Format: 360, PC, PS2, PS3, Wii
Release: Autumn
Publisher: EA
Developer: In-house

In 2004, French footballer Thierry Henry, then widely regarded as the world’s best player, spoke proudly to the press about appearing on the cover of Konami’s latest football game, Pro Evolution Soccer 4. “I started off with the Japanese version about ten years ago,” he said, with an unexpectedly informed zeal that spoke to the series’ independently minded fans. “I just love Pro Evo. It is by far the closest to real football.” For those who followed the annual battle between football’s big-hitters, Pro Evo and EA’s FIFA, the significance was obvious. Henry had defected to Pro Evo, having been FIFA’s cover star the previous year, where he had never made such warm or knowledgeable comments. Pro Evo, the critical darling that relied on gameplay rather than official kits and league licences, was no longer just posing a threat to EA’s glossy juggernaut – it was winning.

Five years on, things have changed dramatically. At an event staged at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, EA has the confidence to unveil its latest iteration, FIFA 10, several months earlier than usual in the yearly schedule. Peter Moore, the charismatic executive whose arrival at EA Sports has coincided with FIFA’s revival, introduces the game’s producer, David Rutter, by applauding the team’s achievement last year. He boasts proudly of FIFA 09’s Metacritic rating of 87 – extraordinary for a sports game and ten points clear of its old rival PES – and says with a smile that this year he’s told them to get 90. He means it.

How did FIFA get here? How did it attain its position as football gaming’s critical and commercial leader? It’s a story of a development team reinventing itself, taking advantage of a hardware generation switch to rebuild its game, led by obsessive, hardworking and bullish producers like Rutter. But it’s also about a vision of football, how it should be played and can be played through technology, a vision protected and put into motion by Rutter’s quiet engineer counterpart, Gary Paterson.


_{^{Gary Paterson (left), the man behind FIFA 10's gameplay design, and David Rutter, its producer}}

Paterson has been described to the press as FIFA’s gameplay genius. If you’d been writing about the game over the last two years and wanted to discuss the engine, you would have been directed to Paterson. The reason is simple – he understands it better than anyone else. An Aberdeen fan who was “brought up playing football, watching football and playing football videogames,” Paterson understands intuitively the sport that his game is trying to capture and recreate. And, as a software engineer, he has a remarkable insight as to how this can be achieved technically, which has seen him rise from programmer on the PS2 and Xbox versions of FIFA 07 to creative director of FIFA 10.

After leaving university, Paterson got his first job at Codemasters in 2000, where he worked on the 3D match engine for management sim LMA Manager. The engine was designed to visualise automated games played by the player’s team, but in doing so it took the kind of shortcut Paterson would later fight against in FIFA. “It used to be scripted,” he explains. “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.” Paterson flipped the system: rather than predetermining the result and fixing the ‘live’ match to fit, he “made it so that the attributes and stats were what drove the score, and it just had to be balanced enough so that it worked.”

Coincidentally, while Paterson was working on LMA, Rutter was putting his own skills to the test on another football management game. In 2004 Sports Interactive split with publisher Eidos and took its Championship Manager database to set up Football Manager at Sega. This left Eidos with the Championship Manager brand but no game to tie it to. It turned to Rutter. “I literally joined and there was me and a couple of other guys,” he says. “We were given an office, we had to deck it out with desks, computers and recruit every single developer. From recruitment of staff to launching the game was about a year. That was an interesting period in my life.”

Both Paterson and Rutter are very open about the fact that before they joined EA (in 2004 and 2007 respectively), they were Pro Evo players. “I hadn’t played FIFA since, I think, Road To World Cup 98,” admits Paterson. “What it boiled down to for me was that it wasn’t nearly as balanced or as fun or as realistic. I can remember picking up [FIFA] 2003 and playing one game and just… I wasn’t really blown away by it. You could see they were moving in the right direction, but they were still a couple of years behind.” Rutter was the same. “I pretty much played Pro Evo exclusively. The first time I played Pro Evo on the PlayStation was with [former Edge editor] João Diniz Sanches,” he explains. “João went: ‘You’ve got to play this game’. I was working at a company called Crush doing a football game and I was like, ‘We are so owned’.”