10 Things EA Wants You To Forget

9. Staging Fake Religious Protests To Promote Dante's Inferno

Rather than, I dunno, showing more trailers, EA marketed Dante's Inferno with "Nine months of Hell", where each month would be themed around a different topic.

In amongst all this was EA hiring a number of actors to stage a fake religious protest at E3, including the golden slogan "Trade in your PlayStation for a Praystation", and "Hell is not a video game", attempting to start a media fire around the game being boycotted. This drew the ire of many religious groups, who claimed they were being misrepresented and pigeonholed into an unfair stereotype of "priggish, thin-skinned fun-killers."

In the "month of anger", EA sent out "care packages" to various perturbed bloggers comprising a hammer inside a box that played Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" on loop. Recipients had to bash the box into pieces to get it to stop, which certainly got some of them talking, but wasn't the best use of anyone's time.

Worst of the lot was lust-fuelled "Sin to Win" booth at Comic-Con 2009, where EA hired a number of "booth babes" you could pose with to win "a chest full of booty". Nothing like tapping back into that age-old, "All gamers are grotty basement-dwellers!" shtick, right?