Building a Challenger: The Creation of ‘EA Sports MMA’

MMA fans have been tearing each other to shreds for more than a year now on the PS3 and Xbox 360 via “UFC: Undisputed.” As good as THQ’s game has been, however, a new challenger in the fight for polygonal supremacy has climbed into the cage (and ring).

Electronic Arts, the worldwide king of video and computer games, is set to unleash its brand of mixed martial arts Oct. 19 with “EA Sports MMA.” Featuring a roster of 80-plus professional fighters from around the globe, the creators at EA expect their MMA game to continue the brand’s dominance in yet another sport.

Bringing EA’s Expertise to MMA

One hurdle the electronics giant must clear is the fact that EA MMA is not licensed with the UFC. It is a pink elephant standing in the corner of the draft room, test department and design/programming quarters, but the brass in charge of creating and marketing the game are undaunted.

“(Even though) I can’t make an MMA league, I can make a hell of a video game,” said Dale Jackson, the executive producer of EA MMA. “(The UFC has) a lot of swagger when it comes to running a league, but this is one place where I have a lot of confidence. I can make a video game and I have a team of the best people in the world here that can put something out that will compete with anybody.”

Jackson, a 13-year veteran at EA, has worked on titles like “Madden NFL,” “NCAA Football” and “NFL Street.” In North America, Madden is the highest-selling video game series in the history of the business (EA’s Sims series rules the roost in computer games, and EA’s FIFA soccer series is the worldwide video game leader in terms of units sold). With the EA team behind it, Jackson is confident EA MMA will be a winner as well. In fact, he said the game’s target audience will be broader than MMA fans.

“I think there are a lot of people out there who are fighting game fans,” Jackson said. “There are a lot of people who play our Fight Night games that never played MMA products. There are people who love fighting games where they love the head-to-head fighting (but) might not necessarily be MMA fans. It’s actually a bigger, broader world than just the hardcore MMA fight fans, so we want to make sure to reach all of them as well.”

Randy Chase, the senior product marketing manager for the game, said its control scheme is easy to learn.

“We found that with doing demos of the game, getting it into the hands of people and letting them play it, people who weren’t MMA fans picked it up and figured it out,” Chase explained. “They actually learned some things about the sport while they were doing it.”

Having the EA logo splashed across the cover will help sales, but original titles are often plagued with poor or unintuitive control schemes, splintered graphics and a cornucopia of other nuances that bog it down. Even a games giant like EA isn’t impervious to these problems.

The Triple Play baseball series was mediocre at best for several years before the company ironed out its issues, and even when Madden was finally released to the then-next generation 32-bit platforms of the original PlayStation and Sega Saturn, the game was delayed for well over a year after its initial proposed release date.

For EA MMA, though, the company used the already established and well-oiled engine of its popular Fight Night boxing series. EA tweaked the inner workings of the engine to alter it from a traditional pugilistic game into a monster of an MMA title.

“We started from Fight Night and then heavily modified it with, obviously, ground fighting, clinch, kicks, submissions, etc.,” Jackson said. “We had to heavily modify it, but we started with right where ‘Fight Night Round 4’ left off. They are a great team up in EA Canada who did Fight Night, so what they gave us was just great.”

EA MMA spent roughly two and a half years in development. Often an original title being built from the ground up can take much longer, and it’s commonplace within the industry for a title to be delayed dozens of times or scrapped due to time and cost constraints. The days of one or two computer wizards working out of their garage to make a simple title are long gone. Going with an already established engine was a no-brainer, though it still posed plenty of challenges.

“I think the interesting thing for making an MMA game is that you are looking at a video game where two guys, two fighters, two characters are going to be pressed up against each other for long periods of time, whether in the clinch or on the ground,” said Jason Barnes, the creative director at EA Tiburon. “That’s very unique compared to most other situations with other sports games. You have that in some limited degree in blocking in football or posting up in basketball, but for the most part those are almost one and done animations. You block for a bit or you tackle for a bit or you post up for a bit, and the opponent breaks free. You grapple in our vale tudo rules set for over 19 minutes based off that. That was the most interesting challenge that we faced.”