For centuries, men have found creative ways to propose marriage to that special someone. Here are seven examples of how some awesomely geeky grooms-to-be used video games to pop the big question.
Nothing says romance like boiling lava
Indie sandbox building game Minecraft allows players to create some pretty wild and imaginative things, so it was only a matter of time before someone used it to pop the big question. Last year, an unnamed BioWare employee proposed to his girlfriend by writing “Marry me?” in lava in the game world. He also built a gigantic engagement ring. According to the video, she said yes.
“I got better things to do than help some schmuck hit on his main squeeze!”
Leave it to Gearbox Software to come up with a totally irreverent and hilarious way to propose marriage. In this video, foul-mouthed Borderlands mascot Claptrap is coerced by an off-screen developer into asking superfan Tora if she’ll marry her boyfriend, Ben, but not before he hits on her himself. Ben tells Kotaku that playing Borderlands together “easily made that awkward starting out stage of any relationship go extremely smooth.”
Hacker puts his skills to good use
YouTube user TheRealPfhreak originally wanted to propose to his girlfriend at Mount Baker in Washington, the site of the couple’s first date. There was no discreet way of getting there, however, so he did what he thought was the next best thing and digitally recreated the mountain by hacking a copy of role-playing game Chrono Trigger. “I spent a long time debating whether or not this proposal was awesome or incredibly stupid,” he explains. “Her friends and my friends helped talk me into it, and it was a huge success!”
Now you’re proposing with portals
When Gary Hudston wanted to ask his girlfriend, Stephanie, to marry him, he enlisted the help of level designers from Portal 2 mapping community website ThinkingWithPortals.com — as well as Valve’s Eric Wolpaw and GlaDOS voice actress Ellen McClain — to build him a very special proposal, according to Time. “You can say no,” GlaDOS says. “I’m sure he’ll get over it … eventually.” Luckily for him, she said yes.
Love and marriage in Little Big Planet
Listen closely and you can hear an audible gasp when gamer “DimmuJed’s” girlfriend discovers his proposal in a custom-made level of Little Big Planet called “Love and Marriage.” “She was so shocked she kept playing and knew I was filming. Afterwards, we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring,” he writes.
A Mobius Proposal
A Mobius Proposal is a co-op puzzle platformer created by Matt Gilgenbach for the sole purpose of proposing to his girlfriend. Players in the game are on opposite sides of a Mobius band and must work together in order to overcome obstacles. “I incorporated the proposal in the game by displaying a fake low battery message and hiding the ring inside the battery pack of the controller,” Matt writes. He then secretly turned on his webcam to record the above reaction.
There’s an app for that
Jen is a verifiable fiend for iOS puzzle games, according to Cult of Mac, so her boyfriend, Joe, asked Foozle creator William Thurston to create an in-app proposal. Thurston agreed and worked the message “Jen, I love you with all my heart and nothing would make me happier than to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” into his physics-based puzzle game. Beneath the message, there was just one button: “YES.” Not only did Thurston agree to create the proposal for free, he even offered the game as a free download for a limited time.
