Order Your Championship Ring Now
From Gamespot:Today, EA announced it has struck a deal with Jostens, the Minneapolis-based jewelry giant that specializes in graduation rings but has also crafted 27 out of the 41 Super Bowl Championship rings. Under the program, titled "Ring of a Champion," Jostens will begin making custom-designed, Madden-themed rings that reflect the skill level of a specific player of the sole officially licensed NFL game.
...players will progress through five different skill levels by performing various feats of virtual athleticism. Once they reach level three, they will unlock a design feature "embedded" in "next-generation console" versions of Madden and will be given a code that will give them access to the Ring of a Champion section of Jostens' Web site. Players will be able to choose from "three unique ring designs" which can be customized with any of the 32 NFL team logos, a variety of colors, and other elements on the rings' tops and sides. Those players which unlock "epic achievements" in Madden will unlock more ring-customization options.
Okay, that is the stupidest damned thing I've ever heard.
Except that it's not.
I'm writing a long post on the potential of Rock Band this week, and one of the specific things I was going to mention was this exact scenario--if someone finished the game on expert, particularly if they finished two different instruments, the game should generate a code that would access a website where you could order exclusive Rock Band gear--t-shirts, jackets, whatever. The gamer would still have to pay for the merchandise, but he wouldn't even have access unless he was in a very elite class of player.
There's a reason that I have an authentic Carolina Hurricanes jersey in my study--I won the Stanley Cup in NHL2K3 on the highest difficulty rating, it was incredibly gripping, and I was thrilled. That game was probably the most mentally challenging sports game I ever played, and when I won, I felt like I'd really accomplished something.
Sure, it sounds goofy to say that game could give me that feeling, but that's what great games do--they give us special feelings. So this whole thing sounds hopelessly cheesy at first, but only if it's a game you don't care about.
I don't like how they're doing this in a design sense, though. It should be tied to winning the Super Bowl, either on the hardest difficulty level in Franchise mode or by being a star player on a Super Bowl-winning team in Superstar mode. In other words, it needs to be as much like real life as possible. Don't tie it to a discrete series of mini-games or something like that, which sounds like what they're doing.
This concept is going to be very big within a few years. Microsoft should have jumped all over this, and I've talked about that--how they should have allowed people with the highest gamer scores to buy jackets and merchandise that designated them as superstars or champions or whatever. It was perfectly lined up to do that with the achievements system, but Microsoft just didn't connect the dots.
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