EA Sports

NB: Many of the games are simply known by their sport, and carry no other distinctive title.

EA Sports has the slogan If it's in the game, it's in the Game, stating their apparent desire to provide the most complete, realistic depiction of the sport in question possible. All the games feature all the real life players, teams, sponsors, stadia, and more. Further, they use famous commentators and now, mainstream music artists to further enhance the experience.

However, many would argue this is at the expense of the gameplay itself. While the presentation is nothing short of flawless, polished to a blinding sheen, the games themselves are often without soul, excitement or spirit. EA is already notorious for its shameless cookie-cutter games, and EA Sports is most responsible for this.

Every year, each franchise is updated with new players, and a new feature or two, but the fact stands that on the whole, FIFA 99, for example, is more or less equal to FIFA 2003. Further, in FIFA's case the games are often released more than once in a year (as in 1998, when Road to World Cup 98 was released mere months before the virtually identical World Cup 98 game). Other times the game engine is simply re-engineered to accomodate different leagues and released again as a full price product.

The tragedy is that the games sell massively regardless of their quality, thanks to the reputation they earned in the early days (when NHL '94 and its brethren were the definitive sports games on most platforms, and thanks to the fact that they are literally the McDonalds of sports games - they're such a strong, well-known brand that everyone buys it anyway.

Contenders like Konami's ISS Pro and Fox Sports NHL have made some inroads into addressing this dominance, but with mostly limited success.

Pseudo Intellectual has pointed out that many of EA Sports' games come from an office in Burnaby, British Columbia. Quite a large number of EA's games come from Canada, notably the Need For Speed series, and marvellous snowmobile game Sled Storm. This is also a point of contention for gamers, as PC Gamer UK admonished that sketches were needed to show the Canadian developers 'what the game of football is' when they were working on FIFA.

EA Sports is the label under which Electronic Arts has published its video game sports franchises since the early 1990's. It was initially applied to the 1994 editions of Madden, NHL and FIFA on the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo. Earlier titles had borne the in-game label of 'EASN' (Electronic Arts Sports Network) which was uncomfortably similar to ESPN, and so 'EA Sports' was developed as an alternative.

The philosophy behind the EA Sports titles was to present the sport in question in a similar manner to a television broadcast. (This was not a totally new concept, as it had been tried with Cinemaware's TV Sports series, but EA were the first to apply the idea successfully, with official licenses and known commentators.)

The much-derided policy of releasing a revised edition of each game every year was started with John Madden Football, where the inclusion of player names and statistics (something of an innovation at the time) made it seem worthwhile to the developers to produce new versions to keep this information up to date, as well as introducting refinements and extra features. Surprisingly, although this policy has led the key EA Sports franchises to be some of the top grossing games of all time, it was initially resisted by Electronic Arts management, who thought there wasn't a market for another football game so soon after the last one.

Over the years the core franchises have expanded to support new hardware platforms and technologies, and an increasing number of sports have been added to the roster. Inevitably, the constant need-it-or-not annual updates have led to some of the games offering little advancement over their immediate predecessor, with a new engine being built from scratch every few years (sometimes to the games' detriment). An additional feature allowed by the increasing budgets is the inclusion of one or more licensed contemporary pop music tracks in each new version.

The current EA Sports franchises are listed below, most of which appear annually. (Note that the year in the title is quite often the year after the game's initial release, to fit in with the Christmas shopping period.) So to get the latest version, simply append the current year (or the current year plus one).

• Madden NFL 2003 (previously John Madden Football)
• FIFA Soccer 2003 (previously FIFA International Soccer)*
• NHL 2003 (previously EA Hockey, NHLPA Hockey, NHL Hockey)
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 (previously PGA Tour Golf, a series predating EA Sports; the Tiger Woods license was initially applied to a seperate series of golf games.)
• NBA Live 2003
• Triple Play 2002 (baseball)
• NCAA Football 2003 (college football)
• Knockout Kings 2003 (boxing)
• F1 2003 (Formula 1 motor racing)
• NASCAR Thunder 2003
• Cricket (not an annual release)
• EA Sports Rugby (previously Rugby World Cup 1995)

There has also been the occasional half-hearted stab at management sims, special editions to mark certain sporting events, and (tentatively) sports trivia titles (as a reaction to Sports Interactive's forays into this field).

The label's importance to Electronic Arts's ongoing success was made clear in their rebranding exercise in 2000. The company is now split into 'EA Sports' 'EA Games' and 'EA.com' divisions.

EA Sports has now sprouted a subsidiary label of its own, EA Sports BIG, which concentrates on extreme sports, arcade sports, snowboarding and other less 'serious' sports titles. (Freekstyle, NBA Street, SSX.)

EA Sports' dominance of the market (reliant as much on their brand name as the increasingly variable quality of their titles) is starting to be challenged by concerted efforts from other publishers. Sega's '2Kx' sports games (Sega Sports) have in recent years had a large amount of commercial success, especially in America. Konami's football games (Pro Evolution Soccer, Winning Eleven) have for the first time outsold FIFA on the Playstation 2 this Christmas, and in the wider market, younger gamers are being drawn more towards 'extreme sports' titles (the poster boy being the all-conquering Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series).