 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Programmers in the end zone
By ROBB GUIDO
But Strauser's players are computer-generated images that punt, pass and kick on video game screens. His real-life team is made up of artists, programmers and game testers who are hard at work preparing the simulated action for next football season. Strauser, 28, directs production of the popular John Madden football game for Tiburon, a subsidiary of game giant Electronic Arts. In an ordinary-looking office building outside Orlando, Tiburon's 140 employees produce some of the bestselling video games around, all with a sports theme. In addition to Madden football, its titles include NCAA Football and NASCAR Thunder. The games are designed for play on the three major game systems, PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube, as well as on PCs. Strauser compares his mostly male workplace to a frat house, and most of those who work there were fanatical video game players long before they became game creators. "I like to tell people I minored in video games" in college, said Strauser, who started out as a game tester. Tiburon is EA's third-largest studio, and expects to sell about 5-million copies of its games this year, or roughly $200-million in sales. That's heady stuff for a company started only eight years ago in Maitland by a group of twentysomethings. Tiburon landed the contract to make John Madden Football in 1994. In 1998, EA bought the studio. John Madden football provides a simulated football experience, designed around the season's actual team rosters. Gamers choose teams and can play one game or an entire season. The game is named after Madden, the former NFL coach who's now a football commentator on Fox TV.
Even the NFL football players featured in the games occasionally drop by to see how they look. "They're so into it," said Trudy Muller, Tiburon's corporate communications manager. "They want to see how the game is made. Then they'll give feedback like "That's exactly how it is' or "Come on, I'm faster than that.' " Madden games are released at the start of the football season and work begins about a year earlier. After three months of planning, full-blown development goes on for six or seven months, followed by two months of testing. Other Tiburon titles follow a similar schedule. The look of Madden has evolved dramatically since its first season, but its market dominance has remained steady. The franchise has earned more than $1-billion in its 12-year run. In the early days of video games, it took only a few people to design, program and debug new offerings. But Madden and the other games at Tiburon involve a sizable team to produce the intricate graphics and realistic action that video game players have come to expect. Tiburon's staff has tripled since 1998. The office lights are dim, so artists and programmers can see their computer screens. A programmer sits in front of two computers. One displays a welter of computer code, the other a screen shot from a NASCAR game. Walls are adorned with football helmets and computer-generated images for upcoming games, as well as logos and merchandise promoting Tiburon's products. At his computer, Steve Waller, Tiburon's lead technical artist, demonstrates how the Madden players are modeled, starting with the image of a skeleton, then adding detail, even emotions, by molding facial expressions. "Before, you could show your father Madden, and he'd be like "Yeah, it looks like a few boxes jumping around on screen,' " he said. Technological advances have made those boxy characters a thing of the past. The skeletons that Tiburon artists work with are derived from a technique called motion capture. Once a year, Tiburon employees and NFL players fly up to EA's studio in Vancouver, where the athletes are festooned with silver sensor balls and asked to perform various actions. A computer program then generates what looks like a wire-frame version of the athlete in motion. A commercial for rival gamemaker 989 Sports' NFL Game Day spoofed the process, as Rams' runner Marshall Faulk refused to fumble the ball so gamers could capture his motions. The Tiburon crew tapes a steady stream of satellite football broadcasts, reviewing them for useful shots. It's an enormous job to compile pictures of every uniform and every stadium for every pro and college football team. "It's for accuracy and making sure things are right," said John Schappert, one of the company's founders who is a vice president and general manager. "So if you need to know what Akron's midfield logo looks like, it's there. I don't think a lot of people realize the research and effort that goes on behind the scenes." Once the images are saved in a database (and licensing agreements are reached), artists painstakingly reproduce every detail they can squeeze into the game. "In a lot of ways, we're doing electronic T-shirts," said Ed Martin, executive producer of the NASCAR game, whose office looks like a minimuseum of racing. "We're giving people an image of what they love. This is for the fans." Most of the time, it's not a question of what to put into a game; it's what to leave out because of deadline restraints. Part of marketing director Todd Sitrin's job is to take the ideas and give them priorities. What sounds the company can't record when it visits stadiums and race tracks are captured in a sound studio. Employees sometimes strap on football pads and run into each other while wired to mics. As deadline for a game approaches, the staff goes from working eight-hour days to 100-hour workweeks. Not that working such hours doesn't have its perks. Employees are treated to an in-house arcade, cruises, paintball outings and free passes to sporting events. And they can dress pretty much as they please. At 31, Schappert is one of the company's elders. He and two partners founded Tiburon in 1994 in Maitland. But Schappert and his partners didn't have a lot of money, so they approached Electronic Arts. EA provided the money and work Tiburon needed to survive. Madden was one of Tiburon's earliest projects. "I lived on the West Coast, and I didn't enjoy it as much as living in Florida," Schappert said. "So we hired people who were smarter than us, partnered with EA, and the rest is pretty much history." Electronic Arts takes care of marketing, sales and distribution from its California headquarters. Otherwise, EA is fairly hands off, Schappert said, and no one asks his team to cut corners. "It's not about shipping the most games, it's about shipping the best games," Schappert said. "The minute you tarnish your image, that's when the fun stops."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From Tech Times
From the AP |
