When players open the fanatically popular FIFA 21 today, they’ll have access to the game’s newest star. Thirty-year-old Kiyan Prince is at the pinnacle of his career, flying high with some of the best skill ratings in the game and backed by marquee sponsors such as Adidas.
But Kiyan Prince has been dead for 15 years, killed on May 18, 2006. At the time, Prince was arguably the brightest young soccer prospect in England. He was stabbed to death while trying to break up a fight outside of his school.
KPF worked with EA Sports, creative agency Engine, digital artist Chris Scalf, and VFX powerhouse Framestore to bring Prince to the screen. FIFA 21 players will be able to select Prince for their teams in career or “Ultimate Team” mode, or play him as a member of his childhood club, Queens Park Rangers. Players will also see contact information for KPF and have the ability to learn more about its services from within the game.
The hope is that the increased awareness will also result in more financial contributions that can help the foundation take its message to schools across the U.K. and set up a permanent base. The elder Prince’s foundation work earned him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2019. That same year, Queens Park Rangers renamed its west London stadium the Kiyan Prince Foundation Stadium.
James Salmon, EA Sports’ global marketing director for the FIFA franchise, says the game has never done an initiative like this in the franchise’s 28-year history. “Virtually recreating any player is significantly complicated; from the outset of the project, we were committed to representing Kiyan as authentically as possible, from aging his appearance using images from his teen years, to developing his on-pitch characteristics and style of play,” says Salmon. “We wanted to ensure Kiyan featured in-game as the superstar he would’ve been and to build on our work to date supporting the Kiyan Prince Foundation.”
Last year, EA Sports worked with KPF and Engine to drop a digital tifo of Kiyan Prince in the game (tifos are fan-generated visual displays in the stands of a stadium), which the companies say went over well with gamers and sparked outreach to the foundation. Now, making Prince a fully playable player, they’re hoping to build on that.
Framestore’s global real-time director Karl Woolley says the key to creating an accurate portrayal of Prince was to make sure they captured his spirit and how his virtual image would feel. “We’ve created many humans, digi doubles, and superheroes in the past, but Kiyan was on a different level,” says Woolley.
As a part of the game’s launch, there’s a short film to engage vulnerable kids, along with a series of ads fronted by the virtual Prince. This was done through a mix of cutting-edge development and some secret sauce: Framestore and Scalf created “synthetic data” to train its technology on, then used two hero shots of Prince that Scalf had crafted and 20 minutes of body-double movement data to train the system. “Leaving the GPUs to churn away for a few hours, we then composited all of the above into the end shot of the film you can see today,” says Woolley.
Prince says the process of bringing his son back to virtual life was an emotional one. “I’m not going to pretend it’s been easy,” he says. “You have to find the right people to help, Kiyan’s friend’s, people he played with. It’s been a difficult process, but I knew the minute it was posed to me that this was a part of the journey I was supposed to be taking. It was such a great fit.”
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