Skip to main content

EA Sports Sets Sail with Carnival for Interactive Funship 2.0 Gaming

With more people playing videogames today than ever before, Carnival Cruise Line is making sure gamers on vacation, don’t have to take a vacation from gaming. As part of its $500 million Funship 2.0 initiative to upgrade its entire fleet, Carnival has partnered with EA Sports to integrate and introduce EA Sports Bars in each of its ships.

“We’ve always had sports and gaming on board our ships, but we never really felt that we were optimizing it,” said John Heald, senior cruise director and brand ambassador for Carnival Cruise Lines. “So we went to the world leader in gaming, EA Sports, and we branded the two companies together. Carnival and EA now have a partnership and it’s been a tremendous success with the EA Sports Bar.”

The centerpiece of the EA Sports Bar, which will have an authentic sports-themed interior, is a massive video wall comprised of 16 individual 46-inch flat-screen televisions. The bar has been designed to immerse guests in sports — both watching live events and playing EA Sports games. The screens are programmable and can be configured in a variety of ways to simultaneously display live sports broadcasts, as well as video game competition. There are also two separate wall-mounted screens specifically for video games that allow for more private play.

Chris Erb, vice president of brand marketing at EA Sports, said this latest partnership is part of a bigger initiative of finding new ways to connect with consumers.

“This is something that we’ve been doing both digitally and in the real world through our marketing as we focus on how we can put controllers in people’s hands and provide good experiences,” said Erb. “The EA Sports brand becomes like a lifestyle. You can play our games 365 days a year, 24/7.”

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The average age of an EA Sports gamer is 27 years old, which fits right in the wheelhouse of Carnival’s passengers.

“You’re a captured consumer on a ship and we thought the best sports experience that you can have is just a place where you can go and escape, hang out, drink beer, play videogames, watch sports, and even bring your laptop and plug in your Wi-Fi,” said Erb. “EA Sports Bars are about having a really good experience, courtesy of EA Sports, on these ships.”

In addition to providing games via satellite, each EA Sports Bar features a live sports ticker that runs non-stop, and there are also authentic stadium noise effects to add to the atmosphere. There will also be regular programming in the bar including sports trivia, videogame tournaments with EA Sports-branded prizes, and other activities hosted by an emcee.

“We have three basic tournaments at the EA Sports Bar,” explained Heald. “We have one for the children, one for the adults, and then we have the most popular one, which is dad and son or dad and daughter versus another dad and son or dad and daughter. This offers a lot of variations of tournaments that get families involved. And it’s all controlled on an iPad. What surprised me was that on the Liberty the most popular games have been FIFA, not Madden. I didn’t know Americans knew how to play that, but they’re all playing the soccer videogames and it was fantastic.”

The Carnival Liberty is the first ship to get the complete overhaul, which includes the EA Sports Bar, as well as a new restaurant from Food Network star Guy Fieri and a comedy club designed by George Lopez. Through 2015, 16 of Carnival’s ships will be overhauled to incorporate these new features.

The brand new Carnival Magic, which will receive an EA Sports Bar in 2014, does have an EA Sports Stadium built into its upper deck. This outdoor area includes a large screen TV that will be used to show sports programming and offer videogame tournaments throughout the cruise.

“The EA Sports partnership goes beyond playing videogames,” said Heald. “We worked with Andrew Anthony, the voice of EA Sports’ ‘It’s in the game’ to record some very special announcements throughout the cruise experience. He’ll promote not only the EA Sports Bar, but also other restaurants and activities on board the ship. We launched this on the Liberty and passengers have loved it.”

Erb said the EA Sports Bars will also be used to give passengers advanced looks at new games, in addition to access to top franchises like Madden, FIFA, PGA, Fight Night and NCAA Football.

“I don’t think our main consumer that’s on these ships are going to be our core audience too much, so we’ll be able to use this partnership to introduce new games,” said Erb. “When SSX ships in the beginning of next year, not all consumers are going to get a chance to see that right away. I think these ships will make a good way of connecting with them. We’ll continue to update games so the ships always have fresh titles.”

Throughout the course of each year, EA Sports will highlight specific games as the real-world sports take center stage. When the PGA TOUR heats up, the Tiger Woods game will take center stage. With the start of college football, NCAA Football will kick off, etc.

“As soon as new games drop, all of the boats will be updated so we can start using it both as a marketing forum to let people see what’s new and different that’s out there from us, as well as to give passengers really cool experiences,” said Erb.

Now gamers can keep up on sports and sports games in between cruise activities like tanning at the beach, snorkeling in the Caribbean, and playing basketball on deck.

John Gaudiosi
John Gaudiosi has been covering video games for over 25 years, dating back to his work for The Washington Post while in…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more