April 21, 2008

Real-Time Weather in Video Games

Image from EA Sports and Wired

We thought we'd explore what has happened to weather in video games over the past year. Last year EA released EA Sports' NCAA 08 Football. It was the first game to pipe in real-time weather conditions at the venue of a player's choice with weather data provided by the Weather Channel. Given we don't play many football games, we asked some of our sport video game focused friends to chime in - verdict? Awesome. Because the weather could be matched to the day you were playing, you could recreate the game in real time while you watched the real game. Very cool.

We also found this rather interesting forums discussion on weather in video games - citing Donkey Kong Country as one of the first games to have weather as a factor. Do you know of any good uses of weather in video games?

We'll continue to look for interesting uses of weather in video games, and hope in the future lots of online video games can make the integration of weather into gameplay and the game.

Via Wired