The latest cover to grace EA Sports pro football simulation is designed by an infant child who submitted their entry via a competition.
Video game box arts are a subjective medium, normally designed by large marketing teams under the premise of enticing potential customers to maximise sales and generate exposure. Although a simple concept, a cover is considered an integral part of the capitalist machine in the video game industry, as it can be the life and death of a product when viewed by an uninformed consumer.
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| Over analyzing market tactics and focus groups has never failed. |
A true to form cover that ticks every marketing box is not always the answer however. Many companies possess long running franchises that run the risk of becoming stagnant when repetition takes hold and a fan base notices a lack of innovation with a property.
EA Sports faced this issue with their long running Madden NFL series, and to alleviate the building pressure, decided to run a box art competition with the victorious entry gracing the cover of the game's 2021 rendition.
The winner? A 5 year old girl.
"Over 100,000 people entered the competition, and if I have to be perfectly blunt, every submission was absolutely fucking terrible. Our own internal artists and graphic designers were even allowed to enter the competition, and theirs were some of the worst I've ever seen!" States Chris Bruzzo, Head of Marketing for Electronic Arts.
"When we picked the winner, we didn't have any information on the person other than their e-mail address, so it was quite the surprise when we found out the entrant was by a five year old little girl."
The father of the winner said he encouraged his daughter to participate in the competition.
"After seeing the pathetic attempts at box art by EA Sports for their '2020 season' games, I knew it wouldn't take much to eclipse their efforts. My daughter is quite the finger painter, so I gave her free reign of my tablet's basicpbasic app. She then copied and pasted ten pictures of Lamar Jackson from Google Images and sporadically placed them without any care. Next thing I knew a bunch of words like Madden was splashed randomly on the box art in different fonts and imperfectly aligned."
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| 2nd place wasn't a difficult task to overcome. |
It's a piece of art if you ask me. Doesn't mean it's good, but I can't say it's bad because her entry beat 99,999 other people. Glad I'm not one of them. Bunch of fucking losers, you all suck!"
Well there's no need to be that rude. Our entire staff entered the competition.
