Over on MTV's Multiplayer blog, Stephen Totilo poses the question: Who the hell knows what a Quick Time Event is? His query results from Microsoft's use of the phrase as back-of-box marketing copy on the Ninja Blade retail package, shot of which I have included below. It looks a little out of place even to me, and I've been familiar with its usage in the gaming context since Shenmue coined the term more than eight years ago.
(Whether the inclusion of QTEs is actually a good reason to play a game is questionable, but that's beside the point.)
I direct Mr. Totilo and anyone else interested to our Quick Time Event wiki page as evidence that people do know about QTEs; enough people, at least, to fill out a wiki about them and identify 87 games (and counting) that contain them. As mentioned on that page, Quick Time Events have been around since the original Dragon's Lair hit arcades way back in the '80s. Come to think of it, that game was nothing but QTEs. And it wasn't very good. But who doesn't have fond memories of Dirk the Daring anyway?
Speaking of crappy QTE-based games, I'm going to nominate Time Traveler as the single worst use of Quick Time Events in history.
To be fair, there's probably not a ton of overlap between the kinds of people using Giant Bomb's database, and the kinds of people who walk into retail stores and make purchasing decisions based on the features listed on game boxes. Considering Ninja Blade's other selling points are the slightly strange "Ninja Vision" and the utterly boilerplate "Extreme Action," maybe this particular case speaks more to the game's dearth of bankable features than anything else.