REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — EA has confirmed rumors that have been circulating about this year’s installment of their annual NHL hockey title, namely that this year’s game will be the first to actually make little hockey guys skate around inside your TV.
“No sense in denying it any longer,” said Sam Perkins, a lead designer at EA. “We did it, we figured out how to generate little dudes up in your TV. No more talking about pixels, frame rates, polygons, physics, all that is over with now. This is flesh and blood hockey being controlled on your Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. Realistic, fully controllable recreations of your favorite National Hockey League players. You’ve never seen anything quite like this, we promise.”
The bizarre but seemingly true claims rang true for Auston Matthews, the Toronto Maple Leafs center that graces the cover of this year’s game.
“I came down to their studio one day,” said Matthews. “And they hooked me all up with the motion capture stuff and whatnot. We were doing wrist shots when suddenly a guy holding a giant stack of papers burst into the room and screamed ‘We did it!’ and then they all started celebrating and told me I could go home. I understand what happened now — they were excited about figuring out the little guys.”
Fans of the franchise were excited about the breakthrough and understandably skittish about the morality involved with summoning little fellas into the universe.
“Wow, that sounds fucking amazing,” said Roosevelt Bauer, a longtime fan of the NHL video game series. “At first I thought the thing was they were gonna switch to the Frostbite engine, but that was obviously just a rumor. This is gonna be so much better. What about the guys though, are they real? Do they feel the hits and stuff? What happens to them after I turn off the game?”
NHL 22 will be released on October 15, 2021. A special Stanley Cup Edition of the game is available that will let you communicate with the little guys in there and tell them you’re their creator.
