It’s not often that we cover marketing teasers, but then it’s not often that we get crowbars in the mail either…
Earlier this afternoon the following crowbar unexpectedly showed up on our doorstep courtesy of NVIDIA. The crowbar reads “For use in case of zombies or…” and has the right half of the NVIDIA logo at the end of the sentence.
Meanwhile over at GeForce.com NVIDIA has posted a teaser countdown page, announcing that they will be making an announcement at the NVIDIA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China, at 7:30pm PDT on Saturday the 28th.
So what does a crowbar have to do with anything? At this point we haven’t a clue. And while crowbars happen to be the signature weapon for Valve’s Half-Life series, we’re rather confident that a black crowbar has nothing to do with Half-Life. This leaves us with opening crates… and that’s all we have so far.
It looks like we won't get our answer until Saturday night, so until then stay tuned.
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uop - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Used to kill snakes, in particular a Krait?meloz - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
rofl, that's pretty vicious uop!Chillin1248 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
It's not a crowbar. It's called a flat bar, commonly known as a pry bar./too much time on his hands
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
I won't claim to be a crowbar expert, but I'm pretty sure this is a crowbar; it's not flat.I had it lying flat for photography purposes (so that you could get a good look at the text), but the curved end is there. PC Perspective has a side shot that shows this well: http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/NVIDIA-continu...
Chillin1248 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Flat bar:http://www.showroom411.com/Media/CMS/2009/flat%20b...
http://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DWHT55528-21-Inch-Spr...
:)
macuser2134 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Interestingly, the crowbar in Half Life may have been colored red to either make it more visible in the game (to pick up), and / or possibly because Lego was used by the game designers in Half Life to make early game mock ups and prototypes. Since the color of the crowbars in Lego is also red. There is no other reason I could find.AFAIK - that does not mean that a crowbar must be red to be called a crowbar.
According to wikipedia, the terms prybar and crowbar are 100% equivalent to each other and mean exactly the same thing as each other. The guy who wrote this acticle is correct that its not a flatbar. Because a flatbar is, by the very definition of the word FLAT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowbar_%28tool%29
Crowbar seems to score pretty highly in all regards for describing the object depicted here. So trying to correct the reviewer over their multiple free and valid vocabulary choices is both completely unnecessary and utterly pointless.
There is already a great place to discuss what is the emphatically "correct" term, and argue whether a crowbar isn't a prybar or a flatbar, or anything else. And it absolutely isn't right here. Its the Wikipedia page mentioned above (discussion tab).
Murloc - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
In italian we don't have that problem because it only has one name: piede di porco. Literally it means "swine's foot", because the end of that tool looks like a pig hoof.In my whole life I always thought that the typical color for crowbars is red, and I never played half life.
Crowbars in my opinion are red because they're needed by firefighters to get people out of buildings, cars or whatever.
Just like a firefighter's axe is red, a firefighting hose cabinet is red, an alarm button is red, most crowbars are red for that reason, they must be easy to find and identify in a hurry.
Chillin1248 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
There are differences between a crowbar and a flat bar, look at the "hook" part of a crowbar and compare it to a flat bar ("L" shaped).But I meant it more as a passing jest anyways rather than correcting the writer...
TGressus - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
marketed as a flat pry bar in the states. probably goes by all kinds of names on the job.piss poor internet sleuthing by the way. if you didn't know, you didn't have to comment.
stonemetal - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
It is flat in that its cross section is flat like paper. Crow bars typically have round or hexagonal cross sections.