Someone at EA Sports lost a bet. That’s the only explanation I have for Snoop Dogg showing up in NHL 20 as both a player and a special guest announcer.
NHL 20’s latest title update, released Thursday, adds Martha Stewart’s cooking partner to the broadcast booth alongside James Cybulski, the play-by-play man who debuted this year. Snoop can also be found in the World of Chel online multiplayer suite, sporting a custom sweater with Long Beach, California’s ZIP code across the bottom trim. Check it all out in the video above.
Snoop and EA go way back. He was the special guest star in the commentary booth for 2018’s EA Sports UFC 3, also developed at EA Vancouver. In 2015, when Microsoft announced its Xbox 360 backward compatibility program, Snoop rallied the public to an online petition to make the dear departed NCAA Football 14 an Xbox One game.
Sadly, that did not come to pass, probably because of licensing and other lawyerly stuff. But I will never forget watching Snoop go behind closed doors at EA’s E3 2011 booth, taking his beloved USC Trojans against producer Ben Haumiller’s Florida State Seminoles. And Ben rolled Snoop up and smoked him, just like one of Snoop’s favorite crops.
