I hope Cindy doesn’t read this post since it’s about a new online computer game (she plays them all the time!) called Combine Combat. It’s created by Successful Farming and John Deere. I played through all 4 levels. My first time final score was 407,494. How’s that stack up against your score? I can see in there user forum that a couple people have gotten higher that 600,000. I wonder who’s tops.

The game lets you pit yourself against your “rowdy” neighbor to see who can harvest the most corn and soybeans in a race against the weather, the markets and time. It’s fun, exciting and it’s drawing a lot of attention. The game is simple. Participants steer their combine with the arrow keys on their keyboard, trying to outpace their “rival” while avoiding various obstacles, including combine collisions. Collecting John Deere icons and featured items can boost speed and add bonus points. There are four levels of play, with total acres harvested, harvest yields and time in field, plus bonus points, contributing to a players net harvest profit. “We approached Successful Farming and said ‘We have some marketing goals, can you help us achieve them,’ ” said David Pauli, John Deere Advertising Creative Group Manager. “They came back to us with Combine Combat, which we felt was an exciting and very creative solution to our marketing challenge.”

In the first week of the game, the site monitored more than 17,000 plays. “People are already talking about their scores on our discussion sites”, Snyder said. “We’ve even got one guy who says he hit $600,000, which we didn’t think was possible.”

They claim the game is addicting. What do you think? In fact, what do you think about the idea of an online game as part of a marketing effort for a company like John Deere?