For the past decade EA have gotten a lot of publicity - something they're notoriously short on - by running a "simulation" of each year's Super Bowl matching the corresponding year's Madden title, thus providing a prediction of who was going to win the competition. You can see how this might be good for EA: not only does it mean the game receives some extra column inches, in both gaming publications and on the sports pages, but if the predictions turn out to be true it's evidence of what an accurate experience of the NFL the Madden games provides. In fact it turns out that it's such an accurate simulation of the real-life sport that EA have successfully predicted the outcome of the Super Bowl eight out of ten times. Not 100% perfect, admittedly, and they got this year's results spectacularly wrong, but it's hard to argue with their track record. They even manage to get pretty close to the actual scores, too, which just seems like showing off to us.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
