I wanted to talk a little more about the Pin Ultimate edition of the new Killer Instinct. The KI team originally came to us with a question. They were making a digital only game but wanted to know if there was a way to give it a cool physical component that would sort of take the place of the game box you would have put up on your shelf. We all put our heads together and what we came up with is the Pin Ultimate edition.
The idea is to go beyond just sticking a statute in the box. With the Pin Ultimate edition you get a case that when closed will look something like a hardcover book on your shelf.
When open though it becomes a tri-fold display for a custom set of Pinny Arcade pins.
There will be pins of all the characters but beyond that there will be a series of what we are calling “engagement” pins. The idea behind these was to turn things such as in game achievements and experiences like attending PAX into something physical that you can put in your display case. The idea is that you can put it up on your shelf and see pins for the KI tournament you played in, meeting the developers at PAX and maybe the challenge you did where you had to play a hundred ranked games in a month. The Pin Ultimate edition is less a “collectors edition” and something more like a scrap book.
So when you buy the Pin Ultimate edition you get the game. You get all the characters and all the content that will be released in the first season. That’s a pretty good deal but you also get something like a quest. You get this display case with a couple pins (Jago and the KI logo) and a bunch of empty spaces. Maybe you’ll fill them all in or maybe you’ll only fill in a few of them. No matter what you do each one will mean something. They will be favorite characters, experiences you had or challenges you took part in. A normal collectors edition is essentially just a record that you bought the game. The Pin Ultimate edition does that too but it’s also a record of how you played the game. Everyone here at PA who worked on the concept and the design is super proud of it. We’re also very thankful to the KI team for being the first to give it a try.
-Gabe out
