Coincidence? Good luck? Hardly: it’s the product of a wholesale rebuilding of the series began years ago, spearheaded by the man who is now FIFA 10’s creative director, Gary Paterson. This is the first of an extended 2-part interview we conducted with him when putting together our feature on FIFA 10. He candidly explains the science and design that lies behind a virtual foot kicking a ball and the fascinating depth to which his team has taken its quest to make a great football game. If you ever wanted to understand exactly how a football game like FIFA works, it's all here. It’s not just about beating Pro Evo or selling bucketloads. It’s much more important than that.
Read part two of our conversation here
So, how did you come to work on FIFA?
Straight from university I went to Codemasters in 2000, where I worked on LMA Manager, on the 3D match engine. It was a management game and it used to be scripted, like, the score’s going to be 2-1, make the 3D match make the score 2-1. I hated that, because I wanted to play the game and enjoy it after I built it. I made it so that all the attributes and stats were what drove the score, and it just had to be balanced enough so that it worked.
When I got to Codemasters I knew that I wanted to work on FIFA or Pro Evo – you know, one of the big action games. I fancied the idea of turning around FIFA at the time, because it was struggling. I got hold of information for someone who worked on FIFA Manager, sent over my CV and I got a job on FIFA Manager in 2004 as a software engineer, a programmer.
I was then basically doing the same job, except obviously with the FIFA, current-gen PS2 engine, so I was getting to know the code-base there. So then after a year of that I got a job as programmer and designer on FIFA 07 current-gen. So I had a team behind me to build FIFA 07 current-gen, then on FIFA 08 I moved on to next-gen.
Current-gen meaning PS2 and Xbox?
Yeah, so FIFA 08 was my first time with PS3 and 360, where I was a designer there, and did a little coding but not as much. Then FIFA 09 I fully transitioned out of coding – although I still dabble – into production, at the time. And then this year it’s creative director. So the title last year was lead designer, producer of gameplay basically. And then this year, creative director on 10.
So back in 2004, what football game did you personally play?
Pro Evo. I hadn’t played FIFA since, I think, Road To World Cup ’98.
What was your impression of FIFA as a player?
I guess much the same as everyone else’s. Basically what it boiled down to for me was that it wasn’t nearly as balanced or as fun or as realistic [as Pro Evo]. I can remember picking up 2003 and playing one game and I just wasn’t really blown away by it. I knew that they had made strides that year because every time the ball moved they made sure it was touched by a foot, you know, and that was the first year they tried that, and you could see they were moving in the right direction with that, but they were still a couple of years behind.
But you had an ambition to work on these games in particular – did you go in with lots of ideas about what to change?
What happened for me was that I was the only coder to do what I did on the Champions League ‘05 engine on LMA. It was a management game, you didn’t ‘play’ it, so I had to make sure Manchester United beat Everton, like, seven out of ten times and things like that, to make sure all the attributes had an effect and the outcome of the matches would be correct.
In doing that I was looking at the code – I mean, I don’t want to downplay the work of the guys who were there before me, but there were concepts there in how they developed the game that weren’t in line with how I perceived the game would be developed. So I put together a document and sent it off to the FIFA team saying, you know, ‘Here are some high-level concepts about how I think it should work’. Things like the success of a shot – it wasn’t based around context all the time, it was just based around attributes, so if the player was really good it would just go in. These are methodologies and a mind-set that you can’t beat Konami with. You have to start thinking about if the player’s under pressure. What kind of kick angle is it? How is the ball moving? What kind of animation is he using? How is he going to strike the ball? What effect will that have on the trajectory of the ball? These sorts of things – I just tried to express to them that there were methodologies that needed to change. And that’s how I got my job on FIFA 07.
And were they rebuilding anyway, as part of the move to the next generation?
I wasn’t involved, but I think they started with a small unit that year, rebuilding the whole engine, and the year after was the big investment in the new engine.
Was it totally from scratch?
Yes.