The safe was delivered to Ninemsn’s office today.
As a journalist who writes about games, I’m used to getting a lot of weird stuff from PR companies in the mail (and giving away at charity drives). But the package Ubisoft PR sent to Ninemsn’s offices in Australia was strange enough to cause an evacuation of the offices today.
According to reports, a courier delivered a small black safe to a reporter in Ninemsn’s central Syndey office, along with a letter instructing the reporter to check his voicemail. Since the reporter didn’t actually have a voicemail to check, he simply typed in the PIN taped to the top of the safe, which caused it to beep. Fearing that the package might actually be a bomb, the editors decided to evacuate the newsroom and call in the bomb squad.
There was a copy of it in the safe Watchdogsalong with a baseball cap and beanie. It’s not clear if the vault was sent by Ubisoft or an outside PR agency.
“We checked with other editors if they had received a similar package because we thought it was a PR stunt, but no one else had,” Ninemsn editor Hal Crawford told Australian media site Mumbrella. point, but since there was no note explaining what it was, we had to take sensible precautions.”
This isn’t the first time a gaming PR mailing has gone wrong. In 2009, EA sent critics a set of brass knuckles in violation of the laws about sending guns through the mail before asking for the “novelty” back. Also in 2009, EA promoted the Dante’s Hell game by sending journalists a $200 check intended to test their resistance to “greed.” At the time, i responded that the stunt “crossed the line between ‘smart promotion’ and ‘blatant bribery of journalists’.”