OK. I’ve been product-pitched by PR companies as a (sort-of) journalist many times. I have been pitched as a blogger a few times.
This week’s malarkey is a new thing entirely. A teaser/blogger-outreach campaign.
On Monday I received a plain brown envelope.
It contained a blacked out memo, but the remaining words revealed something about a military operation. Ooooh! There was a little brown envelope, too. What’s inside?? Oooh a mobile phone SIM card!
Plug it into my phone immediately, of course!
Oh
Nothing.
No top secret texts.. no nothing. No credit on the pay-as-you-go SIM either.
Meanwhile, my clever assistant was all over the memo and thought enough to google the word ‘nanosuit’, one of the few remaining legible words on the memo. There’s a new game coming out today called Crysis that involves the protagonist wearing a nanosuit. It has to be them behind this, since any other mention of ‘nanosuit’ on the web is about science and that.
Next day. I’m thinking they might send me a phone to put that SIM card into! Woo hoo! Errr.. no. I get an email (once it came out of the spam bin) from a ‘top-secret’ website saying they need help with an audio file. There’s a link to a deliberately unfinished site, so you go straight into the file browser. Lots of areas are inaccessible, what with this being top-secret. I poke about a bit, as you do. Eventually, I find an mp3 file — aha — that must be it!
I download it. My computer plays that format in iTunes. It’s called ‘Crysis — final — approved’ in the title bar. It contains some audio of combat footage and some guy talking about being behind enemy lines (or something). I am not at all sure how I am supposed to help them with this. Run it through some audio filters, perhaps?
Very top secret, then.
And I am supposed to write about the launch of your game because…? It’s not about anything that this blog is supposed to be about. I know I make exceptions sometimes, but come on?
P.S. Yes, I have written about it anyway and, yes, free stuff is always welcome so long as I am allowed to be sarcastic about it. Drew reckons it’s “Very cool and slick”, so maybe I’m just a grumpy bastard.
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I think a lot of people we’re unimpressed by the idea:
http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/11/a-strange-thing.html
Thanks for the link, Duncan. I’ll watch out for others. I just don’t get why they thought ‘any old blogger’ (viz. me) would give them positive press for the game. (We’re all game-obsessed nerds, maybe?)
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