The business of video games is a precarious one, especially as technology has improved and standards have risen. Multi-million dollar budgets often result in a lot of meddling by the game publishers, eager to release their products in time for major purchasing seasons and generally acting like focus-group-influenced movie studios. Not surprisingly, a lot of great games get stepped on in such an environment. The business has become so stifling that a lot of programmers and designers have turned to independent outlets for the sake of creative control, resulting in new classics like Braid and an endless supply of Internet browser games. In the past decade, perhaps no major studio game was more unjustly hurried, and thereby crippled, than Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

The development history of Bloodlines is a troubled one. The developer, Troika Games, had recently proved itself a reliable source of quality electronic entertainment with a pair of mostly well-received games, Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil. Troika was founded by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason D. Anderson, the principle development team behind Interplay's Fallout series. To be perfectly frank, these three guys are genius game developers with a real knack for clashing with upper management. Perhaps artists never make good businessmen. Disagreements with Interplay caused them to leave the company early into the development of Fallout 2 and eventually problems with both Valve and Activision would leave them without a company of their own.

Bloodlines is famous for its incomplete feel, wrought with bugs and compatibility issues that have only just begun to see repair thanks to a doggedly devoted modding community. Make no mistake, Bloodlines is still an incredibly entertaining game that looks fantastic and has some of the best voice acting in the history of the industry, but it still plays like a beta.

The reasons for this choppiness are legion. Valve has been known to be rather cagey about its code (with good reason), so it basically gave Troika the Source engine in bits and pieces. Valve's business plan in 2004 was to hit the market with a one-two punch in promotion of their new engine. The "one" was Half-Life 2, a success by all accounts, leaving Bloodlines to stagger along as second banana. Troika had to fill in the coding gaps, to predictably unfavorable results. At the same time, staff shake-ups and constant pressure from Activision led to a lot of re-working and rushing to meet the project deadline.

Activision's pressure was all for nothing anyway. Valve pushed back the release of Bloodlines to benefit Half-Life 2, effectively killing the considerable buzz that had built up around the former. By the time Bloodlines hit the shelves it didn't have the media coverage or clean code it rightly deserved. It was a minor flop and can now basically be considered a high-budget cult game.

The online modding community has done its best to fix glitches and bugs, as well as to restore content. The Unofficial Patch is up to version 6.3 at this point, five years after the game's initial release. Troika went under and its founders have since redistributed themselves throughout the industry. Bloodlines may be one of the most fatally flawed gems in gaming history, but it's a gem nonetheless.