Great opinion article by Chris Hecker’s about his comments taken out of context, poorly reported and generally the stupidity of the gaming press. I have dozens of articles I read about how bad it is, but it is nice to read one from someone affected by just how ridiculous it is.
2 thoughts on “Chris Hecker Just Can’t Get a Break”
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I was at the rant panel when Chris talked about the Wii, and his point about context is absolutely correct. The way that his statements were used by gaming websites as grist to generate hits by stirring up fanboy “debate” (term used in the most charitable sense) would be hilarious if it wasn’t so alarming.
One other aspect that nobody has mentioned (including Chris) is that he had already ranted about the PS3 and 360 at the previous year’s GDC, talking about the differences between in-order and out-of-order processors and how the technical decisions behind the design of these consoles might be detrimental to developers. He even mentioned at the beginning of his Wii rant that a big part of the impetus for picking on Nintendo was simply because he had left them out of his rant last year, and he felt it was only fair to spread his criticism equally. But of course, none of the journalists mentioned that little preamble as it would only undermine their attempts to demonize him and portray him as a straw man nemesis to the Nintendo faithful.
Cool additional info Jamey, I didn’t realise he also had a go at the Xbox and PlayStation, interesting how that also was ignored.
It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so common just to get page hits – I can’t think of any other reason to misquote and be actually wrong so often; it surely can’t be unintentional.