Ashes Cricket

The extremely short-lived and now defunct Ashes Cricket game holds the dubious distinction of being awarded the title of 'Worst Game of 2013' and, bitingly, 'worst video game ever'. The publisher, 505 Games, ended up apologising for releasing the game…

The premise of the game was for it to be released in June 2013, ahead of the actual Ashes cricket series. This deadline was missed, and so was the next and the game was ultimately released, quietly, in November of 2013, long after the physical competition was done.

The Ashes are a contest between Australia and England which is held 'at least every four years' and sometimes more often. The 2013 contest was followed by one in 2014 in order to not interfere with the Cricket World Cup, for which the Ashes' players would also have most likely been called up. The name was coined when Australia thoroughly beat England in 1882, the first Test loss on home ground that the English team had experienced. A satirical obituary mourning the death of English cricket said 'the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia'. The English captain vowed to retrieve said ashes and the media's imagination was gripped by the imagery. The six-inch high terracotta urn, said to contain the ashes of a cricket bail, is kept in perpetuity at the MCC, although it has travelled to Australia on tour and loan on more than one occasion. There is some debate over the original urn, which is said to be a small silver urn, rather than the terracotta one that most people recognise as 'The Ashes'. The urn was originally presented to Ivo Bligh, the English captain, as a personal gift, but it was the terracotta version that was gifted to the MCC by Bligh's widow after his death in 1927.

The computer game featured the official Australian and English players from that year, along with fourteen unofficial teams. Obviously, in real life, no other team can play for the Ashes.

Cricket is a fairly complicated game in life, so it is probably no surprise that the game developers struggled with the concept.

The game, released on Steam on the 22nd of November, was poorly made, with many glitches and bugs. The controls were badly explained, if at all, and the characters and concepts were amateurish in the extreme.

The game was pulled after just 4 days, on the 26th November, with all purchasers being offered a refund and the developers offering apologies to all who had been let down by the project. However short its lifespan, the game lived long enough to earn universal disapprobation from critics and players alike.