Visceral Games and EA certainly haven’t eschewed controversy with their upcoming game Dante’s Inferno. In only six months their shock and awe tactics have included:
- Giving gamers $6.66 preorder promotion if you bought it on September 9th
- Bribing game critics by including a $200 check and the following note with review copies:
In Dante’s Inferno, Greed is a two-headed beast. Hoarding wealth feeds one beast, and squandering it satiates the other. By cashing this check you succumb to avarice by hoarding filthy lucre, but by not cashing it, you waste it, and thereby surrender to prodigality. Make your choice and suffer the consequence for your sin. And scoff not, for consequences are imminent.
- Hiring a group of fake religious protesters to picket against the game outside of E3 earlier this year.
- Encouraging attendees at Comic-Con to commit “Acts of Lust” on booth babes at the show and post photos of their act via Twitter, Facebook or email to win “a night with the hottest girl at Comic-Con, dinner, booty and more.”
No matter your ethical opinions on these marketing tactics, they’ve been brilliantly successful at getting immense amounts of attention from gaming press and consumers alike. For some, however, their newest move may cross a very real ethical line in the sand.
Gaming site UGO reports:
Dante’s Inferno’s Executive Producer Jonathan Knight reveals his game too will include an achievement for killing kiddies. The “Bad Nanny” Achievement will be rewarded to the player whom slaughters a yet undetermined number of unbaptized infants.
Original sin’s a bitch. And to be fair, the little ones do have knives for arms.
This story broke at midnight this morning and there’s already been an outcry about the achievement. Many people are offended by the move—and we’re not just talking about International Nanny Association (INA)—but rather gaming sites like Joystiq.
With this kind of content, many speculate that the game could end up with an ‘AO’ (Adult Only) rating. It’s pretty clear that they could not be successful in the gaming market without distribution of major retailers that refuse to sell games rated worse then ‘M.’
One thing is for sure–there’s no question that this move will garner even more attention for the game.
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