"I did the E.T. video game, the game that is widely held to be the worst video game of all time," he says. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 was a commercial flop and a gaming disaster. Based loosely on Steven Spielberg's 1982 blockbuster of the same name, the game was a confusing mess that left players frustrated and disoriented. Millions of copies went unsold, and Atari ended up literally burying the game by dumping many surplus cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Within a year of E.T.'s release, the entire video game industry collapsed. Warshaw ultimately had to give up his career as a game designer.

Video game developers reached spectacular heights in 2016, creating games that entertained, enlightened, and elevated the medium. These are not those games. These are the losers, the stinkers, the games that wasted the time and money of everyone involved. These games aren't just boring or buggy, but fundamentally broken: They're not so bad they're good, they're so bad it's offensive. I've based this list on Metacritic's five lowest "Metascore" ratings for all games released in 2016.

Every gamer has a tale of the worst game they ever played. It may have been the utterly catastrophic sequel to a much-loved classic, a rushed tie-in with a favourite movie, or an experimental new release from a favourite studio. But we've all had that moment of excitedly unwrapping the box, shoving the disc (or cartridge) into the machine and then ... then comes the horrific realisation that you have wasted £45 on the interactive equivalent of a late-career M. Night Shyamalan movie. To create this list, four veteran game writers gathered together to relive our own experiences of this gut-wrenching phenomenon. As hundreds of games are released every year, there are certainly thousands of unmitigated digital disasters that very few people have had to suffer because they sank faster than a pair of solid-iron water wings.