TITLE
Madden Is As Full Of Anonymous Players As The NFL Itself
AUTHOR
Colin McGowan
PUBLICATION
Deadspin
YEAR
2019
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
It’s hardly a selling point, but this year’s edition of Madden has the real Kyle Lauletta. The game’s rendering of the Giants’ rookie quarterback—who stepped into a blowout win against Washington in Week 13 to throw five incompletions and a pick and then meekly returned to clipboard and donut-gofer duty—looks more or less exactly like the man himself: blond and well-built, handsome and ambiently Pennsylvanian. Given that the real Lauletta is a fourth-rounder with career backup written all over him, the fidelity is both impressive and a tad gratuitous.Lauletta is one of the more obscure NFL players to have an excellent approximation of his real face in Madden 19, and proof that the franchise’s bench goes deep. Every year, the team at EA Tiburon visits the rookie combine in Indianapolis to perform around 330 head scans of incoming prospects, using a semicircular rig outfitted with eight cameras and software that allows artists to turn numerous snaps of a player’s eyes, nose, cheeks, and jawline into a digital re-creation in under a week. The Madden folks also go around to teams during offseason workouts to track down players they’ve missed, or whose in-game models are in need of a refresh. “It just takes a few minutes to do a head scan,” Madden producer Ben Haumiller says, and that—combined with the fact that so many current NFL players grew up with the game and are eager to see themselves represented—assures that Haumiller and company have a vast library of scans available. The number of faces on file is vast, far more than can be put into any individual season’s edition.
Yet the vast majority of semi-anonymous NFL dudes don’t have their real faces in the game. Instead they wear generic masks, one of the 146 Madden heads that look vaguely like football players but not exactly like any one of them. There just aren’t enough hours in a development cycle to get everybody in every year, so deciding who makes an appearance and who doesn’t is both a workload and a budgetary matter. Quarterbacks get first priority, then skill players, then defensive stars. The in-game camera often shows kickers’ and punters’ faces, so they’re higher on the list than you might expect. Defensive linemen, especially gap-clogging tackles, are an underrepresented population, and all but the very best offensive linemen are left out.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
EA Sports
EA Tiburon
GAMES MENTIONED
Madden NFL 19
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Ben Haumiller
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive