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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 .
I'd say it's the most successful unreleased game ever. Perhaps the greatest moment in PR history.
I'm still wondering why they even bother trying. It's been a solid ten years. Who remembers Duke Nukem anymore? I'm sure a FPS with a crude sense of humor could make it, but at this point you might as well bring back Lo Wang and have him star in a game. The name recognition is dead now. The good times for Duke seem to be over. They might as well farm it to someone who knows what they're doing.
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.]
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.
Why not? As long as there's no way the game can ever reach the code during normal operation it doesn't need to be rated up. As long as the user has to deliberately enable it with a program downloaded from the internet he knows what he's getting himself into (and he could probably download worse things when he's on the internet anyway).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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 would then have to be able to run it off a hdd or burned disc and that is completely not allowed by any normal execution of the console. Doing so is about as easy as replacing any of the content of the game with your own offensive user-created material. How is that ever R*'s fault? I don't care if they included the entire filmography of Ron Jeremy in bink video, if the game doesn't physically play it, you shouldn't be able to access it by normal sanctioned operation and any access therein is at best a legal grey-area, on your part. What about those Disney movies that had frames of nudity (Roger Rabbit, Little Mermaid, etc)? I don't remember the government getting involved with that, and that shit was available to anyone with a good freeze-frame function on their remote, and it was marketed to kids in the first place! Hot Coffee is sensationalist bullshit and the ensuing media frenzy was unjustified. Hell don't you basically have to violate the DMCA just to access Hot Coffee anyway?
Just so this isn't totally offtopic, I have to say it bugs me that R* didn't step up and point this out with their PR. You have to violate the integrity of their product to even make it an issue, so it really shouldn't have been an issue at all. Also, here's hoping they go all out and include Hot Coffee 2.0 in a properly rated version of the next GTA. Bustin' nuts when I'm not bustin' caps. Isn't the average gamer's age ~27 yrs old. Market research should show them that there is interest and well, the AO rating is there for a fucking reason. Quit pussy-footin' around damn you.