It’s a half-remembered half-truth. The problem has always been that major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn’t want to be denied review codes in the future, not that publishers were just up and buying good review scores.

Nowadays I’m not sure that that logic holds up in any case, since so much reviewing is done by small outlets and crowdsourcing, but it did seem like a legitimate concern in the days when a half dozen magazines were all the average person got.