Welcome to Heavenston, Ill.
It’s where 60,000 purple people fill Ryan Field beyond capacity each week, Northwestern usually plays Miami for the national title and sophomore running back Joseph Ferguson is the early Heisman favorite.
And it can be found only on a television, in EA Sports NCAA Football video games.
“I’m a video game-aholic,” Wildcats’ senior cornerback Marvin Ward admitted. “In my peak, I couldn’t tell you how many hours I played. I played all day.”
He’s not alone.
About 90 percent of the NU football team spends its free time pretending to be on the NU football team, according to senior defensive tackle Luis Castillo.
When the Cats aren’t practicing football, playing football, watching football, studying or working out, they’re at home, in front of their Xboxes and PlayStation 2s — playing more football.
“It’s fun being out here on the field,” junior cornerback Marquice Cole said. “But when you go home and play video games, especially when you’re on the game, you can go all out. You don’t have to be all serious like at practice.”
And when the players lose that seriousness, it can make for interesting wagers.
Senior linebacker John Pickens and Castillo had a bet going their freshman year, when they roomed together on the first floor of Elder Hall.
“All year we played NCAA 2002, and we would mark the series score on the wall,” Pickens said. “If I lost I was supposed to go play volleyball by the lakefront in a thong. And if I won, Luis had to sing a song of my choice in Elder Hall, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you what song it was.”
The song was Akinyele’s “Put It In Your Mouth,” and Castillo wasn’t about to lose that bet.
“Luis likes to cheat a lot,” Pickens said. “I’d come into the room and I’d see him erasing marks from the wall or giving himself marks. He’s not too smart though — he’s a defensive lineman, so sometimes he put them in different colors. It was obvious he was cheating.”
With cheating rampant, Castillo and Pickens were unable to finish the series and complete the bet.
But their story displays the intensity involved when Big Ten football players grab hold of those analog Dual Shock controllers.
Coach Randy Walker has never played a video game, but he knows his players consider NCAA Football a competition, just like anything else.
“If you’re a competitor, you want to compete,” Walker said. “We have this one game at my house where we toss beanbags in a hole. And I’ll fight you over it. You just want to win.”
behind the scenes
Virtual football players have come a long way in 12 seasons, from blocks of bright colors to statuesque figures with birthmarks and facial hair.
What began as Bill Walsh College Football in 1993 morphed into College Football USA in the mid-’90s and eventually settled as NCAA Football in 1997. All the while, the game was adjusting to the ever-changing game console industry.
EA’s newest title is NCAA Football 2005, which was released this past summer. Each year the title is based on the graduation date of the seniors, not the year in which most of the games actually take place.
A core group of more than 35 people work on each edition of NCAA Football for nine months at the Electronic Arts offices in Orlando, Fla.
The always-improving graphics have paved the way for NCAA Football to be EA’s second-best selling video game, tied with NBA Live and right below Madden NFL.
“As the game gets more mass-marketed, the graphics get much better and it rivals real-life TV, and we get more and more people playing,” said Tom Vuong, associate producer of NCAA Football 2005. “People that might not be playing video games 10 years ago are playing the games now. They’re attracted because it looks so real. The play is so real.”
What makes the play so real — or rather who makes the play so real — are five people who sit in a room and watch college football for most of the year.
“We have a couple of guys following tapes, and their jobs are also to work with the playbooks, to make them as accurate as possible,” Vuong said. “We have about eight satellites, and we record every game that we can. We do research. We sit back and look at what formations the teams come out in. And we make sure that what we have in the game is like what we see from those teams in real life.”
After reviewing tape from almost every college football game they can find, EA employees separate all 117 Division IA teams into eight tiers based on projections for the following year.
They then decide on the strengths of the teams: running or throwing, stopping the pass or stopping the rush.
“At that point we do it down to position grouping,” Vuong said. “And then all of the ratings just fall into place for us at that point. It’s a pretty in-depth formula.”
Vuong and his team top off playbooks and player ratings with accurate portrayals of each team’s stadium.
EA sends two photographers around the country to take pictures from the outside of every team’s venue.
After meetings with coaches, approval from each school and e-mails from football fans — “We would get feedback on Miami’s shoe color and face mask color repeatedly,” Vuong said — NCAA Football is ready to ship in July.
gettin’ it on
It’s Tuesday, 8:18 p.m. Gameday.
The field of play is senior running back Noah Herron’s apartment, home of a 32-inch flat-screen television (a graduation present), an Xbox, a PlayStation 2 and a GameCube.
It’s going to be epic battle between Herron and senior wide receiver Frank Bass: NU in the white uniforms versus NU in the purple uniforms. And Xbox is the game console of choice.
“He’s going to kick my ass,” Herron says.
“I try to play a season a week, about two games a day, ” Bass says. “I’m obsessed.”
Herron takes an early 7-0 lead on an option run by RB #33 — himself. (NCAA Football 2005 is unable to use players’ names in the video game because of NCAA regulations.)
QB #14 — Brett Basanez — had a wide open path to the end zone, and the crowd wonders why the quarterback chose to go to RB #33.
“Basanez means nothing to me,” Herron says.
“I don’t play defense,” Bass complains.
The game is tied 7-7 midway through the first quarter, but Herron is struggling to defend Bass’ passing game.
“The defense needs to play a little bit tighter in the secondary,” says Kirk Herbstreit, an ESPN analyst and one of the game’s commentators.
“Shut up, Kirk,” Herron tells the game.
After a few distractions — “We don’t even get BET,” Herron tells Bass about his cable. “We have the Nuns Channel, just nuns talking.” — Bass builds a comfortable 21-10 lead with a 46-yard touchdown pass to WR #80 (himself).
“Look at Bass!” he yells. “Look at how tall I look! I look suave, man! That’s the first time I’ve ever scored in this game. This is a miracle right here.”
And on the last play of the first half, with the clock reading 0:00, Bass throws a 50-yard touchdown pass to WR #2 (Ashton Aikens). It’s 35-17.
“The game cheats sometimes,” Herron explains.
Herron kicks to Bass to start the second half, but gets the ball back on a fourth-and-five incomplete pass.
“Defensive stop!” Herron screams.
But then, on fourth-and-31 at his own 1-yard line, Herron throws an incomplete pass on a fake punt. That’s right: a fake on fourth-and-31.
Bass makes it 41-17 with a first-down touchdown pass, and turns off the Xbox with 2:26 left in the third quarter.
“Twenty-one point rule,” Bass says. “If someone’s up by 21 points, we turn it off. The game’s over.”
Gameday’s done at 8:58 p.m., and Bass wins big.
“‘The Real World’ is on,” Bass tells Herron. “It’s a new one.”
Ratings matter
There was just one player who ever complained that his rating in a video game was too high, Tom Vuong said. That was NFL running back Emmitt Smith.
Marquice Cole was on the other end of the spectrum when NCAA Football 2005
came out.
Cole was unhappy — extremely unhappy — with his rating of 94 out of 100 in the speed category.
“They never get it right,” Cole said. “They had (sophomore cornerback) Cory Dious faster than me. He’s fast. He ran (40 yards in) 4.28 (seconds). But I ran a 4.23. I broke the school record, and I don’t know how I’m not 99.”
And as a cornerback, Cole wasn’t impressed with the ability of defensive backs in NCAA Football.
“The DBs get burnt too easy,” Cole said. “You can just be USC, tap the receiver button, lob it up and they’ll go catch it every time. If you pick the No. 1 team, you are going to more than likely win, no matter who the other team is.”
NCAA Football has made a few mistakes with NU in past versions, including replacing Evanston with Heavenston and portraying junior cornerback Jeff Backes as an African-American.
But one defensive back owes his scholarship to a football video game.
“I didn’t play football until my senior year of high school, so I learned everything about football from Madden,” Marvin Ward said. “If it weren’t for Madden, I wouldn’t know anything about football. I learned the coverages. If you’ve never played football, you’d never know anything about Cover-2, Cover-3, Cover-4.”
Most of the players who spend their free time with controllers in hand agree that NCAA Football is about as close as a game can come to real life.
“It’s amazing how realistic it is, the way they design the defenses and the offenses, the coverages and the blitzes,” Luis Castillo said. “The playbook is really realistic.”
But with players’ performances in NCAA 2005 based on projections determined during the 2003 season, sometimes reality is a little too much to handle.
“When it first came out, we always played Northwestern versus Northwestern,” junior receiver Mark Philmore said. “But then you get pissed off because all of the receivers start dropping the ball all of the time.
“Recently I’ve been playing with Virginia a lot. Their quarterback can run. His speed is a little bit higher in the game, so it’s nothing against Brett.”
Whether NCAA Football is realistic or not, the amount of time football players spend playing video games is a modern-day phenomenon unique to the current generation of college and professional athletes.
“We played cards on the bus when I was a player,” Walker said. “We didn’t play video games, but I think they’re pretty neat. I wish I could play them. They look like fun. But I really struggle with all of that stuff.
“I’m from a different era.”
Reach Teddy Kider at [email protected].
