It looks like during a recent demo of Unreal Tournament III at the Edinburgh Interactive festival a very peculiar item was uncovered, known only as the Gamercard. The folks at Epic quickly covered it up by stating “Oops!”.

One can speculate pretty quickly and with certainty that this is an attempt by SONY to take a step towards the tried and true GamerTags that MS currently uses over their Xbox LIVE networks. I think it is a great idea and can’t wait to see it in action. We can only hope that Nintendo thinks of something similar and does away with those awful Friend Codes.

From Game Digest:

During a playable demo of Unreal Tournament III at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, we spotted something very interesting on the game’s menu system. It’s called Gamercard and it doesn’t seem too unlikely a possibility that this will turn out to be a unique player identity system, not entirely dissimilar to the Xbox 360’s Gamertag system that manages player stats and achievements.

We quizzed Epic’s Mark Rein about and he did little to dispel our assumptions saying quickly “Oops, you shouldn’t have seen that”. We would have liked to grabbed a pic, and were little deterred by the venue’s strict no camera phone policy and dodgy lighting, however Mark Rein’s rapid covering of the projector with his hand put pay to that cunning idea.

Needless to say, we have little to go on. It is accessed with the Triangle button if that makes any difference to you. It is also anyone’s guess whether this is a future Sony project that will cover the whole of the PlayStation Network or whether it is simply a feature of UT3. But I’m betting that the secrecy surrounding it indicates a new PS3 feature. More news as we get it.