Poll Was Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning last generation's P.T.? (114 votes)
I spent a good chunk of my weekend playing Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and one of the thoughts I had as I jammed on the roll button like a maniac is that there are a surprising number of similarities to P.T.
Now I realize that the games themselves aren't similar at all, and I get that there are other very significant differences (P.T. was free, Amalur was full price; P.T. was the greatest thing ever, Amalur is just so-so) but there are also some pretty weird similarities:
- Both were released as appetizers for forthcoming huge budget games.
- Both were very different from the games they were intended as appetizers from (Kingdoms of Amalur would have been an MMO, Silent Hills would have been third person)
- Both were under the auspices of famous people from outside the world of games (I know Kojima is obviously a games guy, no matter what Jeff says, but I'm talking about Schilling and Del Toro)
- Both preceded by less than a year the meltdown and destruction of the studios making the big games they were supposed to generate hype for, and in both cases the studio's collapse had nothing to do with the quality or reception of the 'teaser' game.
I just think it's interesting that you have these two games both released to create hype for big projects that almost immediately collapsed in a spectacular way. I can't think of many examples of these types of teaser games existing at all (Japanese studios sometimes release 'prologue' games, like Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes or Gran Turismo prologues, but those are more glorified demos than totally different games intended to generate hype for a bigger project.)
Are there examples of these types of unrelated 'hype' games actually working out? Is it a sign of trouble if a studio feels the need to hype a big project through an unrelated game? Is it just a weird coincidence?
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