The 2010 South Africa World Cup ends with Spain beating Brazil 3-1. Bet you didn’t see that coming?

To settle your boggled minds, you should know that this match was a simulation of the entire World Cup games. The simulation used was the recently launched 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa video game by EA Sports for the Xbox 360 platform. The game was set to play all 64 games in the World Cup which will start on June 11. The supposed 90 minute game was completed in 15 minutes by the computer.

Matt Prior, the producer of the game, says that the simulation is very close to the real thing. He adds, “We have a massive group of data collectors in each area of the world and those guys, all fanatics, collect player attributes like speed, strength and tackling, over 40 attributes for each player, and we feed all that data into the computer.”

The game not only includes the 32 teams who qualified for South Africa but also other national teams which are close to 200 in number. This game is closely related to FIFA ’10 and the upcoming FIFA ’11 which has been played rampantly online in the past year. These games can be played on Xbox, Wii or PS consoles.

The video game takes a lot of data into account. A new feature they added is the altitude of the playing field. This now affects the physics of the ball as well as the players’ stamina.