Great Moments in Games PR History

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 .

Comments

Fair point

[Moraelin]

Fair point, it certainly isn't in the same league with Daikatana.

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.

Re:Fair point

[KDR_11k]

Pity about Anachronox, aside from being REALLY buggy (there's an inofficial patch that fixes a lot of it and with that it can be played just fine) it's a great game with some things the developers of japanese RPGs could learn from, e.g. understanding that battles are an RPG's weakness so Anachronox had large parts without any battles at all, autolevelling the unused parts of your party at plot events or allowing the player to skip minigames that are necessary for plot progression. It also manages to be pretty funny most of the time (Being abducted by a comic supervillain? The Democratus political system? Collectible items called "Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects"?).

Re:Hot Coffee

[king-manic]

You actually had to patch the game with a user mod to "unlock" it. It wasn't a controller code you put in but a software patch that flipped a few bits. Oddly no one had any problems with a similiar mini game in gods of war but most likely it was just not brought to the attention of the overly sensitive, irrational group that normally makes so much noise over it.

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.