So like millions around the world I sat there watching the Big Game, doing the things that one does when presented with a titanic struggle between the two top teams. Eating and commenting about the commercials. Just like thirty/thirty seconds of the football nation, I don’t have a dog in this fight. But who doesn’t like to talk about Super Bowl ads?

(As you might have noticed, this isn’t going to be one of my “deeper” writings)

So now the game is over, and the team that won has won (don’t ask me, by the time it was over I had so much to drink I would bet that I saw the Seahawks play the Spungos). It’s now the next day and I have just about gotten the smell of low-cal veggie dip off of my hands and I have to say that I am disappointed. Not only did I drop twenty-five bucks in two office pools with nothing to show for it, but there wasn’t a single videogame commercial. It’s not like there aren’t any top tier titles being released in the near future: Off the top of my head I can think of three. Dirge of Cerberus, Kingdom Hearts 2, Fight Night Round 3.

Three games with the kind of appeal that fits the Super Bowl audience to a T. I don’t need to go over the current gamer demographics again (the emerging mature, affluent gamer), and we all know now that the industry is not kid’s stuff (annual revenues can now be counted in the billions). An ad for an A-list game would not only have every eye riveted but have the ‘internets’ abuzz for days (it won’t be all positive, or even mostly positive given the nature of the beast, but it would be there).

To have a game advertised during the Super Bowl would be the kind of titanic shift in the mainstream’s view of the gaming world that would be remembered like Apple’s 1984. The first publisher with the vision to do this is going to capture the imagination of the world. Imagine, the screen goes dark, and only single notes can be heard played in a quasi-futuristic vibrato. Stars appear and the light outlines the characteristic frame of the armor of Samus Aran. She raises her weapon and fires. The screen flashes white, then some rapid gameplay videos and finally black again, with just the words Metroid: Dread on the screen as the ad ends. Would you sit there and tell me that that won’t be remembered forever?

This has to be done and soon, do we really want just the only link to our culture during the biggest game on the biggest stage to be the inane babbling of John Madden?

Go for the field goal first when down by eleven, John? You have got to be out of your mind!!!

This is my stop.