BandwidthCamp

David Kushner from Wired magazine has a great piece on the rise and fall of Rockstar Games. The company has always had a bad boy-cum-rebel image and over the years it has only gotten more “pristine”. With their Annual General Meeting and the release of the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4), how they handle themselves will dictate their future.

In the fiscal year following the game’s release, Take-Two’s revenue topped $1 billion. At the same time, the Rockstar brand itself was becoming cool. Rockstar promoted GTA games by plastering stickers all over the city, as if it were a band. Donovan, who ran the marketing arm of the company, helped burnish its outlaw image. While most game companies mail journalists promotional T-shirts, Rockstar’s PR schwag became the stuff of legend: A barbed-wire garrote was sent out to reviewers of Manhunt, a game about a homicidal reality TV show.

The Hot Coffee scene confirmed all of the hysterical, overblown suspicions about Grand Theft Auto. And Rockstar’s publicity department, which in the past had displayed an uncanny knack for building brand mystique, only seemed to exacerbate the outrage. “Blaming it on hackers was a colossal PR screwup,” says Corey Wade, a former senior product manager at Rockstar.

Many want to oust CEO Paul Eibeler and bring in a new board. Regardless of what happens, make sure to check out the new trailer tonight. Wired’s Game|Life blog will have updates of both the meeting and trailer throughout the day.

[update 1] New York Times is reporting who is in and who is out at Take-Two.

What can only be a last minute stunt for the desperate camp of Sony. The PlayStation 3 went on sale in Europe recently and as the clock closed in on mid-night Sony UK boss Ray Maguire decided to give away some 46″ Bravia Televisions.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz a spokesperson for the high street retailer said, “The stunt of giving away over £200,000 worth HDTVs, though great for the fans that managed to get one, struck me as being slightly unnecessary in the greater scheme of things - especially as it may have encouraged some of the more cynical media to think of it as a last-minute attempt to bolster queues and PR coverage.”

A few blogs and the press are talking about the stunt, but I don’t think it’s to the level that Sony Europe thought they would get. The stunt does certainly come across as forced and a last minute effort to boost sales of the ill PlayStation 3. I think the $200,000 could have been better spent on other PR/marketing initiatives and not wasted on the televisions. How many people are going to blog about the PS3 because they got a TV out of the deal? The ROI isn’t going to be to high for the launch this past weekend.

Telefilm just announced the second round winners for The Great Canadian Video Game Competition. The Round 2 winners are as follows:

The names of the four Round 2 winning companies (followed by location, project name and platform) are:

• Big Blue Bubble, London, Ontario, Hobby Shop, console;
• Cerebral Vortex Games, St. Catharines, Ontario, Ambush! Trivia, PC/Mobile/Xbox Live Arcade;
• MindHabits Inc., Montreal, Quebec, MindHabits Trainer, handheld; and
• Hothead Games Inc., Vancouver, B.C., SWARM!, PC.

About the Competition
The Competition is made possible through Telefilm Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada New Media Fund and the sponsorship of industry partners Electronic Arts, Radical Entertainment and Ubisoft. Event sponsors include BC Film, Electronic Arts, New Media BC, New Media Business Alliance, Ontario Media Development Corporation and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Media sponsors include Electric Playground and G4Tech TV.

The Great Canadian Video Game Competition provides a needed opportunity for Canadian game developers to build their own capacity and original intellectual property. Competition information, including company profiles, is available at www.telefilm.gc.ca/game.

I’ve been following the competition since it has been announced. Hothead Games and Big Blue Bubble are two company’s that I thought would make it to Round 2 because of their experience more then their game ideas. I was hoping HB Studios & TPB Productions would make it to Round 2 as they were making a console game based off of the Trailer Park Boys… but that didn’t happen. I think the competition is a great idea, however, I do have one problem with it. The winners seem to lean towards more experience then a good game idea, IMO. Which is more important, the teams experience or their IP?

BoingBoing points to some refreshing videos showing “a series of short animation/games that set out to explain how and why video games work — what they’re composed of, how they’re played, and how they’re designed.”

GamesRadar has posted a feature on what could be describe as one of the best lists featuring the worst PR disasters of the last few years. I found the list funny as it was a good ride down memory lane. Some tasty quotes from the article:

It’s one thing for a PR disaster to drag down a company. It’s quite another for one to start a serious movement for censorship of videogames at the highest levels of American government, and the infamous Hot Coffee mod did both.

AND

Whatever the case, BMX XXX wasn’t enough to save Acclaim. But the company wasn’t quite ready to give up on shock, either, and Acclaim is still infamous today for its tasteless UK publicity stunts. First, it offered a cash prize to anyone who would agree to have an ad for Shadow Man: 2econd Coming engraved onto their relatives’ tombstones. Then, the company offered prizes to any five people willing to change their names to “Turok” for a year. Finally, another prize was offered, this time to anyone who’d have a baby on Sept. 1, 2002, and name it “Turok.” And then there’s the guy in the photo above, an Acclaim shill who tried to generate interest in Turok: Evolution by pretending to line up in front of a store for it prior to its release - something no unpaid person would ever do.

On what other list would you find Sony PlayStation not once but twice. Sony, school is in session and I hope you are taking notes.