I really hate to criticize IGN. I’ve been visiting the site since around the late 90′s or as I refer to it the 56k days. Unfortunately, they’ve given me reasons to criticize with Matt Casassamina’s latest interview with Denise Kaigler, the Vice President of Corporate Affairs for Nintendo of America (bet she hates repeating that job title).
I’ve read many interviews throughout the years, and this one is basically a mixture of worthlessness and incredible spurts of sensationalism. I won’t get into the details of everything that’s mentioned, but I will talk about two key parts of the interview that left me scratching my head.
First, Matt starts out the interview talking about third party support for the Nintendo Wii. When you hear those thoughts put together, you could place a guranteed bet on what would come up next. ..
‘Why hasn’t M-Rated software been performing well on the Wii’?
*sigh*
The answer of course is just about as obvious as the question, and honestly I’m definitely with Kaigler on this one. She responds…
“When it comes to the games that are delivered to Nintendo platforms by our third-party partners, I would defer you to those companies”
Then a discussion ensues about success of third parties and having a broad audience on the Wii. Kaigler again backs up her view towards third parties’ responsibilities and their own success…
“We’re not saying that certain games can’t succeed on Wii. We want those games. We want people to bring those opportunities to us. So I opened up my answer to your question by saying talk to SEGA, talk to those guys.”
The third party chat isn’t what angered me about the interview, it’s when they began talking about the upcoming E3 conference. Matt went from not giving up on a question, to just wasting interview time. Pretty much every few paragraphs would end with him asking Kaigler about anything she could say about E3. I won’t bother quoting her, but the general answers were no comment, or just wait.
Then the big bomb dropped, and is where the sensationalism found in journalism today (ahh I rhymed) reared its ugly head. She finally reveals some information to Matt about E3. Here’s the couple of sentences I’m referring to…
“First of all, off the record, Matt, can we just shut that off for a second? I rarely do what I’m about to do with you,” she says.
Without delay, I push the pause buttons on my recording devices.
That’s when Kaigler tells me something so megatonian-huge that I dare not repeat it because it would simply blow your mind. You could not handle it, trust me, so don’t even think about it. Put it out of your mind, people.
All right, she doesn’t tell me anything of the sort. But I wish she did. Does that count? “
I think Matt was trying to be funny, but is he joking? Who knows. This of course will lead to some wild speculations brewing across the internet. I’m sure something big will happen at E3, but didn’t we kind of assume that already? Either way, this was very irresponsible journalism and it really disappointed me.
Such a waste of interview time. After your read through of the interview, what were your thoughts on it? Am I making too much of it, or did you find it to be useless and full of hype like I did?
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