Sports Video Game Preview: Ordinary Guy 2K25

It’s Going To Be My Video Game of the Year

A great deal of attention is being paid to the upcoming release of EA Sports College Football 25, the first college sports themed video game in nearly ten years, but lest we forget that gamers and sports fans around the world love a rival series of video games from developer 2K Sports. Especially NBA 2K, which is fair to call basketball’s Madden.

While all of sports and video game media’s attention has been gobbled up rose-tinted previews of College Football 25, I have been hitting the trenches, doing hard hitting reporting on a different upcoming video game that definitely exists and I did not invent for satirical purposes.

I’m referring to something that the NBA 2K developers have been slaving over for a decade and will finally be released this summer: a brand new game where, instead of playing as the tallest athletes to ever live, you play as an ordinary guy living an ordinary life. It’s called Ordinary Guy 2K25.

“We don’t want to be an arcade-y, cartoonish game like The Sims. We want to be a true-to-life simulation,” a non-fictitious video game designer told me. “Our goal with Ordinary Guy 2K25 is recreate reality one-to-one. We don’t want a Venn diagram. We want a circle.”

In Ordinary Guy 2K25, you play as a fully customizable character from cradle to grave. You start as a baby, learn to walk, talk, and do things, graduate (or fail to graduate) school, get a job in your chosen field, fail to rise in that field, develop a drinking problem, find a new job in a new field entirely because you told your boss’s boss to “fold it five ways from Friday and stick it where the moon don’t shine,” eventually try to retire, fail to retire, get a part-time job at Meijer, then die of old age if a Boeing 747 doesn’t kill you first.

It’s an incredibly riveting experience, and from the forty-five seconds of gameplay a PR person let me play, it’s clear that Ordinary Guy 2K25 is going to revolutionize gaming. Never before has there been such a perfect simulation of going into the office to fill out a pay request form or making your mom cry because you got a C-minus on a math test.

Rather than have your character’s aptitudes, skills, and physical abilities be an amorphous, unquantifiable mishmash, your character’s skills, aptitudes, and physical abilities are put on an objective scale that ranges from 1 (terrible, awful, no good) to 100 (perfect, amazing, God-like), just like in real life.

“We initially tried to add as many jobs to the game as there are in reality, but we realized pretty quickly that wasn’t technologically feasible. Most of the jobs we cut are hard and not especially rewarding. We felt players wouldn’t want to pursue them anyway,” says the non-fictitious video game designer. Examples of jobs that the developers cut from the game include social worker, dentist, and screenwriter.

You’ll want to be careful about which of the skills you level up based on which career path you pursue. For example, if you create a character and pursue the “Techie” career path, you’ll want to put points into coding, but you’ll want to avoid putting points into self-awareness or your character will have a mental breakdown when he realizes no amount of technological progress can make the world any less of an existentially vacuous hellscape and that we are all Sisyphus ceaseless and senselessly rolling a rock up a hill and oh god, oh god, there is no escape—just think happy thoughts: Bitcoin. VR Headsets. Bored Apes.

The one thing technological progress can do is make photorealistic graphics. The animation is crisp and the character models lifelike in Ordinary Guy 2K25. The cubicle your character spends all his time in is the most realistic looking cubicle in gaming.

It turns out that spending an inordinate amount of resources and manpower on recreating reality as closely as possible frees up game developers from having to do pesky things like finding a creative vision of the world. They can instead focus on finding creative and innovative ways to bilk players out with microtransactions.

For the uninitiated, microtransactions are small dollar purchases players can make. These purchases are usually cosmetic changes but can also be for items that make the game easier. For instance, in Ordinary Guy 2K25, you can make a microtransaction to get the “Inherited Wealth Pack,” which unlocks otherwise difficult to obtain jobs like “Movie Star” and “Twitter Owner” and “Trust Fund Baby.” These perks are well worth the price of admission. With his trust fund, my character was able to pay for an experimental treatment for wishbone cancer that would have otherwise killed him.

The game is a lot of fun to play, but there are observations I have that I contractually cannot write about. This is because, in exchange for early access to gameplay and quotes from non-fictitious video game designers, I had to implicitly promise not to tell you anything that might make you think this game sucks chunks, and explicitly promise to have such a slavish devotion to branding that I only refer to Ordinary Guy 2K25 by its full title—not Ordinary Guy and certainly not OG25—even though absolutely no one on Earth talks this way.

This is because preview pieces are advertisements masquerading as articles. Ultimately, though, no one is going to hell for trying to get you excited for College Football 25 or Ordinary Guy 2K25, especially not if the writers approach it without any J-school pretense. Additionally, no one is ever going to hell for asking you to subscribe to a free, funny, and extremely niche newsletter about sports and the existential angst they cause.

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