usual (something literally just a single pixel) to allow for players to make their way through small openings between the bullets. While the game generally considered to be the first bullet hell shooter is late 1993's Batsugun by Toaplan (the company's final shooter), which featured future mangaka Junya Inoue (Btooom!) as a graphic designer, the game often considered to be one the founders of the sub-genre is another Toaplan shooter: Early 1993's V・V (pronounced "Vee Five"), a.k.a. Grind Stormer.
Directed by Kenichi Takano & co-programmed by a new hire named Tsuneki Ikeda, both of which would help co-found Cave & develop 1995's DonPachi, this game actually plays slightly different depending on the region, mainly in how you power up. The original V・V over in Japan uses a system not too dissimilar from Konami's Gradius or Toaplan's own Slap Fight (which this game is considered the spiritual successor to), plus an exclusive shield power-up, while Grind Stormer internationally has a more traditional instant power-up system, along with bombs & speed-up/down icons that are exclusive to this version. After the game's initial arcade release, Tengen managed to get the rights to port it to home console, resulting in Grind Stormer for the Genesis/Mega Drive, which came out on March 25, 1994 in Japan, & sometime later in the year in North America, literally just a week before Toaplan officially went out of business on March 31. To be perfectly honest, while the Genesis was known for having a faster 16-bit CPU than the SNES, resulting in it being able to handle shooters at a faster clip (the PC-Engine's dual 8-bit CPUs ran at the same speed, which also made it ideal for the genre), this was pretty much unlike anything ever seen on the console. Bullet hell, even in this primordial form, is all about fast-paced action and/or covering the screen with bullets, both of which require way more processing power than what the Genesis was capable of. Still, bless their souls, the development team over at Tengen Japan somehow managed to deliver as accurate an experience as possible, even allowing players to select between which gameplay style to use, V・V or Grind Stormer.
Sure, there are some difference in overall gameplay, and during the most hectic parts it might seem like the poor Genesis is killing itself trying to display all of the action, but this is a bullet hell game on a console that was in no way designed to play one, and that's amazing. Sadly, though, this version of the game now goes for absurd prices, partially because of a manufacturing defect, which resulted in a smaller print run, at least when it comes to functioning carts.
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Game development is by no means an easy thing, even when all you're making is a really simple proof of concept, as so many things can go wrong from something as simple as a single letter or digit of code being input incorrectly. In that regard, games like these, which deliver experiences that their respective hardware should not be able to execute, & especially without the assistance of any extra hardware, are truly "miracles" in & of themselves. Even something like Phantasm on the Saturn, which is more a case of "no kill like overkill" when it comes to how many discs you need to properly port a game over, shows another aspect of this concept, as the hardware itself isn't exactly the problem, but rather the medium it's being delivered on. Today, with console hardware that's pretty much all based around PC architecture to start with, the idea of pushing beyond what's believed to be possible to deliver an "impossible" experience has become more of a nearly-lost art (minus specific efforts on the Switch), so it's always fun to look back & see this kind of "Can't say 'NO'!" attitude.
John Romero's Daikatana (N64 & GBC) © 1997-2000 Square Enix
Syberia (DS) © 2008 MC2 France/Microïds and Tetraedge Games
Doom II (GBA) © 1994-2002 id Software, Inc.
Phantasm (Saturn) © 1995 Sierra On-Line Inc. (now Activision) © 1996 Sierra Pioneer Inc. © 1997 Outrigger Corporation © 1997 Infini Entertainment Technology Inc.
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (GBA) © Revolution Software Ltd. 1996, 2002
Grind Stormer (Genesis) © 1994 Tengen Inc. (now Warner Bros. Games) © 1993 Toaplan Co., Ltd. (now Tatsujin)
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