Here's something funny, not related to any of the current goings on though. So I was looking up the game
Portal Runner trying to see if it's something worth playing (
Anyone here play it? ), and found out that it ran into a little controversy back in 2001. The short is that one magazine, GamePro, gave the game a low rating:
https://archive.is/XR1fR
In response to this, 3DO's president, Trip Hawkins, sent a nasty-gram to the magazine telling them that they played the game wrong, didn't review it "correctly", and 3DO is pulling all their advertising from GamePro:
https://archive.is/MuoeT
Reading some of the letter, you wouldn't think this was over 20 years ago, but here you go:
<The audience for games no longer consists of one iconic block of angry young men who cannot get a date on Saturday night. Reviewers who don't consult with the game publisher about the intended audience, and don't attempt to position a game in terms of who might like it and who might not like it, are unprofessional. I furthermore propose as a solution the idea that you assign a journalist during the preview stage of a game, and provide professional follow thru by having that same journalist write the review. In the case of Portal Runner, we had some ambition to reach a wider audience. We wanted to include boys, girls, women, and casual gaming men. I know from firsthand experience that Portal Runner is a hit with all of those market segments. Many of your readers are in those segments. But your reviewers are not. Meanwhile, I personally think we made a game that hard-core adult male gamers would enjoy. But I can understand that some of them would reject it the same way some adults reject Shrek or Beethoven. But personally, I think that really means there is something wrong with a man like that, not with Portal Runner.