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

[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: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).