What can we learn from gaming’s failures? I don’t mean the usual, well-documented critical duds like Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana. I’m talking about the industry’s crater-deep disasters.

To answer this question, I dug up the five lowest-scoring PC games ever registered on Metacritic, which proved to be an interesting list. Interesting, as in the most terrifying growth you’ve ever seen on an elderly person’s back. That kind of interesting.

Worse games may exist, surely, but these five received universal disdain and did something to attract people’s attention. Maybe it was because they preyed on post-9/11 tensions or because they were so bad that the developer had to release an official apology.