Duke University Has Balls of Steel

What’s worse than spending $120,000 to promote a video game that spent 15-years in development? Spending that much on a Twitter trend, only to have everyone think it’s about school spirit.

That’s what happened yesterday, when 2K Games dropped 120 grand on a promoted #alwaysbetonduke hashtag. It was intended to promote “Duke Nukem Forever”, a terrible first-person shooter that sort of plays like a Leisure Suit Larry mod of Half Life 2, but it ended up cramming the site full of pro-Duke University tweets. How bad did it get? Well, not Cherokee Parks bad, but bad enough that Duke had to explain it on their news Twitter, should too many people start associating Duke’s “Mighty Foot” with the University. That’d probably work better with UNC.

Huh. Why wouldn’t Duke University want to be associated with a game with a “capture the babe” mode, where you throw a woman over your shoulder and slap her on the ass to keep her from “freaking out”?

Well, the hashtag promotion didn’t work and all the reviews for Duke Nukem are terrible, so we can chalk this up as the worst Twitter promotion since the Demon Deacons paid for #wakeforest and ended up selling a million copies of Kirby’s Dreamland.

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