Playing to Win

There is the discipline of understanding the audience through focus groups. The discipline of sharing best practices and technologies across the studios through an intranet library. "There's a saying around here," says Brown in communications. "If somebody develops a better blade of grass in one game, that grass will be in somebody else's game the next day." There's also the discipline of grooming the next generation of executive producers. EA's "emerging leaders" program gives participants firsthand experience in departments outside their own. There is the discipline of studying (well, playing) the competition. "We often know more about the feature set of our competition's products than our competition does," boasts Riccitiello.

There is the discipline of methodical project management. "If you're working on a game and you miss your deadlines, you won't be working here very long," says Riccitiello. "This isn't some sort of summer camp -- it's boot camp. If you're not a hunter-carnivore, if you're not willing to work as hard as you can to win in the market, it's not a good place for you."

And yet, the staff is encouraged to take creative challenges. Neil Young was the executive producer on Majestic, an online conspiracy thriller that broke the rules of traditional computer games. It was episodic, like The X-Files. It took interactive play to a new level, offering clues via email, fax, and telephone. But EA discontinued the game because of disappointing sales. Despite being a high-profile flop, it was considered groundbreaking, if flawed, internally. Young was not fired. He became executive producer of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of this year's most important titles.

ON TO THE NEXT GAME
The Academy Award in Rick Giolito's office sits perched on a high shelf above his desk in EA's Los Angeles studio. "Oh, you noticed my Oscar?" he says. It's a joke. The award actually belongs to Mark Lasoff, who won a 1997 Oscar for his visual-effects work on Titanic and has joined EA as art director on MoH. That, in a nutshell, sums up the cinematic nature of video games today. If you want to create a war game that feels as compelling as a movie, you raid Hollywood.

MoH was originally created by DreamWorks Interactive, the much-touted multimedia experiment started by Steven Spielberg, along with Bill Gates, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. After the company failed to live up to its pedigree, EA bought DreamWorks Interactive and promptly transformed MoH into a best-seller. Like other EA acquisitions, the studio retains a good bit of its original identity. In fact, there was a Spielberg here just the other day, says Giolito. The director's son dropped by to play video games with a friend.

The MoH production team decided that it was creating more than a game. It was a "deep, interactive cinematic experience," says Giolito. Rather than spell out the player's objectives, the game starts in Normandy, and you figure out your mission by encountering soldiers who instruct you through scripted animation. Last year, when EA debuted a trailer of the game at E3, the industry's big trade show, people waited in line for three hours to see it.

The development team is obsessed with authenticity. It hired retired U.S. Marine Corps captain Dale Dye to serve as a consultant on the game. Dye, who earned three Purple Hearts fighting in Vietnam, consulted on Saving Private Ryan, Born on the Fourth of July, and Platoon. He teaches the game makers combat tactics and how to handle various weapons. He leads the camouflage-clad team in maneuvers in a mini - boot camp on a paint-ball range. "The people making the game get an understanding of what it means to flank and what it means to work as a team out in the field," says Giolito.

For the D day scenes, six designers and sound engineers traveled to Normandy to take pictures of the beaches and the towns, and to record the sounds of the French countryside. The multilayered soundtrack, featuring music as well as sound effects, gives the game its rich, cinematic feel, and hopefully, says sound designer Erik Kraber, it sparks emotions too. "Ultimately, MoH is a first-person shooter, so you're firing your weapon, but in between that, we try to create attachment to character and personality," says Kraber. "So if you lose someone in battle, it's not taken lightly. That's the Holy Grail in our game."

It's the sort of game that prompted EA to hire Barry Jackson. Although he doesn't play video games, he has worked on a dozen films as an illustrator, including Shrek and Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Jackson has helped refine the MoH preproduction process, which Giolito is sharing with other EA studios. First, a group armed with Post-it Notes gathers in a small conference room that's decorated with camouflage netting. Everyone tosses out dramatic moments to include in the game, such as an ambush, a reunion, or a dream sequence. Then they start rearranging the Post-its to build the narrative arc of the story. It's a common script-writing technique, says Jackson, known as "step-outlining."