Sunday, the world exploded and oozed news goodness all over the media. For the few active gaming journalists not busy shaking off the effects of liquor, a slew of writing awaited. The leaks were the result of a survey that was hosted by a marketing research firm named Intellisponse. The details are a bit scant, but it appears as though a user figured out how to share the survey with his friends, and thus the media. The part that should concern the RPG enthusiast in the mess entails a video simply named “Crucible.”

And as you can see, it is an extremely early build of what appears to be an RPG.

Some astute observers ran to the trademark office and checked up on the shadowy name of the title. After a bit of digging, Sega’s The Crucible: The Evil Within trademark from 2007 popped up. That then led to the speculation that it was the “secret project” that Sega and Too Human developer Silicon Knights were working on. We can blame that bit of conjecture on both hyper journalists and Denis Dyack, who spilled the beans on the project previously.

With the new information of what this mysterious video could be, MTV Multiplayer Blog writer Steven Totilo e-mailed Sega. Sega representative Steve Groll fired back with this statement:

“That video is not the game that Silicon Knights is creating for us. I have no idea if it is a game they are working on for someone else, but it’s definitely not the project that Silicon Knights and SEGA are producing. I can’t reveal any info about the game we currently have in development, but I can tell you that it is not titled ‘The Crucible.’ More news about our game coming soon.”

Kotaku picked up the ball on the story today. According to an anonymous Kotaku source (which could either be a hamburger or a human) the Crucible footage is the work of Big Huge Games. A notable developer only because last year Oblivion designer Ken Rolsten joined the studio.

To make matters harder for both the journalist and starving RPG enthusiast, the title isn’t due out until 2009. That is, if this is actually THQ’s title. And at this point, who the hell knows.

***

I think this is a decent introspective of how the gaming media operates, and perhaps how it needs to change. One of the biggest challenges that I have had in my meager opportunities to write is fighting back against the “first post” mentality. It is an obvious fundamental, really. The blog or website that gets the news up the quickest garners the attention, and hopefully sources from other blogs and websites. As a writer I love working on a timeline with specific guidelines. I understand everything needs to be delivered in a timely manner, but a bit of additional research at the beginning of this story could have went a long way. If you take a look at Kotaku, there were three different renditions of the story that I noticed. This mentality prohibited proper questions asked and critical analysis.

The writers of this story across the vast universe of the internet (minus Destructoid of course) never seemed to take the time to tell the audience (until late in the game) about the steps they were taking to make sure the story was right and accurate, thus not misleading myself or you, the reader. Perhaps it’s just the historian in me that screams “research” but I could have dealt with a bit here. The follow-ups were beautiful, I admit, but should really have been done initially.

That said, I really enjoyed the way Destructoid's Mr. Sterling handled the story. He gave us a recap and told the reader it wasn't set in stone. Excellent job and very graceful. I think his work proves the moral to my story - leaks are not fact and probably shouldn't get thrown out there to the wolves so early.