Writing about games is a pretty simple job. It's not necessarily easy, as you have to have a certain way with words and a decent knowledge base of games to draw from and compare too, but as long as you double check your facts, go to the base source and are transparent with your process, it's quite difficult to slip up.
But it does happen.
In the case of one writer for VG247, who wasn't transparent and didn't check their facts and sources, a mistake was made that confused a demo of the remastered Uncharted 2 with Uncharted 4. The writer went to pains to point out their experience - or seemingly lack thereof - with the Uncharted games and even called the 'new' one out for being formulaic and unimaginative.
It didn't take long for readers, other press and even the developers to point out the mistake and poke fun at the writer behind it. Neil Druckmann, creative director at Naughty Dog showed a screengrab from Pitfall and teased it as "new Uncharted 4 screenshot showing off the rope mechanic."
VG247 did own up to its mistake though, with the editor publishing an explanation and apology some two weeks later:
We’d like to apologise to Naughty Dog for a massive mistake we published last month.
"On September 30th we published an article titled "Is Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End too formulaic?" based on what we thought was a hands-on session with Uncharted 4 at the Tokyo Game Show.
"We didn’t realise it at the time; what we’d played wasn’t Uncharted 4, but the remastered Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, from the recently released Uncharted Collection. We were not aware of this until after the article went live.
"As soon as Sony notified us of our mistake we immediately unpublished the article as it was clearly based on one massive error on our part. TGS is busy and obviously the majority of signage isn’t in English, but none of that excuses the fact that we seriously fucked up."
