If you’re the first to pitch a perfect game in “Major League Baseball 2K10,” you could earn $1 million, almost as much as the Giants’ Tim Lincecum pulled down in his two Cy Young Award-winning seasons combined.

MLB2K10According to a news release sent out today by Novato-based 2K Sports, a contest that opens at midnight on March 2, the day “MLB 2K10” goes on sale, will award a cool million to the first person who’s able to pitch an entire game, nine innings or longer, without allowing a base-runner. Apparently, the company feels that the game’s realistic, overhauled pitching controls will make performing the feat nearly as difficult as it is to pull off in real life. (To date, only 18 perfect games have been thrown, 16 of them since 1900.)

Naturally, the contest has a few more rules and caveats. For starters, you must be 18 or older and playing the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 versions of the game, and the contest isn’t open to residents of such fun-hating states as Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, North Dakota and Vermont. Perhaps a bigger sticking point is that the perfect game, which must be completed within the first two months of “MLB 2K10’s” release, has to be recorded on video, then submitted to 2K Sports on a DVD. You’ll also have to use some game settings created specifically for the contest, which will prevent you from filling up an entire roster with Emmanuel Burriss and adjusting all of the game’s difficulty sliders to favor your pitchers.

Honestly, the DVD requirement sounds like a lot of work. (Think of all the hours of useless footage the contest winner will end up shooting.) In the era of always-online game consoles, it seems like it would be relatively easy for 2K Sports to verify that a given Gamertag or PlayStation Network ID has won the $1 million, but then again, they’re willing to make someone a millionaire just for being good at a video game, so it’s hard to quibble.

For the sake of contrast, some digging around on the Internet reveals the Giants paid Lincecum about $405,000 in 2008 and $650,000 in 2009, and the bum never even threw a no-hitter, let alone a perfect game.

For more details, keep an eye on this page.

(Even though I threw a perfect game against the Pirates using default settings in “Major League Baseball 2K7,” I won’t be devoting myself to this pursuit. How strange would it look if a video game journalist accepted a $1 million payout from a game publisher?)

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