Good Year / Bad Year?

Realtime Worlds

There was plenty of sympathy, however, for Realtime Worlds. Dave Jones' Dundee-based studio went into administration back in August. The developer's latest project, cops and robbers-themed MMO APB, just hadn't attracted enough players. In the end, APB was online for just 86 days.

It's never funny when people lose their jobs, unless they're BNP councillors, so there's not much more to say about this one. For the full story, you're better off reading our Fall of Realtime Worlds feature, which explains where it all went wrong.

Tiger Woods

Time to move onto something cheerier – well, funnier anyway. 2010 was the year Tiger Woods, a golfer so famous even I've heard of him, was exposed as a love rat. Which is of course what men get called when they've been dirty old slags.

One analyst blamed falls in sales of Tiger's videogames on his antics. But EA Sports boss Peter Moore stood by him, which wasn't surprising since he'd previously expressed support for an actual convicted rapist. The question is, how long will EA stick with Woods?

"We have no plans to move away from him, but it's a business relationship on the basis of we make the best golf game and he's the best golfer," said platinum-coiffured EA king John Riccitiello. "We're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for a period of time."

All the best then, Tiger.

Music games

And there we were hoping to get through one of these entries without mentioning EA. Unfortunately they published Rock Band 3, which made headlines in 2010 for not selling very many copies at all.

So much for Harmonix's claims that no one bought Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock because they were waiting for RB3. Activision's offering had also failed to set the tills ringing, with less than a fifth the number of copies sold compared to previous instalments.

But the dream isn't over, according to Screen Digest analyst Piers Harding-Rolls. "I don't believe the music genre is at a dead end," he said. Hooray! "I expect dance titles to sell well this Christmas." Oh.

John Riccitiello agrees: "I think the music genre is going to recover. I don't know exactly how. It could be based on some new innovation. Maybe it all becomes dance-based." I'd prefer it all to become One Direction-based, but perhaps that's a personal thing.

Project Milo

Cast your mind back to E3 2009. That's when Gepetto Molyneux first introduced us to Milo, his virtual talking boy. "It's very different. It's very ambitious. But we're going for it," he told us. It was all very exciting.

However, confusion reigned in 2010. Milo wasn't going to be released as a game, said Microsoft mouthpiece Aaron Greenberg. Except it was, he said the next day – just not "this holiday".

Molyneux cast doubt on this assertion by revealing that Project Milo was just a tech demo.

"It's definitely not just a tech demo," said Greenberg six days later.

"I still think this is a very, very big tech demo," Molyneux then said. "I don't think of it as a released product at the moment... I don't think of it as something that would be a boxed product on the shelf," he added.

"Of course! I wouldn't be working on it if I didn't hope that to be true, yes," said Molyneux a few weeks later, when asked if he thought of Milo as something that would be a boxed product on the shelf.

The same day Eurogamer published that interview, rumours emerged that Project Milo had been cancelled.

Just to round it all off, a Microsoft bigwig Alex Kipman claimed Milo had never been announced as a game, adding that it was "never really a product". He basically insinuated that the whole thing had never existed in the first place, as though it were just a dream emerging out of the bizarre ramblings of a crazy old man. As if.

Farewell then, Milo. And farewell 2010. Let's hope more this year brings us more exciting new game announcements, amusing executive spats and brilliant Peter Molyneux quotes than ever before.