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Peter Molyneux's Godus Isn’t The First High Profile Gaming Contest To Implode
This week hasn’t been a terribly good one for Peter Molyneux and his 22 Cans studio. Yesterday, we spoke to him about the status of Godus, following a video intended to smooth things over with fans.
With damage control underway, another blow was dealt this morning in an interview with Bryan Henderson. Henderson was the “winner” of the Curiosity contest, which was supposed to yield him power in the game and real-world wealth. Neither of these things have happened, and they can’t until and unless 22 Cans gets multiplayer working.
This situation brought to mind other high-profile gaming contests that simply imploded. Godus isn’t alone, but as you’ll see from the following examples, it’s not in good company.
Advent Rising and the disappearing $1 million
In 2005, Majesco released an ambitious game called Advent Rising. To promote the title, the publisher announced an equally ambitious lure: $1 million in cash prizes.
For each of six weeks following the game’s launch, developer GlyphX Games would hide the game’s logo in one of the levels. The first to uncover the icon would get a prize.
No money was ever awarded, as the contest was canceled mid-way through. At the time, Majesco was suffering some financial problems (not an uncommon state of affairs for the currently ailing company). However, the stated reason for pulling the plug were technical issues leading to an inability to provide an assurance of fairness.
While participants did walk away with a couple of free games (hopefully contestants all chose Psychonauts), questions still linger. Did Majesco really not have a plan in place to accurately certify the winner, or did the publisher make a promise it simply wasn’t able to keep financially?
You could have won a role in The Mask II… except that movie never happened
Sometimes its not the fault of game companies when contests go awry. Destructoid recently recounted the tale of a Nintendo Power contest that offered one lucky fan a role in the follow-up to Jim Carrey’s The Mask.
As you might recall, The Mask II was never filmed (much later, Son of the Mask was released). Jim Carrey declined to reprise the bombastic lead role, and the concept fell apart.
Ultimately, that meant that the winner, Nathan Runk, never got his time in the spotlight. Instead, he received a letter from THQ (the publisher of The Mask video game), a jacket from the canceled film, and some of THQ’s Super Nintendo titles.
In its final issue, the topic came up, as did a public apology for the first time in 17 years. You can read the full story on Destructoid.
And sometimes companies just have terrible ideas…
Would you change your name to help advertise a game? How about endow your child with a specific appellation just to make some bank?
Acclaim put £5,000 ($10,000) on the table as an offer to parents in the UK if they chose to name their child born on September 1, 2002, “Turok.” Turok: Evolution was scheduled for release on that date, and the publisher set up a website to pre-register parents.
It was planning to award the funds to the first baby born on that date, provided the parents signed a legally binding letter of intent. We couldn’t find any record of parents taking the company up on the offer, but it really doesn’t matter.
The game was already out by that point, and the buzz from the stunt did its job. Of course, this wasn’t the most absurd thing that Acclaim did before it went out of business.
Acclaim offered to pay UK families of the recently deceased to put billboards on their loved ones’ headstones to promote Shadow Man: 2econd Coming. As you can imagine, the Church of England took issue with that. “There was enough fuss with plastic flowers in churchyards,” a church spokesperson told The Guardian at the time.
One of Acclaim’s last bits of poor decision-making was rebranding a follow-up to Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX as BMX XXX. Nudity and sexual content abounded, Mirra sued to separate himself from the embarrassing project, and ultimately, the game flopped. Acclaim certainly will be remembered, but probably not how everyone associated with it would like.
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