All posts by Rick Kolesar

Game Design Challenge: Collector’s Edition

I placed third in Game Career Guide.com‘s Collector’s Edition challenge.  The task was to “Determine all the materials that will be included in a Collector’s Edition of the game Terminator: Salvation, a game based on the upcoming science-fiction movie” with a budget of $20.  Here is what I came up with…

SEMACODE

With the limit of the Collector’s Edition price being $80, I looked for the cheapest, but ‘coolest’ things to put in the box. The Collector’s Edition already has a making-of DVD in the box, which is a good start, so then I added…

* A futuristic looking metal card key that has some “battle damage” on it and a Semacode on it. When you hold this up to your Xbox360 or PlayStation 3 camera during gameplay, it will grant you easier access to areas (even without the card, these areas are available to players, just harder to get into).
* mp3 download of the main theme from the Terminator movies
* small vinyl toy from Kidrobot of the Model 101 Terminator

I figure the card key is around $1 to mass produce at most, the mp3 would have a 1 time royalty charge, then the cost of bandwidth to download it, and the vinyl toy costing somewhere between $7 and $10 for a custom order of over a half of million or so. Also, the card key would have a 12 digital code printed on it for people who don’t have a camera. I stayed away from custom pieces to keep price down. Now while the vinyl toy and card key is custom, most of those are pre-made and we would just be paying for a new paint/print job.

You can view the results of the challenge here.