NFL legend John Madden, in prepartion for the rapidly approaching 2013 NFL season, has spent the better part of the past six months at EA Sports’ Design Studios in Redwood City, CA working hard on coding and refining the upcoming release of his namesake video game, “Madden NFL 25.”
“I’m still having problems with the lighting renders on the late afternoon games,” the 77 year old former coach of the Oakland Raiders said. “I can’t seem to get accurate color texture because my diffusion rates won’t stay constant.”
Madden, who retired as a broadcaster from NBC Sports in 2009, has personally overseen every installment of the iconic game since its launch in 1988, and recently spent several all nighters at the EA offices while authoring a completely new, line by line coding platform that has allowed for breakthroughs in user interface and graphic motion.
“It’s this new Infinity Physics Engine,” Madden said, leaning back from his chair at his computer station. “By eliminating the pre-determined output functions on momentum and collisions, we’ve created endless possibilities for smoother play and more realistic control. But until we can properly assign accurate subratings for every NFL player’s specific skill set, the blocking and tackling functions will be no better than they were in the 2007 upgrade.”
“Here, just watch the animation on this J.J. Watt sack,” he continued. “The magic is all in the motion blurs. That’s over 3 months and six thousand lines of code to get a tackle that authentic.”
Added the NFL Hall of Famer, “Boom!”
Madden rejected any notion that he could step aside to let EA’s team of designers take the reins from him on future installments.
“Heck no. As long as this game bears my name, I’ll be right here at this console writing every line and rendering every effect. Look, I retired from NBC specifically to allow me more time here at EA. It’s taken every free moment I have to get these new field rendering values to better support dynamic degradation and realistic weather effects.”
“Al Davis told me something years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it,” Madden concluded. “He said, ‘John, 3D characters that can not only support swap-parts for variety, but can also quickly render accurate shading parameters, don’t simply create themselves, you know.’ And boy oh boy, was he ever right about that.”
