This box office showdown could not have ended more poetically. The culmination of a calculated, well thought-out, brilliantly creative production strategy by Marvel- and a movie named after a board game that has nothing to do with the actual board game. Between this and The Hunger Games giving Twilight the boot, maybe there’s hope for Hollywood yet….
This dude combined a graphic novel, a rap album, and a video game. It’s like Lupe Fiasco meets Scott Pilgrim. Only less Canadian. What makes it even cooler is that the overarching story is semi-autobiographical- so it’s got that personal touch that’s always a hallmark of special projects in games, comics, and music.
With financ…
I don’t know how Kotaku’s Bashcraft digs up great stories like this, but damned if he hasn’t done it again.
As it turns out, having an “$” in your name makes it a whole lot easier to be generous in paying for your mistakes, as evidenced by “Micro$oft”‘s latest in a series of costly apologies to customers. When called out over a bug which disabled the split-screen multiplayer feature of the 360 release of Minecraft for some users, Xbox corporate offered affected users a full refund. Say what you will about the Microsoft company history, but their Games Division’s ability to guilt trip their higher-ups into doing right by their mistakes continues to impress me.
As a soon-to-be-former RIT student(!), I’ve interacted with Microsoft’s games division on multiple occasions. Far from representing the cutthroat corporate culture the company became synonymous with in the 1990’s, these Microsoft guys were relaxed, fun, innovative, creative… the total antithesis of the Microsoft I grew up with.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in their reaction to the homebrewing cottage industry which sprang up in the wake of Kinect’s release. 90’s Microsoft would’ve responded with Cease-and-Desist’s; last year’s Microsoft cheered on when a tech company put out a bounty to the first person or group to successfully create open-source drivers for the peripheral (although to be fair, they did flip-flop a bit first). 90’s M$ would have bought out all the startups working with their licensed tech, and gutted them; today’s MS houses several companies working on Kinect apps.
They may not be perfect, but I think Microsoft deserves a decent amount of credit for trying to change their ways, and for giving the Xbox division the freedom it needs to earn the trust and respect of this generation of gamers.
100 years later, the shadow of the Great Bambino still looms tall over baseball.
What Is?
Hey! I'm Mike, this is my blog. and my dream is to use my middling tech skills to make the world a better place (not in the techno-libertarian, "the world is a better place if I get mine" sense, but in the actual, "I want to help" sense).
