Select your address

Can't find your address?

Enter address manually >

Uh oh! We can't install a phone line for you

But we can still offer you a great range of TV and Broadband packages!

Sport is Life: How FIFA became the real deal

Gaming > Latest news > Sport is Life: How FIFA became the real deal

Football is almost the perfect videogame, especially when playing with your mates. You don’t even need to be much of a gamer to get it, or even to become good at it.

There are few greater passions in life than the one we all share for sport and the FIFA Football series has become one of the greatest ways to express this devotion. This year, with women’s international teams included for the first time, we can make that connection with all the world’s greatest players.

Football is almost the perfect videogame, especially when playing with your mates. You don’t even need to be much of a gamer to get it, or even to become good at it. Thank 150 years of the British Football Association and over three decades of programming to reach the point where we are now, which is about the same time taken for the ATLAS experiment to perfect the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, and no less important. Yes, owing to great people in history we have a clear set of rules (though we still like to argue about them), and consoles powerful enough to make players on the pitch look, behave and intuitively control with stunning realism.

There have been many attempts to capture the essence of football since the dawn of computer gaming in the early 1980s. The Hall of Famers go as far back as Pele’s Soccer for the Atari 2600 in 1981 then later include Kick Off (1989) and Sensible Soccer (1992) for prehistoric home computers. They were all crazy basic to look at, as you might expect, but the flow of the gameplay made up for visual shortcomings and – because they were games – hilarious physics like curving the ball using ‘after-touch’ were accepted as the norm. They were just awesome fun to play.

When FIFA International Soccer entered the scene in 1993, it was the first game that had a tracking camera and pseudo-3D perspective. Football purists were critical of the game for showboating and not much else on the early consoles, but it became the biggest selling title of the year.

Pressure was on for FIFA to really prove itself, however, after competition arrived a year later in the form of Konami’s International Superstar Soccer series (now Pro Evolution Soccer). PES upped the ante in terms of realistic player attributes and behaviour. Long story short, the PES vs. FIFA rivalry has continued to rage, with both big names enjoying their ups and downs until the present day.

The response from FIFA each season has been always fascinating and admirable, but with FIFA 2009 released in 2008 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 it brought its killer app: Ultimate Team. This simple to play trading-card style game really emphasised EA Sports’ connection to the wider world of real life teams and players, effectively replicating the transfer market with dream squad ambitions. It captured the thrill of opening a pack of cards to find a star player and trading ones you don’t need.

Eight years later, FIFA Ultimate Team has become a corner stone for the series while also inspiring the wildly popular Madden Ultimate Team that debuted in the American Football game Madden NFL 11 in 2010. It’s a great conversation starter, and a solid way to improve and exchange your sporting knowledge with aspiring player-managers around the world. As new additions go, Ultimate Team has been significant for a lot of wholesome reasons that the EA Sports team believes really matter.

Meanwhile, in that pursuit of things that mean something, FIFA 16 has struck solid gold.

There are 2.6 million women and girls playing football in the UK alone under the FA*, with numbers similarly growing numbers across Europe and the US. The Independent recently named five female players, staff and FA leaders in its 50 Most Influential Women in Sport. Women’s football is major and exciting. Thankfully nobody is more aware of this than the EA Sports team responsible for FIFA.

“The introduction of women’s national teams is one of the most important additions we’ve ever made to our franchise,” says senior producer, Nick Channon. “Why now? The answer to that is quite simple. We’ve been working on putting women in our game for quite a while. We did a prototype a number of years ago where we put a female head on a man’s body. This was not what we wanted. So, we created a list of things that we needed to do it properly which made us realise there were quite a few technical deficiencies in our game that stopped us from doing so.” As things turned out, bringing the world’s best female players to FIFA had a positive effect on the rest of the game.

“The major thing was ‘player scaling’; the way that we do body types in our game,” Nick continues. “We didn’t have the ability to scale based on hips, shoulders, legs – all the different body parts were originally scaled up and down as one. Improving this also had a major effect on male body types. Now we can do a proper Peter Crouch, who’s tall and skinny. Also, a lot of female players have pony tails. Previously we wouldn’t animate these for male players during gameplay because it was difficult to do. We needed to optimise the entire game to allow for hair simulation in gameplay.”

The list of improvements that women’s football instigated doesn’t end there.

According to Nick: “We had a lot of work to do regarding animation. We needed to work on head scanning to allow for likenesses to be as authentic as possible, sending our scanning tech out to most of the teams. All of these things came together, and it’s taken us a number of years to do it.”

There’s a hair-raising promotional video to show-off how great women’s football looks in FIFA 16, which you really ought to see. “We’re not here to stand and watch. This is our game too. The time has come,” it says. Truer words have rarely been spoken. It makes you want to punch the air.

Go, FIFA 16.

*Source: The Football Association

back to top