They say that all publicity is good publicity, and we guess to be fair Ubisoft’s recent Watch Dogs’ PR stunt did manage to bring attention to the game, albeit in a not-so positive kind of way. What happened was that Ubisoft had sent Ninemsn a package containing a letter and a safe. They then told the addressee to check their voicemail, presumably for instructions on how to proceed.
However the addressee did not have voicemail and just punched in the attached PIN code. The safe started beeping and naturally this raised some alarms as they were wondering what was going on. According to Ninemsn’s Hal Crawford (via Mumbrella), “This is definitely the other side of the line in terms of what it’s safe for a PR company to send anonymously to a newsroom. The thing was black, heavy and slightly creepy.”
They then checked with other news outlets to see if they had received anything similiar, but they claimed they did not. “We did check with other newsrooms to see if they had received a similar package as we thought it was a PR stunt, but no-one else had. We weren’t panicked at any point, but given there was no note explaining what it was, we had to take sensible precautions.”
Luckily nobody panicked, although offices had to be evacuated and a bomb squad had to be called in, who then pried open the safe, only to find a copy of Watch Dogs, a baseball cap iconic to the game’s protagonist, and a beanie. We’re pretty sure this is definitely not what Ubisoft or their PR company had planned, but safe to say it did make an impression.
Filed in . Read more about Ubisoft and Watch Dogs.