Modern Warfare 2: Really worth the hype?

Hype is surely the most effective marketing tool in any company’s utility belt.  When the public are so excited about an upcoming product that they are willing to trawl the Internet for a slightly higher definition version of the teaser trailer and flood Amazon with their pre-order cash before a release date has been announced, you know you’re onto a winner.

This year there has surely been no single work of entertainment that has induced such ravenous hype as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game has now been available in stores for almost a month, sales figures are astronomical and the servers are filled with happy gamers. But, is the game really worth the extraordinary amount of hype that precluded its release?

The hype machine for Modern Warfare 2 first kicked into gear on March 25 of this year when the teaser trailer containing the now infamous line “Remember, no Russian” (more on that later) was first shown at San Francisco’s Game Developer Choice Awards. I could not name a category from the Awards show, never mind a winner. The big news from the show was that Modern Warfare 2, sequel to the amazing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, was on the way.  More trailers, interviews and gameplay clips were released at a steady clip as the months rolled by, all of them doing downloads in the hundreds of thousands. The game was secure at the top of every gamer’s to-buy list.

Several weeks before release news hit headlines of the infamous “No Russian” mission. In this mission players take on the role of an undercover CIA agent infiltrating a group of Russian terrorists as they massacre civilians in an airport. The player can choose to join in on the civilian shooting gallery or just watch it unfold. Multiple times before reaching this stage the game warns you of its disturbing content and gives you the option to skip, but this didn’t stop the media circus. The controversy even sparked discussion in the House of Commons. True to form, The Daily Mail had a lot to say about it at the time and Sam Leith’s review of the game on their website is 435 words long, 269 of which are dedicated to describing the scene in detail and piously condemning it. Still, if the Grand Theft Auto series has taught us anything it is that moral outrage does little to hurt a game’s sales and can indeed be an important cog in the hype machine.

On 10 November the game was released. To date it has had the biggest launch in entertainment history, grossing more on its first day than Grand Theft Auto 4, The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I, like many gamers, was lined up behind the counter of my local Blockbuster waiting to get my hands on it. Unfortunately due to a broken right hand induced by an angered punch to a couch sparked by an accidental bite of the lip whilst eating a lovely slice of bread pudding (true story), I was not able to play the game very much during that first week but since I have made up for lost time.

What I can safely say after my time with it is that the game is superb. The graphics are gorgeous, the controls are unmatched and the game runs at a surprisingly solid framerate. So, does it live up to all this immense hype? The issue here is not with the game itself but with the whole phenomenon of hype. How can anything justify such borderline hysteria without being some kind of cultural revolution? Surely hype should come after release when people have been exposed to the final product, reviews are up and word of mouth has spread.

At the age of eleven I was personally stung by this phenomenon for the first time. It was 1997 and toys, fast food promotions and television specials were abundant for the ill-fated Joel Schumacher opus, Batman and Robin. Finally the film hit theatres and even at eleven years old it struck me as a camp load of nonsense. The next year TriStar Pictures began marketing Godzilla and the whole process began again. Modern Warfare 2 is certainly not a Batman and Robin situation. The game is excellent, but I am still left somewhat cold and empty, like a child on Christmas morning whose toy fire engine is great, but doesn’t fulfil his every dream as he had hoped. I have once again been battered with the hard lesson that hype is not intense public excitement for a product that has proven its worth, but the workers’ tool of the skilled marketing executive.

Those of you who have yet to learn the brutal lesson of succumbing to hype only to have your dreams shattered may not need wait too long. James Cameron’s Avatar is just around the corner…

Jim Dixon

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Tags: Afghanistan, Gaming, Technology

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.