REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – EA Sports has announced that next year’s installment of its popular NHL video game series will introduce Lockout Mode, an exciting new feature that promises to make the game more lifelike than ever before. The “NHL 14” video game is planned to be entirely unplayable, never turning on and responding to no commands. With the real NHL season questionable at best, given the stalemate in negotiations between the players and ownership, the announcement from EA Sports comes just in time for eager fans.

“With each release, the goal is to make the game more like the reality of NHL hockey,” said EA spokesperson Gary Hartman. “The dominant trend in today’s game is that the seasons don’t actually occur, so we’ve put a lot of work into reflecting that in ‘NHL 14.’”

While most yearly re-releases of the game involve only minor tweaks and updated rosters, this project took an enormous amount of effort. Engineers spent months painstakingly programming the game to make actual play entirely impossible.

“It’s more complex than it seems at first,” explained game designer Craig Simmons. “If you watch for long enough, and I mean for days at a time, there will be flickers on the screen, and tiny bits of activity that make you think the game might turn on. Of course, it never will. We’ve made sure of that.”

Engineers have given the players significantly more attributes and introduced some exciting new gameplay modes, which will never be seen. Also not functioning is the game’s soundtrack. The in-game fighting has also been improved, with players now able to engage in long-term disputes and debates in addition to blindly throwing punches at each other.

“It’s tough to sell a game that does absolutely nothing and still make it popular,” said Hartman. “But as far as I know, the real National Hockey League isn’t worried about this problem, so neither are we.”