Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.