Alternate title for this was “Oh IGN”, but this isn’t entirely IGN’s fault (maybe…it could actually be all their fault), but while showing some people the rumored Factor 5 Kid Icarus game I stumbled on this Joystiq article talking about IGN’s Matt Casamassina “confirmed” a Kid Icarus for the Wii.
Pit looks uh...different.
Take a look at the date of that article, May 8th, 2008. This was the year of the really awful Nintendo E3 where the best we saw was the Wii Motion Plus. I think the big surprise title was actually Animal Crossing City Folk, but as I was researching what happened during that E3 I was only left to wonder. How did anyone on IGN mess this up? I mean, it’s pretty big talk when you say “hey, this game is confirmed” and then not only does nothing happen, but nothing happens for 4 years and it comes out on a console that no one was aware of back then, by basically a studio that didn’t exists, (Project Sora came about in 2009) in which we wouldn’t get a trailer until 2011.
Now, I’m pretty sure Cassamassina was talking about Factor 5, the developer of the Star Wars Rogue Squadron series that was later bankrupt after an unsuccessful launch of Lair. To my understanding though, the game was super early in production and without Nintendo’s approval. Factor 5 was most likely getting ready to pitch a possible Kid Icarus game to Nintendo, of which rumors of it were floating around that same time and later models were eventually leaked/revealed. This isn’t an uncommon practice for game developers who want to work with a license and so I do kind of shake my head at a major source of gaming news, or at least someone working within them to be on some kind of show, not knowing what is pretty much standard procedure for development. Especially since the game never seemed to get pitched, or maybe was even shot down, how it can be confused for a totally confirmed, going to happen kind of game is WAY beyond me. If this was some random blogger, I would suspect a trolling, but again, major source of gaming news should probably know the difference between a rumor and confirmation, and should maybe know a little more into how games are made…that might actually help in understanding them.
Also yes…it’s a slow day for extra credit.
