A nasty critique of Conduit 2 was followed by negative comments about the reviewer's book on Amazon.com.
Image courtesy High Voltage

A leaked e-mail suggests that employees at videogame developer High Voltage might have “Amazon-bombed” the book of a reviewer who panned one of the studio’s games.

Freelance reviewer T. Michael Murdock reamed Conduit 2 earlier this month on gaming blog Joystiq, giving the Wii shooter one star out of five. Within a day, several negative reviews sprang up on the Amazon.com listing for Murdock’s book, The Dragon Ruby, which is linked in the writer’s Joystiq byline. Some of the reviews have since been deleted.

An internal High Voltage e-mail, written by Conduit 2 art director Matt Corso and discovered by the Marooners’ Rock website, suggests that the studio might be involved in a retaliatory campaign.

“Michael was kind enough to recently provide us with a Conduit 2 review,” Corso says in the e-mail. “And so in turn you all should feel at liberty to (of course read it first) and then return the favor by writing a reader review for Michael’s book for him.”

The world of videogame journalism is filled with shady relationships and deals, from questionable paid junkets for reviewers to selective looks at pre-release games. But calling upon a game studio’s employees to smear a reviewer’s other work takes the dubiousness to a new, strangely personal level that could cause all sorts of problems — if reviewers aren’t honest due to fear of developer retaliation, everybody suffers.

Wired.com spoke to High Voltage Chief Creative Officer Eric Nofsinger, who confirmed the e-mail’s validity but said he doubted that any of the studio’s employees followed through on Corso’s suggestion.

“I think he wrote it in a very tongue-in-cheek kinda way,” Nofsinger said. “We would want to never attack anyone for their opinions on a game.”

Nofsinger also pointed out that Corso was not the only one to bring up the idea, referencing several message board posts that suggested bombarding Murdock’s Amazon page with bad reviews. Fans of Conduit 2 expressed outrage at Murdock’s negative critique on a number of websites, including Joystiq’s forums and GameFAQs.com.

“At the bottom of the review the author has a link to his book on Amazon,” one GameFAQs user wrote several hours after Murdock’s review went live. “I say we spam his book with negative reviews.”

Nofsinger criticized Murdock’s review of Conduit 2, calling it “poor form and childish,” but said he did not think that warranted a “poor-form retaliation.” Some of the developers were particularly upset at Murdock for giving away the game’s ending, Nofsinger said.

Both Nofsinger and Corso apologized for the e-mail’s contents.

‘They’re trying to get their hands out of the cookie jar before they get smacked.’

“My mind really wasn’t in that dark of a place when I wrote that,” Corso said in a statement to various media outlets including Wired.com. “In fact I seriously considered buying the book myself. I wanted to know how good it really was that this guy felt so in the right to trash our game and give away the ending like he did. And then post a plug to his book at the end, implying that we suck and he is totally great.”

Murdock criticized the apology, calling parts of it “lunacy” in an e-mail to Wired.com and saying that he had not had any contact with anybody from High Voltage.

“They don’t honestly care about what happened, and they’re trying to get their hands out of the cookie jar before they get smacked,” Murdock said. “They simply have no remorse for what they’ve done, and they think the industry and everyone else will just laugh it off. I hope that doesn’t happen. A game company shouldn’t just keep shooting themselves in the foot, hoping their limp goes away.”