Daily News – Team Bondi, Tattoos, Duke’s Marketing and Puppet StarFox

The latest news from the world of videogames and some puppets.

With the developers of LA Noire, Team Bondi, under investigation by the International Games Developer Association about their employee working conditions, GamesIndustry.Biz [registration required] uncovers the emails that have led to this investigation. Yet another example of why you don’t want to work in the game industry.

The Escapist has a great article that analyses the marketing campaign behind Duke Nukem Forever:

In marketing, this is called a wedge strategy. You create something that will blatantly offend people in order to get two groups fighting about it. This is about manufacturing a controversy. On one side, the defenders are those who are going to buy your game, on the other side are those who’d rather chew glass than buy your game. In so raising the publicity of the fight, media outlets will pick it up, debate it, put in their two cents and be Very Serious and Thoughtful about This Controversial Game.

JP Sherman, Tainted Love: The Marketing of Duke Nukem Forever

Absolute Radio DJ, Pete Donaldson has a cracking new videogame tattoo. Do you recognise the character in question?

For anyone who’s played StarFox 64 on the Nintendo 64, then this brilliant David Bowie/puppets/Starfox mash-up will probably bring back a few memories. For everyone else, go play Starfox 64 :-P

And finally, I’m off to a F1 2011 press preview event tomorrow. We published lots of juicy details on the game in my previous interview with Paul Jeal, Senior Producer of the F1 games at Codemasters. If you’ve any more questions for the development team then post them in the comments please. We will be sure to ask them for you.