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

Duke Nukem Forever is no embarrassment

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say it's the most successful unreleased game ever. Perhaps the greatest moment in PR history.

Do Not Figure out

[Bogtha]

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, 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.

Re:Do Not Figure out

[Guntram Shatterhand,]

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.

Re:Do Not Figure out

[The PS3 Will Fail]

"Who remembers Duke Nukem anymore?"

Apparently, you do.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure everybody's already seen the list, I'm just wondering if it's worth placing a bet of whether humanity will achieve interstellar travel before 3D Realms finishes DNF.

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.

Re:Do Not Figure out

[Anonymous Coward]

I just saw Titor tomorrow. Have them show up on the corner of 9th and Penn at 11:47AM tomorrow morning, that's when I saw him.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R

[Wilson_6500]

Hey, if STALKER and Daikatana were both eventually released, DNF can be, too. I've heard that STALKER is actually not a bad game, either--just that it was way overpromised as far as features... kinda sounds like what they've admitted with DNF, come to think of it.

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

[Guntram Shatterhand,]

Honestly, I'm not sure that the whole Hot Coffee thing was Rockstar's fault. Sure, the minigame is stupid as hell, but to Rockstar's credit they didn't put it in the game. Unless you knew what you were doing and since it was rated to adults, it seems that the whole fuss around it was for politicians needing a scapegoat. If Hot Coffee wasn't applicable, they would have used 'Bully' and all the Columbine connotations that it could have contained if the game itself wasn't so Dennis the Menace-like.

Re:Hot Coffee

[Quarters]

>>but to Rockstar's credit they didn't put it [Hot Coffee] in the game."

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.

Re:Hot Coffee

[KDR_11k]

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).

Re:Hot Coffee

[Floritard]

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 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.

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.

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"?).