I don't know if anyone else watches
the reality show The Apprentice. Well, in this year’s series, the contestants
were given the task of creating a video game. And one of the games created
was called "Artic Saviou"r. Not "Arctic", as in the North Pole - no, the team
misspelled the word as "Artic". And none of the contestants noticed
this mistake until it was too late. Now, I think most people watching were thinking to
themselves, "That could never happen with a real videogame!" But I’m afraid you’d be wrong, there.
You see, in the last 15 years, huge developer Capcom somehow made TWO disastrous mistakes on
two different games. On one game, they left a watermark on the front of the game box. And on the
other game, they misspelled the game’s title on the side of the box. Today, let's look at how both
of these extremely funny mistakes happened, and how people reacted when they found out the video
game they just bought had a typo in its name! Part 1: The Watermark First of all, let’s go back to the year 2006,
when I was a mere 4 years old, and Capcom had just released a game called Okami. Now, Okami is
this super artful game directed by Hideki Kamiya, the man who would later create Bayonetta.
And as I said, Okami was created by Capcom, but it was actually created by a specific
team inside Capcom called Clover Studio. Not long after Okami was released for the
Playstation 2, Clover Studio was shut down, and all of its developers left the company. Which
left Capcom with a problem. They wanted to bring Okami to Nintendo’s new console, the Wii, but none
of the game’s original developers worked at the company anymore. So, Capcom had to find another
group of devs willing to take on the project. And the studio they picked was an American
studio called Ready at Dawn. Pretty quickly, Ready at Dawn realised that porting Okami
to the Wii would be much much more difficult than they first thought. And that is because
when Okami’s original developers left Capcom, Capcom somehow ended up losing most of the
game’s files in the process! The head of Capcom USA at the time explained, “The first drop
of assets we got from Japan were incomplete. Very incomplete. So we had to [ask Capcom in
Japan] to go prodding through old hard drives and old computers to see if the assets could be
located anywhere. We got a second asset drop, which got us most of the missing stuff back, but
there were still a few bits missing.” In the end, Ready at Dawn ended up having to recreate
quite a few art assets from the ground up! But, the team pulled through, and in early
2008, Okami was released for the Nintendo Wii. Except, on release day, players started
noticing something wrong with the game. Or rather, with the game’s box. At first
glance, this box looks perfectly normal, but if you zoom in right here… there’s an IGN
watermark on the cover! IGN, the video game news website - their watermark can be seen clearly on
the front of Okami’s box! The only explanation for this bizarre occurrence is that whoever
created the design for Okami’s box art actually copied one of the images from IGN’s website,
without noticing IGN’s watermark on the image! At the time, one player posted online, “How the
hell did that happen seriously? Just check my box, why is the IGN logo doing there? Capcom asking
assets from IGN cause they lost their artwork?” And yeah, that does seem like the most
likely answer. Capcom didn’t have a lot of the original art from Okami, so perhaps IGN’s
website really was the best place to find art to put on the game’s cover! Of course,
there was outrage when this was discovered, and credit to Capcom, they responded quickly
and well, posting on their official blog: “I can honestly say that my worst
day at Capcom was this Monday. After releasing Okami for the Wii last week to
some great reviews, one of our Okami diehard fans discovered that the folks who work here at
Capcom are, in fact, human and can make mistakes. I’m speaking of the watermark that
appeared on the cover of Okami. It’s sadly one of those things that’s hard to
spot if you don’t know what your looking for, but the moment you see it, it becomes
obvious and stares you in the face. As fans know, the real art of Okami is on
the game disc itself, but given the artistic nature of this game, we’d like the outside of
the box to match the beauty contained within. To that end, we’re offering a free make-good gift
to our fans. If you purchased Okami for the Wii, for a limited time, you can choose
from one of the three art pieces below and Capcom will ship a high-quality version
of the box cover straight to your door. Thanks again for being a fan
of both Capcom and Okami!” However, Capcom’s problems weren’t quite over
yet. There were big delays in shipping out these replacement covers to everyone who filled out
the form. So, in the end, as one final apology, Capcom didn’t just send out the one cover
people picked, they sent everyone a copy of each of the three new game covers. I think you can
probably see that Capcom handled this situation pretty well. However, you would think that
after this disaster, they’d be pretty careful to make sure nothing like it could ever
happen again. Uh, cut to 4 years later… Part 2: The Typo So, the year is now 2012, and Capcom is
developing the next game in their super successful Resident Evil series. This new game is
being developed for Nintendo’s handheld console, the 3DS. Apparently the development team hoped
that the 3D effect of the 3DS would make the game even scarier! Anyway, the name of this
game-in-progress was Resident Evil: Revelations. Even in Japan, that Revelations subtitle is
spelt out phonetically as an English word. Now, in early January, early copies of the game
were sent out in North America to game reviewers, so that they had time to review the game before it
launched the following month. And straight away, those game reviewers noticed a glaring issue on
the side of the box. “Resident Evil: Revelaitons”, it said. I’m not even sure how to pronounce
that… “Revelaitons”? Journalist Dan Ackerman at CNET posted this picture, with the caption,
“Just got Resident Evil: Revelations for 3DS, and they misspelled the name on the side of the
case”. Pretty soon, it became obvious that this was not an isolated incident. Capcom immediately
put out a statement apologising for their mistake, but their problems weren’t quite over yet. On
their blog, Caopcom explained that the entire initial shipment of games to North America
had this issue, which added up to about 90,000 boxes! 90,000 people would pick up their copy
of Resident Evil: Revelations and notice at some point that the side of the box said Revelaitons
instead. In that same blog post, Capcom offered customers a replacement cover for the game with
the typo fixed, just like with Okami, but they also said this: “If you do wind up demanding a
corrected sleeve, keep the one with the typo: It might turn into a collector's item one day,
and then you can sell it for countless millions”. But how on Earth did this typo even happen? Well, here’s what one of Capcom’s higher-ups
- Christian Svensson - had to say about it: “I can’t even tell you how many people looked at
that package and approved it. Nintendo of America, Nintendo Japan, ESRB, I don’t know how many
people internally, and our guys in Japan. I can’t come up with an excuse for it. It
just happened. We’re not happy about it. There are new processes that were
put in place that involve people outside the company. We’ve redefined who
has final say over packaging. I’m cautiously optimistic we won’t be seeing this happen again.
It’s embarrassing. I can’t really sugarcoat it. There are only about 90,000
units that have the misprint. If you’ve got it and it’s shrink-wrapped, that’s
a new special edition, that’s our new strategy.” So again, Capcom did manage to fix their
mistake, in a way, by sending out another lot of replacement game covers. But I
think that statement I read puts it best: “It’s embarrassing”. Which is what makes this
story so fun. A huge company like Capcom… misspelling their own game’s name? It just goes
to show that the people making the games we play are only human. And after all, there’s
nothing more human than making mistakes… Hey, thanks for watching to the end! Both of
these stories made me laugh so much when I heard about them that I decided I needed
to turn this into a video. Hopefully you found these stories as interesting as I
did! Subscribe to this channel for more strange chapters from video game history every
week, and for now, I’ll see you next time. Bye!
