Nudity is apparently the in thing over at YouTube — provided you can get the video to stay up for any length of time. After last night’s Playboy debacle, another highly-anticipated title found itself on the YouTube cutting floor, thanks to violations of YouTube’s nudity clause. No, I’m not talking about anything related to the adult entertainment business, either. The subject in question is none other than Duke Nukem, who is featured in perhaps the most anticipated video game in years.
Mind you, the anticipation for the newest installment of the Duke Nukem franchise isn’t because it will be the most groundbreaking video game ever, or anything like that. No, the Duke Nukem anticipation level is owed solely to the following line of thinking: “Is this game EVER going to come out?” You see, in case you aren’t aware, the Duke Nukem sequel has been in development since 1997. In fact, financial issues made the game’s release even more doubtful — read the Wikipedia entry for the full history of the game.
Fast forward to September 2010, after some legal issues were handled, the game’s development began again in earnest, with a target date of May 2011 for its release. As expected, the date was pushed back, bringing the doubt back to the surface, but if the official Duke Nukem Forever site is to be believed, the game is scheduled for release on June 14, 2011. After such a long and crazy ride, Take-Two was clearly eager to capitalize on Duke’s never-ending popularity, and of course, they wanted to market the game to the new generation of gamers who may not be aware of the Duke Nukem story.
Like any game company worth their salt does, Take-Two released promotional content to get the hype meter moving in time for the official release date, but there’s one problem: The content was deemed too risque for YouTube’s audience. As you can see in this article’s lead image, the Duke Nukem Forever trailer had too much nudity in it, and even if it is animated nudity, that’s apparently too much for YouTube to take.
Well, at least for this particular upload. As is normally the case, other uploads of the same content are visible in the YouTube search results, and what the hell, we’ll just go ahead and post the videos here, as well. Keep in mind that there is some video game nudity, so if that’s the type of thing your work frowns upon, don’t push play on the following embeds.
First, the non-YouTube version, just in case the others get pulled, courtesy of IGN:
Now, for the pulled YouTube trailer:
And here are the ones YouTube missed. I’d start with the one Gamespot uploaded, but apparently, if they upload something, even if it’s not their content, they think disabling the embed feature somehow makes it theirs. Or something. Because of Gamespot’s apparent arrogance, they get no link to their stolen video.
On with the non-removed launch trailers, first one is courtesy of GamerSpawn:
And then there are the viewer uploads, followed by the page link, for differentiation purposes:
Page link
Page link
Page link
Page link
Page link
Page link
That’s not all, either, making one wonder why the initial upload was caught but the ones that followed were not. Any guesses on how long the videos embedded in this article last? Will they make it until the end of the day?