By ninemsn staff
A computer geek has won his girlfriend's hand in marriage after proposing to her through her favourite video game.
Tammy Li, from New Jersey in the US, was engrossed in a popular puzzle game on her portable game console when she hit a certain score and the screen suddenly cleared.
An engagement ring then dropped into view.
"I thought it was pretty cool, in a nerdy way," fiancé Bernie Peng said of his own effort, according to local newspaper The Star-Ledger.
"Of course afterwards, we did the nice dinner and everything too," he wrote on his blog.
Peng, a financial software programmer, spent one month altering the code on Li's Bejeweled puzzle game for her Nintendo DS console.
The pair even re-enact the special moment with a series of posed photographs posted on Peng's blog.
"You reprogrammed a game to propose to your fiancée. That IS nerdy....but it also totally reeks of awesomeness!" reads one of 529 comments posted on the blog.
PopCap, the Seattle-based company that makes Bejeweled, has promised to fly the happy couple to the city as part of their honeymoon.
A PopCap spokesman said most video game companies would disapprove of users manipulating their games.
"But it won him a woman," the spokesman was quoted by the Star-Ledger as saying. "As a bunch of geeks we have to say, 'Bernie, hats off to you'."
Li and Peng plan to marry by the end of this northern hemisphere summer.
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