'Grand Theft Auto Online' Launch Fiasco: Five Of The Worst Video Game Launches On Record

It could be worse…

Never play an online game at launch. Or, if you do, caveat emptor.

At best, you’re going to be a guinea pig for the final stages of a beta; at worst, you won’t play at all.

Today marks the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online, and as Paul Tassi reports, it’s a buggy mess with long queues and plenty of other problems.

“One thing we are already aware of, and are trying to alleviate as fast as we can, is the unanticipated additional pressure on the servers due to a significantly higher number of players than we were anticipating at this point,”writes Rockstar in a blog post, adding that they are “working around the clock to buy and add more servers, but this increased scale is only going to make the first few days even more temperamental than such things usually are. This is part of the problem some of you have been experiencing with the iFruit App and some Social Club services – we apologize in advance for this and thank you for your patience in this area.”

This is no surprise. “Significantly higher number of players than we were anticipating” is an old chorus, and we’ve heard it all before.

Even though online video game launches have been plagued by server issues for years, we continue to see history repeat itself. Fortunately, as I’ll get to later in this post, Grand Theft Auto Online manages to avoid the worst ill effects of a bad launch.

Here are a handful of launch fiascos that should serve as cautionary tales. (There are others, which you should feel free to discuss in the comments of course.)