Happy new year, dear readers! We at GotGame.com are excited to bring you more delicious games and culture coverage in 2012. But before we do that, we’d like to weigh in on last week’s (uh, last year’s) Ocean Marketing debacle. If you somehow passed it by, allow us to drag you into this pit of strange conflict and strife. In other words, here’s a quick recap.

A fellow by the name of Dave had done some online shopping for the holidays, and that included a few Avenger controllers (which are superfly add-ons to Xbox 360 controllers, often used among disabled gamers).

When Dave inquired to Ocean Marketing (the PR firm in charge) about the unexplained tardiness of his order, things soon exploded into a head-scratching series of emails from Paul Christoforo, a man (somehow) wielding the power of the internet pen for the burning ship that was Ocean Marketing. The emails started with the irritatingly brief (“They still haven’t shipped yet on the way here from china”) before degenerating into words of equal parts offensive and comedic (“Grow up you look like a complete child bro. I Don’t have my controller so im gonna cry to the world … Really ?? Hey take that free time and do something more productive. All you had to do was check the like everyone else , people have inquired but you’re the douchiest of them all J”). It’s fun to shake your head sometimes. Those who give it a read might find their reaction best represented by Penny Arcade’s own title for the post: “Just wow!”

Mike Krahulik of the famous webcomic got more involved than that. The thread in its entirety can be found in a post by Penny Arcade. Get yourself some slippers and a cup of coffee for this one.

Beyond that, Christoforo eventually apologized to Krahulik, and explained his take on the infamous events in an interview with msnbc.

Nothing gets its panties in a twist like the internet, but was it really worth it in this instance? If a valet (for instance) were to scratch my car and spit at my feet when I asked for an explanation, it would make for quite a story. One I’d share with friends and look back on rather periodically, thinking, indeed, “just wow.” But would I paste it all over the internet as fuel for the sadly inevitable (yet surely unforeseen, to be fair) smear campaign on the individual’s family? Eh.

To bring in the wrath of high-profile internet personalities and websites seems like a wringing of powerless hands more than a demand for justice. And Krahulik’s verbal artillery is unabashed revenge rather than poised refereeing (where none is really needed in the first place). Owen Good of Kotaku provides a mature consideration of the whole “pissing contest,” though I would add that Dave’s reflex of summoning the internet guard (Kotaku and IGN along with Penny Arcade) is tempered by concern for the end result: “I’m really gonna feel bad if I think that sick children may somewhere down the line have fewer avenger controllers because I got into a pissing match with a sad old man.  Please don’t cancel their booth on my account.  As much as I hate this asshole, I still WANT his product and think it should be out there.“

A noble sentiment! Hopefully the controller and its intended market suffer no neglect as a result of this meme-spawning whirlwind. One that started when just one guy got behind a keyboard, unaware of the loudspeaker that came attached.