It wasn’t just that Pro Evo played a superior game of football. Like many gamers, Rutter’s preference for Konami’s game was tied into a negative perception of EA and its handling of FIFA. He resented EA for “the marketing glitz, paying for success and shoving licences on it,” he remembers. “What is ‘Road To World Cup’? Why is there a ‘Road To World Cup’ game? You’ve just released a game, you’ve released another game called Road To World Cup, and now you’re releasing a World Cup game. Are you taking the mickey? A lot of people felt that way at the time. I’ve worked in football studios for a long time, so I would play FIFA for research but I‘d never play it for fun.”

Paterson made the move to EA in August 2004, when Pro Evo was at the height of its powers. “I fancied the idea of turning around FIFA at the time, because it was struggling,” he says matter-of-factly. “I got hold of information for someone who worked on FIFA Manager, sent over my CV and got hired.” Working initially on FIFA’s management spin-off Total Club Manager, Paterson enjoyed the culture he found at EA Canada, which he describes as “play hard, work hard”. And he also found a general recognition of Pro Evo’s dominance. “I think when I joined they understood they were in a position where they needed to reinvest. It was the beginning of the change in their mentality around FIFA. You could tell it wasn’t quite right, and they were in the midst of transition.”

Paterson’s job on Total Club Manager was similar to the one he’d done on LMA, programming the 3D engine to generate logical match results. But the code he was now working with was taken from the full version of FIFA. What he saw bothered him. “I don’t want to downplay the work of the guys who were there before me, but there were concepts there that weren’t in line with how I perceived the game would be developed,” he says. Rather than sit on his findings, Paterson drew up a document that included what he describes as “high-level concepts around how the game should work,” and sent it to the main FIFA team. “Things like the success of a shot,” he explains. “It wasn’t based around context, it was just based around attributes. You have to start thinking: is he under pressure, what kind of kick angle is it, how is the ball moving? You have to think about how he’s going to strike the ball, and what effect striking the ball in that manner would have on the trajectory of the ball.” His message was clear: what EA had were “methodologies, a mindset and concepts that you can’t beat Konami with.”

Thanks to this document, Paterson was given a job on the gameplay team for the PS2 and Xbox versions of FIFA 07. His move came amid a more general changeover, since this was also the year that the studio unveiled its entirely new next-gen engine with FIFA 07 for Xbox 360. There had been an earlier game for 360, FIFA 06: Road To FIFA World Cup, using what Paterson identifies as the “current-gen engine with some enhancements,” but it had reviewed badly, underlining the need for new technology. Andrew Wilson was the man in charge of overseeing that technology.

Now vice-president of EA Sports, Wilson had been Paterson’s producer on FIFA Manager before being promoted to head up the entirety of EA’s FIFA output. “We started with a very small group of phenomenal producers, designers and engineers,” he says of the team behind FIFA’s new engine, naming gameplay producer Kaz Makita (“now David’s boss”) and Hugues Ricour (“now running FIFA’s online business out of Asia”) as key people. A realistic appraisal of FIFA’s recent history was the team’s starting point. “The FIFA game on PS2 was not a bad game,” Wilson says. “I think it had an amazing competitor in Pro Evo, and Pro Evo had become the football game to play. Sitting on the outside of that FIFA team throughout the PS2 cycle, everyone was trying to build a great game, it was just that Pro Evo had secured the position as the benchmark to measure all football games by, and was doing a phenomenal job.”

Wilson and the others soon realised they had to start from scratch. “What it was really about was using the platform transition to create a new benchmark. [We] went through what we thought next-gen football was going to be about. The original vision was: wouldn’t it be amazing if you could play 11-on-11 football by the 2010 World Cup? At the time that seemed a ludicrous notion – even internally people were saying, ‘Konami are going to go in a different direction and you’re gonna get hosed again’.”

Having established this ambitious goal, the team worked backwards from 2010 and decided what needed to be done year-on-year in order to achieve it. “The first thing we had to do, we actually had to make it feel like football,” says Wilson. “Anyone who played FIFA would say: ‘It was a good game, but it didn’t necessarily feel like football’. We had to rebuild the engine so that by the time you were playing as a single player [in an 11-on-11 match] the fundamentals would be the key to your experience.”

As a consequence, FIFA 07 was not what you’d call “a flashy product,” as Wilson puts it. It didn’t have “whizz-bang marketing features” and instead concentrated on the basics of passing, shooting and running. It was designed as a building block, to be improved with each iteration. This is where Paterson came in. He had worked with Wilson on the rewrite of FIFA Manager – Wilson says he was “instrumental” in the quality boost of EA’s management game – and was moved on to the next-gen team and began to work with the new engine during production of FIFA 08.