2005-02-24

2 Bob Burnquist T-shirts Please

First off, I really don't play video games anymore, but this is pretty cool. You can now
buy pizza from within the EverQuest II video game. Apparently this is the first such linkage of the real world to a video game. I knew some folks in college that suffered from an EverCrack addiction. I gurantee they would have used this feature. They would have loved it even more if they could have typed /captain_and_coke. I can see this sort of thing becoming more popular.

I can see games like the Tony Hawk series letting you earn the virtual skate board decks in the game and at the same time allowing you to buy that same deck right from the game. When you complete the game, you could have the option of buying a limited edition t-shirt. Imagine how much money they could squeeze out of you.

Sports games could offer special edition collector cards. Maybe you could even get a 4"x6" glossy of the scoreboard displaying the whooping you just put on your buddy mailed to your house for $4.

And the ultimate. This would probably get me back in to playing video games. They could hook an online game to something like the iTMS. If you don't like the tracks in the game, you can import a whole new set, either from iTMS, or from your own library. You could even earn free tracks by completing different parts of the game. Of course the game will have ads built in on billboards and such, so you really don't get the track for free, you just earn it based on the count of ads the game has served to you. As much as I used to play the THPS series, I think I could own a stable of punk bands.

I'm aware that some games were starting to allow stuff like this 3 or 4 years ago. I even remember experimenting with the original Sims that would allow you to plug-in your own .mp3s to get played on the stereos in the game, but it was far too manual and they didn't get the chance to take my money for the convenience of having it built in to the game. This might have progressed since then because, like I said, I really don't play games anymore. This could be big.

1 comment:

Jason said...

Hey, I claim prior art, Maury and I were going to add a feature to the Access Point to find the closest pizza place to wherever your installation happened to be via GPS.

I like the idea of adding your own music. I remember how cool it was when Playstation first came out, we would fire up the game and then replace the disc with a music CD of our choosing. When the tracks began playing it would be your music instead. Often locked up the game, but at least you had your own music until it did.