Great Moments in Games PR History 36
Games Radar has a piece up entitled The Top 7 PR Disasters. Focusing mainly on the last few years, it highlights things like 'All I want for Christmas is a PSP', Hot Coffee, and (of course) Uwe Boll. Daikatana makes number 3 on the list: "Daikatana could have been just another mediocre shooter that passed silently into obscurity, leaving no imprint except a valuable lesson for Ion Storm's developers and a vague bad taste in the mouths of gamers. Unfortunately, Romero and his big mouth had to go and hype the s**t out of it, and as a result Daikatana is blamed not only for sinking Ion Storm, but also for sending Romero's career plummeting from stardom to relative obscurity." Though it's not mentioned on the list, elsewhere 3D realms is owning up to the embarrassment that is Duke Nukem Forever .
Duke Nukem Forever is no embarrassment (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair point (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of which, much as I will admit that Sony was as inept as it gets when talking about the PS3, and it did generate its own backlash, I still think Daikatana beats that hands down and should deserve to be number 1. I don't know how many still remember it fully, but the backlash was _massive_. Sony so far got a milder "well, fuck Sony and their console, the Wii (or XBox) is better anyway" reaction, but Daikatana managed to create a wave of pure Sith-like hatred. Suddenly everything that John Romero did, or his girlfriend did, or that he even had a girlfriend, was blown out of proportion and presented like an abhomination of such proportions never seen since WW2, and as the work of the Antichrist.
While Daikatana was a thoroughly mediocre game, maybe deserving a 50% score and to be quietly forgotten, the reaction was such that people had decided it's the worst game ever made, in fact a thorough abhomination of a game, before even trying the demo. (Sucky as that demo was.) People were posting venomous anti-Daikatana stuff and demanding John Romero's head on a pike without even having seen more than a couple of screenshots. (And for that matter, how about paying for a game before having any _demands_ from the developpers?) I've personally known a couple of people who were ranting and raving about what a piece of shit Daikatana was, but hadn't actually played the game or the demo, and in fact refused to even try it.
And speaking of the demo, ok, maybe it's not PR as such, but it was a thoroughly uninspired move on its own. See, most of Daikatana's levels were actually fairly nice. E.g., the ancient Greece levels actually looked pretty good. But it started with some thoroughly uninspired swamp levels, which were, well, ugly and uninspired. Bad move on its own, since the first levels are what gets people hooked or gets them to throw away the game before getting any further. The worst move however, was that those levels were chosen as the demo levels. So even if someone did decide to play the demo, it would only help convince them to _not_ buy the game.
Daikatana wasn't just blamed for sinking Ion Storm, it pretty much _did_ sink Ion Storm. The negative reputation of Daikatana and "Ion Storm killed Looking Glass" part of the backlash, also tainted Anachronox. (Not the greatest RPG ever, to be sure, but not quite deserving the "if it's from Ion Storm it's another abhomination" reaction some people had, either.) Even releasing Deus Ex under the Ion Storm name didn't do much, except create a "yeah, but it's the _other_ Ion Storm" reaction. And I wouldn't be surprised if it still sold somewhat less copies than it would otherwise have.
Basically, sorry, even Sony's handicapped management and insulting interviews didn't manage to create _that_ kind of backlash yet. Negative publicity and resentment, ok, they did cause. But nowhere _near_ Daikatana scale.
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Do Not Figure out (Score:5, Interesting)
First, they admit that they were aiming too high with Duke Nukem Forever. And then, in the same interview, they say that they've got lots of new hires and they are increasing the scope of the project to include multiple platforms.
They just don't learn, do they? I bet in the next interview they'll tell everybody that they are switching engines again.
I'm sure everybody's already seen the list [a-13.net], I'm just wondering if it's worth placing a bet of whether humanity will achieve interstellar travel before 3D Realms finishes DNF. I wonder what it would take to convince Fred Brooks to visit Broussard and smack him around the head with a copy of The Mythical Man Month? I'd pay good money to see that.
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Don't underestimate the draw of nostalgia. If DNF comes out, I expect that sales will be brisk. [Even if it's a stinker, I think it will still sell.]
Re:Do Not Figure out (Score:4, Funny)
Believe me, people are still wondering in 2307, my current subjective-present that I will return to shortly after making this post. After the first appearance of the time machine in 2098, one hundred years before it was technically invented (some say reverse-engineered), things start to get a little hard to track.
Here's what I can tell you: Duke Nukem Forever was officially released in 2144, which is a good couple decades before the first interstellar vessel left the Lagrange-1 manufacturing center in 2170. But there is known to be at least fifty people at 3D Realms working hard to finish the game in the present. They've gone through forty six complete project resets, and one hundred and fifty different engines, including one apparently produced by an alien race who we will not make contact with for another 1,000 years or so. So you could call it either way.
Oh, and you may be wondering: Yes, the game was pretty bad, even by 2144 standards. That alien game engine didn't run so hot on the Playstation 23, and the trademark wise-cracks were apparently written sometime in the 2200s and made no sense to contemporary audiences, though that term had already started to lose a lot of its meaning.
One last note, the reason I'm here: If you see John Titor, try to grab him and hold him until the Federal Time Police or the Time Continuum Perturbation/Interference Police show up to take him away, since he's wanted in 14 different decades.
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Just maintaining that list must be a full time job.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that I'll be buying the PC version of DNF no matter _how bad_ of a game it is. For one thing, it's Duke Nukem, and Duke Nukem 3D was just too good of a game for this not to follow in that tradition (I'm blindly hoping). Secondly, this thing has become an iconic piece of gaming legacy. I bought Daikatana (for $5) and even played a good bit of it. Daikatana had its moments, I'd say! Hearing Superfly cry like a little baby when I stumbled my dumb ass into a deathtrap gave me a pretty good laugh. I hold out _at least_ that much hope for DNF, whenever it comes out.
Hot Coffee (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hot Coffee (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes they did. At first they claimed it was a player created mod for the PC version. Then people unlocked it on both the PS2 and XBox versions. R* was called out on their lie quite vehemently. R* then recalled every unsold disc and sent out a second pressing that had the Hot Coffee data removed. Why would they do a recall if the data wasn't included on the disc by default? They most definitely put Hot Coffee in. It was, more than likely, a mini-game that was (wisely) cut during production. Instead of taking the time to audit their assets & code to truly remove the offending data they just disabled access to it. They didn't think anyone would go poking around in the game files and find it. It's their fault for doing a slapdash job of "removing" it before the game shipped.
Do an EBay search for GTA & Hot Coffee and you'll see a lot of original game discs, the ones that still have the data on them, for sale.
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I find that difficult to believe.
Rockstar's defense had the look of "plausible deniability." It established a precedent for burning any content into a game, no matter how violent or obscene, so long as the modding community is there to take the fall.
Re:Hot Coffee (Score:5, Insightful)
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Superficial.
It's too easy to imagine developers leaking the key to the net --- a key that may be little more than a cheat code.
The game code and game assets cost serious t
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Well... it's make-believe sex, they have all their clothes on, nothing at all is visible. It's just not offensive content in my opinion, no wonder they didn't care that people might find it.
Then they messed up with all the lies and other bad PR moves, that was just totally unnecessary. They should have just admitted there were scenes on the CD that were edited out, but they weren't anything special.
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Then people unlocked it on both the PS2 and XBox versions.
Why do people keep saying this? I know this thing was beaten to death but stop fucking saying this. You simply can't "unlock" Hot Coffee. That implies you can get to these parts of the game during normal execution. Like a racing game giving you new tracks or mario getting to a secret warp zone. You cannot do this at all. The only way to access this content is to physically hack into the game, something you're really not in anyway supposed to be doing, especially on a console. If you did hack the code you
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Re:Hot Coffee (Score:4, Informative)
As for the data, it's common practice to be fairly lazy about stuff in most industries. KOTOR2 has models and dialogue never used that was pressed on disc. Planescape had a rash of audio files that were never used. Castlevania SOTN had several incomplete levels included that could be accessed with a glitch. the NES metroid had a whole bunch of unfinished levels. At a certain point in developement it's easier just to disable in code and press then to do a data audit. These days excess data doesn't cost any more to press but dev do cost money to comb through binaries and remove un-needed content.
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Article misnomer (Score:1)
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http://www.gamesradar.com/us/ps3/game/features/in
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picture [wikipedia.org]
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A Pentagram did not kill Ultima 8 (Score:2)
Daikatana was not so bad... it was buggy and late. (Score:1)
And it has 4 games in one. All four episodes feature new weapons, enemies, textures, enviroment, sounds, music etc..
Daikana has faults I don't bring up since everybody seems to be aware of
Sweet! (Score:1)