(just in case you haven't noticed, one of C3C's print ads was a picture of the White House with a "commie flag" over it.)
From this month's Maximum PC In/Out (reader mail) section:
I was very shocked and offended at the "ad" on page 39 of your November issue. This ad has a picture of the White House with a Commie flag over it (and lower in the page a little postage stamp-size logo for the game Civilization. Sirs, this is not an ad for a game--it is a political statement, and a treasonous one at that. Is it your policy now to run this type of cheap-shot anti-American propoganda when this country happens to be at war?
After seeing this ad I will never, repeat never, buy a Firaxis or Atari game again for me or anyone else, and you can relay that thought to your advertisers. If you're going to continue to run ads of this ilk, maybe you should change the name of your magazine to something more appropriate, like Le Socialist Workers People's Review of Maximum Decadent Kapitalistic Komputers.
-Ray C. Schultz
After seeing this ad I will never, repeat never, buy a Firaxis or Atari game again for me or anyone else, and you can relay that thought to your advertisers. If you're going to continue to run ads of this ilk, maybe you should change the name of your magazine to something more appropriate, like Le Socialist Workers People's Review of Maximum Decadent Kapitalistic Komputers.
-Ray C. Schultz
the mag's response was very gracefully pulled off, considering mine would be "..|..".
Editor-in-chief Jon Phillips responds:
It may be a disturbing image, Ray, but I don't think it's treasonous, at least not in the legal sense of the word. Regardless, I should point out the copy that runs with the image: "but for a few decisions, the world could be a very different place." Now, I don't know about you, but I interperet that as an endorsement of America's Cold War policy, which pretty much had the widespread support of our nation's most passionate self-proclaimed patriots. Regardless, I think we all know the game publisher's intent was ironic, not political.
As for regulating the ads that appear in the magazine, we are sometimes a victim of the stringent firewall that we place between the advertising and editorial staffs of the magazine: We don't have the foggiest idea of what the ads look like until the magazine comes back from the printer (nor does the ad staff have any idea what specific content appears in the editorial pages.) Sometimes this firewall really bites us, but the Civilization ad wasn't one of these cases.
It may be a disturbing image, Ray, but I don't think it's treasonous, at least not in the legal sense of the word. Regardless, I should point out the copy that runs with the image: "but for a few decisions, the world could be a very different place." Now, I don't know about you, but I interperet that as an endorsement of America's Cold War policy, which pretty much had the widespread support of our nation's most passionate self-proclaimed patriots. Regardless, I think we all know the game publisher's intent was ironic, not political.
As for regulating the ads that appear in the magazine, we are sometimes a victim of the stringent firewall that we place between the advertising and editorial staffs of the magazine: We don't have the foggiest idea of what the ads look like until the magazine comes back from the printer (nor does the ad staff have any idea what specific content appears in the editorial pages.) Sometimes this firewall really bites us, but the Civilization ad wasn't one of these cases.
EDIT: Damn. This shoulda gone in the Conquests forum shouldn't it?
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