Latest Dante's Inferno Stunt Includes Hidden ASCII Art
We've had a few run-ins with EA's rather particular methods of marketing their latest action scythe-em-up, Dante's Inferno. They've included relatively tame challenges to game journalists, including a cake shaped like a human arm for Gluttony, and a random check for Greed. The fan challenge was far more depressing and even dangerous to some industry females, as it rewarded fans at Comic Con for "commiting acts of lust" with the booth babes, a prize which our own PixelPoet politely (but firmly) declined.
Well, EA's back with a more sneaky stunt to promote the game and reward fans, and this time there seems to be almost no potential for sexual harrassment. Good job, guys! Welcome to the 21st Century!
The theme this time is almost a blast from the past - if you remember the scares about subliminal messages and playing records backward to reveal satanic messages, you may be even more worried by the idea that your computer may have downloaded demonic imagery if you've visited sites like IGN, DailyMotion, Kotaku, and Digg in the past couple of days. How to tell if you've been exposed? Just right click and 'view page source.'
As you can see from the Kotaku example, the art appears in ASCII, and is also surrounded by a comment tag so it doesn't actually show in any page. It's entirely hidden, and those who stumble upon it will also find the address of an Inferno-linked site and one of six passwords to enter therein. Hunting down all the hellish text allows players to download a rather large EARTHLY_REWARDS kit with wallpapers, concept art, music, etc. While this likely qualifies even less as an ARG than last week's Heavy Rain reveal, it's still an interesting promo for those dedicated enough to make use of it.
For any others interested in facing damnation, Dante's Inferno will be available tomorrow in the U.S. and saw a release last week in Europe and Australia.
faePuck
Posted to Video Games on 8 February 2010
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: dante's inferno, ea, marketing, ps3, psp, xbox 360
Cleared it in 5 hours DON'T BUY THIS. Rent it. Honestly its an OK-only God of War rip off and its like playing though the version of Outworld from the first Mortal Kombat film.
I returned mine to the shop the day after I got it and told them it was n unwanted gift and got my money back. Please for your own sake use the renting time to decide.