by Nobody mentions the infamous Second Son rubber.
From Mirror’s Edge messenger bags to Fallout 3 lunch boxes, players are sharing the best physical and digital pre-order bonuses they’ve ever received.
Love ’em or hate ’em, pre-order bonuses have become an industry staple over the past few generations of consoles, giving exclusive bonuses to players who risk a game before it’s released. Although most of these are beta access or some kind of skin for a character, some companies take it a step further and offer some pretty awesome bonuses.
ResetEra user Chubigans started a thread on the site asking others about the best pre-order bonuses they’ve received, both physical and digital. They started the conversation with a classic bonus – the gold cart for Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. For those who don’t know, pre-ordering the game back then gave you a unique gold variant, while others would just get one normal cartridge.
By far the most mentioned pre-order bonus in the whole thread is for Mirror’s Edge. If you pre-ordered the game, you got a yellow shoulder bag that looked like the one in the game, which is a surprisingly generous offer for 2008. Funnily enough, the Collector’s Edition of the game also came with a shoulder bag, apart from one that was apparently inferior and didn’t look like the one in the game.
If a shoulder bag doesn’t sound like your thing, you might be surprised to learn that some games offer lunch boxes as pre-order bonuses. Two mentioned multiple times in the thread are the one that came with Fallout 3 and one for the 2009 release of Bionic Commando. Weird that it happened twice, but at least they both look pretty high quality.
One particular pre-order bonus that’s popular in the thread is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest for the GameCube, a remastered version of OoT that came with pre-orders of The Wind Waker. This version of the game was essentially a much harder version of the original, but also came with the normal version on the hard drive if you didn’t want the challenge. Back then, who would have thought Nintendo would be so kind as to offer ports as pre-orders?
Another game that has been mentioned a few times in the thread is Dead Rising. The original Xbox version of the game featured a Willamette Mall map that acted as a universal booklet, which apparently came in handy for familiarizing yourself with the layout before launching the game. The Wii version of the game, Chop till you Drop, also came with a pretty snazzy t-shirt that looks straight out of Willamette.
One infamous pre-order item that luckily isn’t mentioned in the thread is, well, the glow-in-the-dark condom and energy drink that came with certain pre-orders of Infamous: Second Son. This oddly specific bonus (arguably more appropriate for the overall “energy and electricity” theme of the first two games) was offered as a pre-order for GameStop Italy and surely has to take the crown as the oddest pre-order of them all.
