Following a scandal-filled 2008, Tecmo employees have been warned against editing the company’s page on Wikipedia to allegedly hide damaging information from the public.
Last year was not a very good year for Tecmo. Scandal first broke in June, when the company’s most high-profile developer – Dead or Alive creator and Ninja Gaiden reviver Tomonobu Itagaki – left the company in a public tiff, filing suit against his former employers for bonuses for Dead or Alive 4 that allegedly went unpaid. Tecmo responded, saying that the bonus in question had been part of an agreement made with different management, and slapped a legal gag on Itagaki, but found itself faced with more dissenters as employees sued for hundreds of hours in unpaid overtime. The court battle turned ugly, and company president Yoshimi Yasuda resigned in August at the center of the controversy.
But after that whole kerfluffle, things seemed to be smoothing over for Tecmo, getting financial backing in a merger with Koei and finally being able to put the ugly mess behind them. Tecmo and its employees obviously wanted nothing more to do with the legal quagmire that had surrounded summer ’08 – and perhaps more importantly, it seems they didn’t want anyone else remembering the controversy, either.
It seems that at least one Tecmo employee – or at least, somebody with a Tecmo IP – has been attempting to edit the company’s Wikipedia page in order to remove sensitive information about 2008’s legal storm that could potentially damage the company. As livedoor reports, Wikipedia has publicly admonished Tecmo for tampering with the page to hide information about employees who had left the company.
Tsk tsk, Tecmo. At least send Ryu Hayabusa to do that sort of thing. I mean, he’s a ninja – he’d at least be stealthy about it.
(Via Kotaku)
