Playing to Win

The recording sessions led to another new -- and unexpected -- feature. "Snoop said, 'I want to be in the game,' " says Karp. So EA added him along with fellow rappers Fabolous, Busta Rhymes, and Hot Karl, who hoop it up with Tim Duncan and Jason Kidd. The musicians were given NBA skills according to whichever player they wanted to model themselves after.

In terms of technology, EA hopes to unveil a radical improvement in each iteration. In NBA Live 2003, that innovation is the new "freestyle control stick." It allows you to use both joysticks on the controller, rather than just one. Now, in addition to moving a player forward, backward, or sideways with the left joystick, you can perform more sophisticated moves with the right stick, or right analog.

This is about more than simply adding a new button, says software engineer David Bollo. This is about increasing the level of control, which is a very big deal to gamers. Bollo is more than happy to demonstrate. He's sitting at his desk in the NBA Live office, not far from a row of NBA jerseys hanging from the ceiling. Although he can't palm a real basketball, when he picks up the game controller, he plays like Jason Kidd. "So I can palm the ball behind me or I can sweep it between my legs," Bollo says, moving various players like a puppeteer. "If I want to get fancier, I can cradle it to the right, then cross over and spin my way through traffic. I'm a big fan of the spin move."

Some improvements come straight from gamers, and not just those at EA. After focus groups in Europe said that FIFA wasn't authentic enough, EA assigned 60 people to fix the game. One of the biggest changes involved the ball, and how it remained glued to a player's foot when he dribbled. "We had to do an absolute rewrite," says Rory Armes, a senior studio vice president. The reason? The more realistic a game appears, the higher customer expectations become.

The moves themselves come from actual athletes. The Madden NFL studio, for instance, has tapes of every NFL game going back about five years. Chiang and his team study the tapes for acrobatic catches and tackles as well as for memorable celebrations, like the time San Diego Chargers wide receiver Tim Dwight tilted the ball back and pretended to drink it. "What's real to our consumers is what's on TV," Chiang says.

Actually, EA is going for authenticity rather than realism. It's an important distinction. The games look and feel real, but not too real. For instance, there is no trash talking in NBA Live, the coaches don't get fired in Madden NFL, and there's no ominous black smoke or fatalities in NASCAR Thunder. (Although there are plenty of fatalities in MoH, there's no blood.) When the cars crash, there's only white smoke, the sign of a less severe accident. At first, NASCAR insisted that the cars, plastered with corporate-sponsor logos, couldn't be damaged even after collisions. Eventually, though, Chiang's team convinced NASCAR that bent hoods and crushed bumpers were a part of racing.

FUN AND GAMES AND SERIOUS BUSINESS
It takes a tough company to make entertaining games. "The forgotten aspect of creativity is discipline," says John Riccitiello, president and COO. It's something that EA never forgets. Coming up with a clever idea for a game is the easy part. The hard part, the part that EA focuses on relentlessly, says Riccitiello, is identifying the right idea, assembling the best development team, solving the inevitable technical problems, creating a game that people want to play, getting all of the work done on schedule, getting it to market at the right time, and knowing how to generate buzz about it in an increasingly crowded market. True, many stages of that process are inherently creative, but what ties them together is discipline.

There is the discipline of trying to understand ideas in the making. "This is where a lot of great ideas get lost," says McMillan. "Maybe you don't understand what somebody is describing, and it could be the next Sims." Early in the process, game makers try to identify the creative center of a game, or what they have come to call the "creative x." At its core, NBA Street, which features rim-ramming three-on-three action, is about becoming a street-ball legend. Def Jam Vendetta, a new title, is hip-hop meets professional wrestling. "When we were building The Sims, we knew what we wanted in the game," Riccitiello says. "We knew what to put in and leave out. Ditto James Bond 007, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings."