Remember, Capcom got onto this whole Evil / 'Cube kick because it was rehashing games that were mostly available on the PS1, and finding them selling surprisingly well. I don't think anyone expected a port of a PS1 game to generate as much hype or sales as RE:1 did, and with the costs they sunk into it I bet it was one of their most profitable titles for the year. Thanks to that, the 'Cube got more and more entrenched with Resident Evil. Someone probably just came to their senses WRT RE:4, and realized that a PS2 port was not only a viable option, but a good one. Generally 3rd parties in the industry are platform agnostic, and would be well advised to stay that way.
And I'm sure their parents' parents realize just how little the parents still really know.
Bush is getting his 50% approval rating from somewhere, and I don't think it is college campuses. If I had two kids, a morgage, and a carreer, I doubt I would have the time to follow the hundreds of millions of dollars that is getting funneled to a company who is openly paying the vice president.
Don't forget, they also would need to buy shelf space and promote the things if anyone were to see it, and even basic inventory takes people.
Of course, with CD's and DVD's being around for so long, people forget that Carts are expensive and risky (Capcom lost all of the money it made from Street Fighter 2 on the Genesis carts for SF2:CE).
If each cart sold for 20 dollars, Sierra probably gets about 14 of that, 7 of which might go to manufacturing and Nintendo tax. If they spend 500k on promotion (a small budget), and another 100k on boxes / programming / submitting for approval / etc, that's 600k sunk costs. Assuming no returns, they'll need to sell though a bit under 100k to break even. Of course, if they sell through only half of what they sell-in, they'll be eating all of their potential revenue in returns. If, on the other hand, they sell really well, they stand to make a few hundred k.
Over all, that's not a very good bet for a niche port. And remember, publishers aren't deciding whether or not to make a game based upon whether it will make money, but whether or not it will make more money than all of the other offers they have on the table. Better opportunities were out there. If Sierra thought it was worth it, they would have just paid somebody to make the emulator. 80k is worth it to avoid the legal minefield.
Actually, as this is the good in question, and this is what it's supposed to be a counterfit of. It's pretty clear that US Customs shouldn't have gone anywhere near it. It's not a counterfit if it's not trying to pass as the original, like a Schwatz watch or a Glame Boy Advance. We're talking about the difference between a Rubik's Cube and a Magic Cube, where the term Cube can be accepted as descriptive and the packages don't match.
They also sell metal springs, Chinese Finger Traps, and a whole host of other obviously counterfit products. Just look at that non-pogo brand pogo stick. Devaluing US trademarks by buying generic versions of toys that have been around for generations now... Won't she think of her country? She and those Safeway-brand cereal makers should be shot like the Jap terrorists they are. Did I say Jap? I meant the Arab terrorists. But it's not racist this time, because they are terrorists, the lousy lot of 'em.
Our wiki discribes everything from how to setup your development environment to how to use the office coffee machine. It's much easier to keep documentation reasonably up-to-date if anyone can write it, and it is much easier to find information if it doesn't consist of slogging through file heirchies to launch a PDF file. Instead of being 12 months out of date, our Wiki documentation is generally only about 3 months out of date, and the important stuff is actually (gasp!) up to date.
We use MoinMoin Wiki. Good setup, though formatting is a pain and tables are right out.
Actually, this looks like a bug in their system. The nastygram keeps referring to meta tags/invisible text/header text. They obviously were looking for sites who spam their name all over in order to get a search for "Metroid Prime" to return "PrimePieceofAss.com" (Not a real site. On second thought, it probably is). Here you have something that a kid-safe company would consider adult, with no obvious reason to talk about zelda or metroid, which does, in fact, have a bit on the side about videogames.
It's a misunderstanding. Nintendo's lawyers f*ed up, which wouldn't be the first time this has happened.
How long does it take an experience cracker to build a no-CD crack for a game?
Macrovision once estimated the time for an average game at 5 days, and touted that their software pushed that number back an additional week. Actual merits of Safe Disk aside, In the industry one assumes a one to two week window before pirated copies start arriving, unless your game is particularly popular and it gets cracked on release day or even before release.
Having access to the source doesn't really make it any easier for a hacker to deconstruct the workings of the system. Binary Executables are uncompiled all of the time for compatibility purposes, it's really not much of an impediment.
A few months ago thanks to shoddy service and an annoying propensity to charge for everything possible under the sun (Including roaming in my home area, line setup fees when they shut off my phone due to their website frequently dropping payments, etc), I swore I would switch carriers.
With the exception of World of Warcraft, these are all sequels. They may all be great games, but where are the original ideas?
How do you know an original idea game is going to be great until after it has launched? How about adding to that list
Katamari Damachi Eyetoy: Antigrav Donkey Konga
Admittedly, if you look at the latest Game Developer magazine most of the major publishers spend less than 30% of their budgets on original IP, but they exist. This might not be such a bad idea, when great original titles like Black and White sell terribly. Of course Prince of Persia sold terribly as well, despite being A: a sequel B: an awesome game C: heavily advertised. On the other hand Prince of Persia is full of original ideas, it just happened to be a sequal, in the same way that Super Mario Brothers 2 was a sequel to Super Mario Brothers 1.
Look for originality. Buy originality. Promote originality. Stop complaining about a lack of originality. We make all that we can. The rest is in the hands of the consumers who bother to look for the good stuff, and tell other people about it.
Yes, but Zelda is a classic worthy of celebration. Much like how people keep remaking and re-releasing much loved movies and songs, videogames deserve the same treatment. Now, whether they're being remade for the benefit of humanity or because someone wants to feel closer to a classic somehow is another story discussion, but the draw is definitely there.
Plus, it's a great way to get to understand the decisions that went into the creation of the classic without the hassle and failures of from-scratch development. Inventing your own gameplay is fraught with peril, especially as it is a skill people are expected to pick up on their own. This way you deconstruct an existing engine down to the minutest detail, without having to worry about your own design mistakes or lack of available art resources.
And on top of that, they created the engine specifically to allow anyone to design levels for the classic. Imagine if anyone could go back with the original storm trooper outfits and create their own scenes or storylines for starwars. Some of it would be as good as troops, and some of it would be as bad as The Phantom Menace. Certainly letting anyone be a level designer for a classic Miyamoto game is reason enough for the project's existence.
I do agree, though, that it would be nice if there were more original OS games developed, but that doesn't mean classics like this shouldn't get people excited enough to go out and make their own versions.
You have a surprisingly high view of the previous quality of slashdot.
There actually has been at least one story about Windows emulating a Macintosh emulating Windows. And people using virtualizing software to virtualize virtualizing software... Splitting a computer into a client and a server in order to fully tap the potential of XWindows. This is a pretty common theme. Printing out little paper doll versions of printers. Applications that write themselves.
While running a modern OS on an old machine with a 1 hour post time isn't groundbreaking, it is nifty. If you could get a version of Debian running on a Univac, that would be cool. So is this.
The majority of geeks get their world news from one source: Slashdot. All that I can say about that is... STOP DOING THAT! This is a dorky, geeky website about what the SCO lawyers ate for breakfast that morning and building marble runs out of legos.
In many ways getting OSX to run on an 040 based Macintosh is like playing the Matrix on a Zoetrope... Utterly pointless but damned nifty. Sure you had to create a connected series of bluetooth LCD monitors with alternating frames playing back from a 1GB CF drive, but don't it beat all that it works. And that the old macintosh is running the new mac software with a one-week boot time is even cooler and more interesting.
If you want news, go to the BBC. If you want fanatical fandom with no grounding in reality... go to Fox. If you want nifty stuff like discussing the colors of glowsticks in 30 year old movies, you're in the right spot.
I would like to point out that contrary to what the first linked article states, it is actually possible to microwave the hampster in the NES version of Maniac Mansion. They changed this in code for the second printing, which never happened as Maniac Mansion didn't sell well enough.
Agreed. You can get away with a lot more when you're selling a word processor than when you're selling a videogame. Having seen Steam's "performance" over the years, I swore that I would never install it until it became A: minimalist B: stable and C: open to any vendors.
I'd also been planning on buying Half-Life 2 when it was released. But with Doom 3 out and Halo 2 coming out, I don't see how they can require Steam and feel they can get away with it in the competitive marketplace. It's amazing that in this situation Microsoft is actually the non-evil one, but there it is.
I can understand their desire to protect their revenue stream, but not via steam. Don't make me install your poorly written bloated proprietary closed sales gimmock just to play something I've paid you for. Stop being RealPlayer, or suffer their fate.
While Wild Tangent traditionally contained spyware, not adware, I have seen Wild Tangent installations that were responsible for pop-up ads on people's computers.
I think it's safe to put them firmly in the slime-lower-than-dirt category.
Not to mention that having that VC available allows them to eat the costs of a failed development. Now, likely their publisher ate the majority of the costs, but they wouldn't get out of the arrangement without some form of financial punishment. This decision, of course, would be a lot easier to make if you had VC to cover the costs of prototyping a new project.
Sad to tell, but at points in game development you have to throw out things that aren't working. If you wait too long, everything becomes interdependent upon that mistake enough that the only options for dealing with it are throwing out everything, or shipping a substandard game. Lionhead has a name to protect, and it would be foolish of them to Daikatana themselves. And, of course, when you throw out everything in a game due to fundamental design problems, it is good to stand back for a few years to get perspective on the project. Plus saying that you hope to "revive it in the future" is just CYA for "it's dead."
Yes, and in India it would be really bad form to release a game about killing cows. Much like in this country it would be bad to release a game about blowing up Jews.
Being a game developer myself, I listen to the criticisms of my audience. If a sizeable enough portion of them feel that I've insulted their [group] through misrepresentation of [traits of those who define the group], then I've probably [done something really stupid]. Basically every developer I know, from those who do high-level society modeling to those who have to decide how exaggerated to make ethnic differences in character meshes, feel the same way. I don't see why this would be such a hard concept.
While City of Heroes has all of the women be Amazonians in skin-tight spandex, anyone who goes to City of Heroes knows to expect archetypal superhero outfits no more practical than the skirt worn by Zena. While it would be good to see a few nonstandard female characters, the current state melds with the expectations of the players. A Tale in the Desert is known for being an eglatarian perfect society... a society born of the goal of creating a persistent online world devoid of the traditional kill-anything-that-moves mentality of MMPORPGs. It has a reputation as a very Star-Trek like utopia, and it attracts the types of players for whom that would be very important. If this type of thing happened in a MMPORPG version of Manhunt, for example, that self-selected group of players probably wouldn't care. But A Tale in the Dessert is a far more socially aware group of people: they're even aware that they're building a society, and that's a major focus of the society. Sexism doesn't fit A Tale in the Desert, and the developers should have been aware of that.
Saying the market will sort things out is basic lazyness, the modern equivalent of shoot 'em all and let God sort them out. Take responsibility of the decisions that you make, and take the time to think through the ramifications of the decisions others make.
The valid question does arise, though, how far can you go bringing in real world storylines without crossing the line between entertaining and rubbing salt into wounds? Now as a game developer it is impossible to not upset anyone at all and still have compelling content... A character that commits suicide can be completely gripping to one person and too painful to bear for another. But on the other hand there are certain morays that should not be crossed. The Sims 2 will allow you to have homosexual relationships, as that has become basically accepted in society, but it won't let you sleep with your kids. If Malakai The Molester of Children came through ATITD, players would be rightfully outraged. Child molestation is a Moray in this country, and games should only in the most ginger of terms or ways cross any of those lines. Likewise, sexism and racism is a moray to a lot of people, and should be treated as such.
Negative, dangerous, or damaging experiences are a part of a good RPG, but there are fundamental differences between having your virtual town stomped by a dragon, and having your character raped by another character. Encountering sexism wherever you find it is still sexism, be it in a game or in real life, and it has very real negative emotional consequences. To have this not only condoned, but acted by the GM is greatly stepping over the line, and is likely to bring in the undesired emotion of basic outrage.
I can understand how someone crafting the game from a high level could make such a stupid mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a terribly stupid mistake. Put your players in uncomfortable situations, yes, make them face choices that they rather would not want to make. But don't bring people out of the game by doing the kinds of bad emotional things they are attempting to escape and call it entertainment. You could cause discomfort amongst the players by deleting all of their characters, but it would be a stupid thing to do.
That the ATITD community ejected the cad the way they did says more (IMHO) about the game than that he was inserted into the plot.
Now the community is (rightfully) trying to eject the cad that inserted that into the plot... an effort I would totally agree with, if I wasn't so forgiving.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, if RC4 is this much faster, just wait until they get to their Gold Master!
Remember, Capcom got onto this whole Evil / 'Cube kick because it was rehashing games that were mostly available on the PS1, and finding them selling surprisingly well. I don't think anyone expected a port of a PS1 game to generate as much hype or sales as RE:1 did, and with the costs they sunk into it I bet it was one of their most profitable titles for the year. Thanks to that, the 'Cube got more and more entrenched with Resident Evil. Someone probably just came to their senses WRT RE:4, and realized that a PS2 port was not only a viable option, but a good one.
Generally 3rd parties in the industry are platform agnostic, and would be well advised to stay that way.
For one example, DX9 anyone? And you can forget direct music, direct audio, the ass wackbards networking, etc.
Then you would be wrong. Cheney's deferred compensation from Haliburton is a minor concern.
Cheney's deferred compensation is a gross violation of ethical standards. Can I help it if this administration happens to have worse ones?
And I'm sure their parents' parents realize just how little the parents still really know.
Bush is getting his 50% approval rating from somewhere, and I don't think it is college campuses. If I had two kids, a morgage, and a carreer, I doubt I would have the time to follow the hundreds of millions of dollars that is getting funneled to a company who is openly paying the vice president.
Don't forget, they also would need to buy shelf space and promote the things if anyone were to see it, and even basic inventory takes people.
Of course, with CD's and DVD's being around for so long, people forget that Carts are expensive and risky (Capcom lost all of the money it made from Street Fighter 2 on the Genesis carts for SF2:CE).
If each cart sold for 20 dollars, Sierra probably gets about 14 of that, 7 of which might go to manufacturing and Nintendo tax. If they spend 500k on promotion (a small budget), and another 100k on boxes / programming / submitting for approval / etc, that's 600k sunk costs. Assuming no returns, they'll need to sell though a bit under 100k to break even. Of course, if they sell through only half of what they sell-in, they'll be eating all of their potential revenue in returns. If, on the other hand, they sell really well, they stand to make a few hundred k.
Over all, that's not a very good bet for a niche port. And remember, publishers aren't deciding whether or not to make a game based upon whether it will make money, but whether or not it will make more money than all of the other offers they have on the table. Better opportunities were out there. If Sierra thought it was worth it, they would have just paid somebody to make the emulator. 80k is worth it to avoid the legal minefield.
Actually, as this is the good in question, and this is what it's supposed to be a counterfit of. It's pretty clear that US Customs shouldn't have gone anywhere near it. It's not a counterfit if it's not trying to pass as the original, like a Schwatz watch or a Glame Boy Advance. We're talking about the difference between a Rubik's Cube and a Magic Cube, where the term Cube can be accepted as descriptive and the packages don't match.
They also sell metal springs, Chinese Finger Traps, and a whole host of other obviously counterfit products. Just look at that non-pogo brand pogo stick. Devaluing US trademarks by buying generic versions of toys that have been around for generations now... Won't she think of her country? She and those Safeway-brand cereal makers should be shot like the Jap terrorists they are. Did I say Jap? I meant the Arab terrorists. But it's not racist this time, because they are terrorists, the lousy lot of 'em.
"WTF??" is where great underfunding leads.
Our wiki discribes everything from how to setup your development environment to how to use the office coffee machine. It's much easier to keep documentation reasonably up-to-date if anyone can write it, and it is much easier to find information if it doesn't consist of slogging through file heirchies to launch a PDF file. Instead of being 12 months out of date, our Wiki documentation is generally only about 3 months out of date, and the important stuff is actually (gasp!) up to date.
We use MoinMoin Wiki. Good setup, though formatting is a pain and tables are right out.
Exactly. Who are you to question why your god wants you to believe in evolution?
Considering other things he's done with the GBA, I'm sure he'd do a great job with GTA-SP.
Actually, this looks like a bug in their system. The nastygram keeps referring to meta tags/invisible text/header text. They obviously were looking for sites who spam their name all over in order to get a search for "Metroid Prime" to return "PrimePieceofAss.com" (Not a real site. On second thought, it probably is). Here you have something that a kid-safe company would consider adult, with no obvious reason to talk about zelda or metroid, which does, in fact, have a bit on the side about videogames.
It's a misunderstanding. Nintendo's lawyers f*ed up, which wouldn't be the first time this has happened.
Apparently, however, they're not very happy about crossing over into hardcore fantasy.
How long does it take an experience cracker to build a no-CD crack for a game?
Macrovision once estimated the time for an average game at 5 days, and touted that their software pushed that number back an additional week. Actual merits of Safe Disk aside, In the industry one assumes a one to two week window before pirated copies start arriving, unless your game is particularly popular and it gets cracked on release day or even before release.
Having access to the source doesn't really make it any easier for a hacker to deconstruct the workings of the system. Binary Executables are uncompiled all of the time for compatibility purposes, it's really not much of an impediment.
A few months ago thanks to shoddy service and an annoying propensity to charge for everything possible under the sun (Including roaming in my home area, line setup fees when they shut off my phone due to their website frequently dropping payments, etc), I swore I would switch carriers.
Well, that was convienient.
With the exception of World of Warcraft, these are all sequels. They may all be great games, but where are the original ideas?
How do you know an original idea game is going to be great until after it has launched? How about adding to that list
Katamari Damachi
Eyetoy: Antigrav
Donkey Konga
Admittedly, if you look at the latest Game Developer magazine most of the major publishers spend less than 30% of their budgets on original IP, but they exist. This might not be such a bad idea, when great original titles like Black and White sell terribly. Of course Prince of Persia sold terribly as well, despite being A: a sequel B: an awesome game C: heavily advertised. On the other hand Prince of Persia is full of original ideas, it just happened to be a sequal, in the same way that Super Mario Brothers 2 was a sequel to Super Mario Brothers 1.
Look for originality. Buy originality. Promote originality. Stop complaining about a lack of originality. We make all that we can. The rest is in the hands of the consumers who bother to look for the good stuff, and tell other people about it.
Yes, but Zelda is a classic worthy of celebration. Much like how people keep remaking and re-releasing much loved movies and songs, videogames deserve the same treatment. Now, whether they're being remade for the benefit of humanity or because someone wants to feel closer to a classic somehow is another story discussion, but the draw is definitely there.
Plus, it's a great way to get to understand the decisions that went into the creation of the classic without the hassle and failures of from-scratch development. Inventing your own gameplay is fraught with peril, especially as it is a skill people are expected to pick up on their own. This way you deconstruct an existing engine down to the minutest detail, without having to worry about your own design mistakes or lack of available art resources.
And on top of that, they created the engine specifically to allow anyone to design levels for the classic. Imagine if anyone could go back with the original storm trooper outfits and create their own scenes or storylines for starwars. Some of it would be as good as troops, and some of it would be as bad as The Phantom Menace. Certainly letting anyone be a level designer for a classic Miyamoto game is reason enough for the project's existence.
I do agree, though, that it would be nice if there were more original OS games developed, but that doesn't mean classics like this shouldn't get people excited enough to go out and make their own versions.
You have a surprisingly high view of the previous quality of slashdot.
There actually has been at least one story about Windows emulating a Macintosh emulating Windows. And people using virtualizing software to virtualize virtualizing software... Splitting a computer into a client and a server in order to fully tap the potential of XWindows. This is a pretty common theme. Printing out little paper doll versions of printers. Applications that write themselves.
While running a modern OS on an old machine with a 1 hour post time isn't groundbreaking, it is nifty. If you could get a version of Debian running on a Univac, that would be cool. So is this.
The majority of geeks get their world news from one source: Slashdot. All that I can say about that is... STOP DOING THAT! This is a dorky, geeky website about what the SCO lawyers ate for breakfast that morning and building marble runs out of legos.
Because it's neat?
In many ways getting OSX to run on an 040 based Macintosh is like playing the Matrix on a Zoetrope... Utterly pointless but damned nifty. Sure you had to create a connected series of bluetooth LCD monitors with alternating frames playing back from a 1GB CF drive, but don't it beat all that it works. And that the old macintosh is running the new mac software with a one-week boot time is even cooler and more interesting.
If you want news, go to the BBC. If you want fanatical fandom with no grounding in reality... go to Fox. If you want nifty stuff like discussing the colors of glowsticks in 30 year old movies, you're in the right spot.
I would like to point out that contrary to what the first linked article states, it is actually possible to microwave the hampster in the NES version of Maniac Mansion. They changed this in code for the second printing, which never happened as Maniac Mansion didn't sell well enough.
Agreed. You can get away with a lot more when you're selling a word processor than when you're selling a videogame. Having seen Steam's "performance" over the years, I swore that I would never install it until it became A: minimalist B: stable and C: open to any vendors.
I'd also been planning on buying Half-Life 2 when it was released. But with Doom 3 out and Halo 2 coming out, I don't see how they can require Steam and feel they can get away with it in the competitive marketplace. It's amazing that in this situation Microsoft is actually the non-evil one, but there it is.
I can understand their desire to protect their revenue stream, but not via steam. Don't make me install your poorly written bloated proprietary closed sales gimmock just to play something I've paid you for. Stop being RealPlayer, or suffer their fate.
While Wild Tangent traditionally contained spyware, not adware, I have seen Wild Tangent installations that were responsible for pop-up ads on people's computers.
I think it's safe to put them firmly in the slime-lower-than-dirt category.
Not to mention that having that VC available allows them to eat the costs of a failed development. Now, likely their publisher ate the majority of the costs, but they wouldn't get out of the arrangement without some form of financial punishment. This decision, of course, would be a lot easier to make if you had VC to cover the costs of prototyping a new project.
Sad to tell, but at points in game development you have to throw out things that aren't working. If you wait too long, everything becomes interdependent upon that mistake enough that the only options for dealing with it are throwing out everything, or shipping a substandard game. Lionhead has a name to protect, and it would be foolish of them to Daikatana themselves. And, of course, when you throw out everything in a game due to fundamental design problems, it is good to stand back for a few years to get perspective on the project. Plus saying that you hope to "revive it in the future" is just CYA for "it's dead."
In other parts of the world, beef is offensive.
Yes, and in India it would be really bad form to release a game about killing cows. Much like in this country it would be bad to release a game about blowing up Jews.
Being a game developer myself, I listen to the criticisms of my audience. If a sizeable enough portion of them feel that I've insulted their [group] through misrepresentation of [traits of those who define the group], then I've probably [done something really stupid]. Basically every developer I know, from those who do high-level society modeling to those who have to decide how exaggerated to make ethnic differences in character meshes, feel the same way. I don't see why this would be such a hard concept.
While City of Heroes has all of the women be Amazonians in skin-tight spandex, anyone who goes to City of Heroes knows to expect archetypal superhero outfits no more practical than the skirt worn by Zena. While it would be good to see a few nonstandard female characters, the current state melds with the expectations of the players. A Tale in the Desert is known for being an eglatarian perfect society... a society born of the goal of creating a persistent online world devoid of the traditional kill-anything-that-moves mentality of MMPORPGs. It has a reputation as a very Star-Trek like utopia, and it attracts the types of players for whom that would be very important. If this type of thing happened in a MMPORPG version of Manhunt, for example, that self-selected group of players probably wouldn't care. But A Tale in the Dessert is a far more socially aware group of people: they're even aware that they're building a society, and that's a major focus of the society. Sexism doesn't fit A Tale in the Desert, and the developers should have been aware of that.
Saying the market will sort things out is basic lazyness, the modern equivalent of shoot 'em all and let God sort them out. Take responsibility of the decisions that you make, and take the time to think through the ramifications of the decisions others make.
The valid question does arise, though, how far can you go bringing in real world storylines without crossing the line between entertaining and rubbing salt into wounds? Now as a game developer it is impossible to not upset anyone at all and still have compelling content... A character that commits suicide can be completely gripping to one person and too painful to bear for another. But on the other hand there are certain morays that should not be crossed. The Sims 2 will allow you to have homosexual relationships, as that has become basically accepted in society, but it won't let you sleep with your kids. If Malakai The Molester of Children came through ATITD, players would be rightfully outraged. Child molestation is a Moray in this country, and games should only in the most ginger of terms or ways cross any of those lines. Likewise, sexism and racism is a moray to a lot of people, and should be treated as such.
Negative, dangerous, or damaging experiences are a part of a good RPG, but there are fundamental differences between having your virtual town stomped by a dragon, and having your character raped by another character. Encountering sexism wherever you find it is still sexism, be it in a game or in real life, and it has very real negative emotional consequences. To have this not only condoned, but acted by the GM is greatly stepping over the line, and is likely to bring in the undesired emotion of basic outrage.
I can understand how someone crafting the game from a high level could make such a stupid mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a terribly stupid mistake. Put your players in uncomfortable situations, yes, make them face choices that they rather would not want to make. But don't bring people out of the game by doing the kinds of bad emotional things they are attempting to escape and call it entertainment. You could cause discomfort amongst the players by deleting all of their characters, but it would be a stupid thing to do.
That the ATITD community ejected the cad the way they did says more (IMHO) about the game than that he was inserted into the plot.
Now the community is (rightfully) trying to eject the cad that inserted that into the plot... an effort I would totally agree with, if I wasn't so forgiving.