After lengthy discussions among the staff, in-depth interviews with futurist experts, an embarrassing incident involving tea leaves and chicken entrails and frequent trips to the new Googlestradamus online event predictor tool, the IGNN staff has compiled the first-ever IGNN-certified journey into the future. So hold onto your butts.

10 Events We Predict Are Sure to Happen in 2010

1. Elvis’ rotting corpse will rise from the grave and lay a wreath at the tomb of Michael Jackson. (IGNN’s response: Sounds like a great game, Capcom, particularly now that we have a box of Shruggies to protect our furniture!)
2. U.S. and Soviet cosmo/astronauts will not revisit the Jovian system, engage each other in diplomatic space nookie and discover an alien intelligence. (IGNN’s response: We really miss Arthur C. Clarke. He would have been a great addition to our staff.)
3. Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata will journey high in the mountains of Hokkaido in search of missing chairman Yamauchi and will instead discover the Golden Plum Pagoda, which will teach him enlightenment and make him reconsider launching an HD Wii and giving full credit to analyst Michael Pachter for the novel idea. (IGNN’s response: We don’t comment on rumors…particularly our own.)
4. Sony’s long-anticipated gaming/personal service robot product–the PlayPal–will be released with great hoopla but within a month the units will succumb to a viral hack that makes them want to go swimming and thus shorts out their circuitry. (IGNN’s response: Darn! We were really looking forward to having our own robots this year. Didn’t Arthur C. Clarke promise us robots?)
5. Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox 360 will turn gamers into avatars, which will set the stage for the historic release of the Avatar game, which in turn will make all previous games launches pale into insignificance. (IGNN’s response: Being ten feet tall and blue is okay, but what we really want is wings and breasts…actually, that’s just what Rondo Nobson wants. Much of the staff already have breasts and the thought of Nobson fondling his own pair is so off-putting that they have just filed a sexual harassment suit against geek culture.)
6. The Madden series will finally turn to digital download and EA will double its profits while selling the updated game for half the retail price. Even so, an angry Xbox mob will march on EA’s new organic scented candle ship factory in Sausalito to protest having to pay more than the value of a ham sandwich for anything except a ham sandwich. (IGNN’s response: We have to go with the mob on this one. When it comes to a new Madden with improved ball-scratching animations or a tasty ham-flavored snack, we’re going with the ham.)
7. Microsoft will sell Rare back to itself for three quid and Ubisoft will sell France to Rare for two Euros and a gift certificate to Starbucks. (IGNN’s response: How did nobody see this one coming?)
8. Activision’s Bobby Kotick will win the year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, but his great triumph will be overshadowed by his untimely demise when a troop of baboons escapes from the Oslo zoo and devours Mr. Kotick minutes before he is to accept the award. (IGNN’s response: Darn those baboons!)
9. The world will explode on June 10th due to a miscalculation by a physicist at Cern who was distraught over the loss of his Sony PlayPal. The ensuing runaway “God Particle” event resulting from the simultaneous discovery and destruction of the Higgs-Boson will cause a cascading firestorm through the space-time continuum. (IGNN’s response: What does this mean with respect to the deposit we made for our office lease?)
10. A new Evony model will appear in Internet advertisements on the first Tuesday of every month, and by a strange coincidence each one will be named Claire. (IGNN’s response: Just because it’s going to happen doesn’t mean anybody will care about it.)