Mountain carving gaming stunt splits opinion
By Rich Leigh on Friday, February 3, 2012
To celebrate the launch of fighting game SoulCalibur V for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Namco Bandai called on stone engraver Goran Andersson to create a permanent carving of characters Mitsurugi and Pyrrha into a mountain in Tanum, Sweden.
Namco Bandai enlisted the help of SavedInStone, who have engraved the characters on their mountain close to a UNESCO World Heritage Site filled with Bronze Age stone carvings.
Marketing director Lee Kirton said: ‘Everyone knows the SoulCalibur characters are among the hardest fighters in gaming – so we’ve decided to immortalise them in granite for thousands of years.’
Despite a huge amount of coverage, the stunt hasn’t pleased everybody, with MSN gaming blogger Simon ‘PsiMonk’ Munk even going as far as to pronounce it (and a number of other recent marketing efforts for the game) reason not to buy the game, calling it the ‘stupidest PR stunt in some time’.
