Introducing the Athletic Director Simulator 4000 High Score Challenge

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

This is going to be a bit of a different week for the newsletter. I am going to be in Orlando from Tuesday-Friday of this week on a Serious Professional Journalism assignment. I’m also juggling a few other reported stories (stories that nothing to do with any video games, FWIW), and expect to have a bit of an unpredictable schedule.

But just because I’m on the road or on the phone doesn’t mean you should miss out anything, right? So I thought this week would be a great chance to reintroduce an old friend, and try something a little different.

Introducing, the Athletic Director Simulator 4000 HIGH SCORE CHALLENGE

In case you’re new to Extra Points (and if you are, welcome!), we created a computer game called Athletic Director Simulator 4000.

In this game, you take on the role of a low-major athletic director. You’ll face scenarios that are very similar to problems that ADs face in the real world, where you’ll need to balance your budget, your fan support, your campus/political support, and your school’s competitiveness on the field.

If you do well, you can get promoted to mid and even high-major programs. Do poorly, and you’ll get fired.

If you played the game last year, awesome! But good news! In the process of Extra Points securing new corporate ownership, we also bought back the IP rights to ADS4000, and I’ve been working on updates ever since.

Today, the game has over 200 different scenarios, and I’m adding more and more over the course of the week.

To encourage people to give the game another go, or perhaps fire it up for the first time, I thought we could try something a little different.

For this week, we’re running a contest. Whoever posts the best score (combined variable ranks at the end of a run) will win a) the right to add two questions of their own to ADS4000, b) the right to pick an Extra Points topic in June and c), a fabulous Extra Points #swag #pack full of mystery prizes

Here are the rules:

• The contest runs until 5:00 PM CST on Friday, May 24.

• The winning username will have the highest composite score between budget, support and Directors Cup ranking, per the game’s Leaderboard on 5:00 PM CST on Friday.

• I will reach out to the winner that evening via email to confirm, and to get an address so we can mail out their prize

What’s in the swag pack? Could it be a bunch of old Extra Points stickers? Could it include vintage college pennants? Perhaps some yet-unreleased Extra Points merch? Some volumes from the Extra Points research library? A poem from Penny? Who can say, really. It’s a mystery. Only way to find out is to get an awesome score, I guess.

The Extra Points topic could be just about anything. Want to force me to do more extended research into college hockey or rugby? Now is your chance. Want an extra 2,000 words on failed historical conference realignment plans, or defunct bowl games or crazy mascot stories? I await your command.

Wane me to write a newsletter on how, actually, the officials got the call wrong and J.T. Barrett was actually short at the end of the 2016 Ohio State-Michigan game? I mean… I’d really rather you didn’t! But a deal is a deal.

How do you play ADS4000?

ADS4000 is a browser-based game, optimized for desktop performance. It should run on mobile devices, but based on our testing and what we’ve heard from readers, the game really does run and look better on a desktop. It will run on a PC or Mac, and in every browser type we’ve tried.

Could we port the game to Steam, PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo in the future? Sure, maybe. Are we going to do that in the next two months? No.

Access to ADS4000 is limited to students on a D1.classroom subscription (if you’re reading this and not sure if this applies to you…it probably doesn’t), and our premium subscribers. A premium subscription is just eight bucks a month or $75 for the year:

I plan to continue to add content updates to ADS4000 not just this week, but continuously over the summer, while we also try to figure out the best way to add new features and support.

Good luck with the game, and I hope you enjoy a little competition!