Just call me Mr FIFA

In an exclusive interview, Vice President of development at Electronic Arts Canada and Manchester United fan Bruce McMillan, explained why he's the man they call Mr FIFA.

Bruce McMillan, Vice President of development at Electronic Arts Canada, is an industry old-timer. He's worked with Konami, Accolade, Broderbund, Epic, Mindscape and Sega. He conceived Hardball 2 and designed the acclaimed 4D Sports Boxing. He was one of the key players in making the FIFA games the games they are, and now he's lead designer on every single version of FIFA Soccer `96.

In the old days, along with Don Mattrick, Bruce McMillan was the leading light in Distinctive Software, a Vancouver based outfit that joined the EA organization in July 1991. EA Canada is now one of the most important sections for the EA Sports empire and, from their plush offices, they're designing almost all the FIFA `96 skus, NHL `96 and NBA Live `96. A committed Manchester United fan, Bruce McMillan just loves soccer and speaks with a real passion about trying to emulate it. He's a busy man finishing FIFA off, but we managed to get him to squeeze this exclusive interview into his schedule.

What is your role on FIFA Soccer `96?

Lead Designer and Executive Producer. As in football, FIFA Soccer `96 was a team effort involving over 100 people ensuring that FIFA Soccer `96 ships at the highest possible quality on six formats, in six languages, on the same day. The FIFA Soccer `96 development and production teams are made up of some of the best people in our business and I am lucky to be part of this team and to have led them to this end objective.

What would you say you learnt from your first products in the games business?

This business is all about details, focus and delivering a consistent experience to the consumer. The gameplay experience has to be the number one priority in any product, the rest are details. As the hardware systems get more and more powerful this experience needs to remain the number one priority if you want to be successful.

What advice would you give young hopefuls starting out now?

Surround yourself with people who are much brighter than you are and keep them focused and happy. Don't hide behind elaborate non-interactive sequences to sell your products, focus on the interactive experience. If you can't explain that experience with one or two sentences or with a very short visual demo on why someone will want to buy your product, move on to your next idea. The ultimate product has not been created yet, keep trying...

What's the most important element in a sports sim?

Strong sports sims need to have realism, attention to detail and ultimately very strong gameplay. There are many sports sims on the market that at first glance look stunning but because of their lack of realism and their inferior control and interfaces, turn out to be inferior sports products. This is a major focus of EA Sports products and our entire line adheres to these standards.

Sweat actually makes a good sports game?

Sports games are relatively straightforward to build. It's a big X on the wall. As we're keen on saying here, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to get the X." The difficult thing is making that X, a bigger X. Creating a bigger, better X. For example, with FIFA. Before I designed that product I really thought, what is the essence of football? What excites a football crowd? It's the chants. The calibre of the match. The whole atmosphere. Those have to be reproduced somehow in a videogame. The speed of the game, too. If you've gone to a football match and watched a defensive struggle, it can be very boring sometimes. What's really exciting is when things turn around - go back and forth. What I've tried to do with the sports products is not take them so seriously. Not go down to the level of detail where it is a pure simulator and gets boring.

I wanted to have strong simulation elements for authenticity, but I also wanted to have the excitement. You will see 10-0 results sometimes, if you're playing against Brazil. That's okay. It is a video game, so you can't take it too seriously. But at the same time you have to have the authenticity. If the game is breaking a football rule then that is going to be a problem. That is where the big X is. Making the consumer feel that they are there and suspending the belief that they are playing a video game.

What is your favourite non-EA sports sim?

Sensible Soccer has always been a big favourite of mine as has Intellivision Baseball. Both had depth and strong gameplay. I'm a big fan of driving products and will no doubt have to replace my Ridge Racer CD soon, due to over use.

What did you like most about Sensible Soccer?

Sensi excited me because of the speed of the gameplay. I'm a big football fan and that title gave me a strong sense of strategy. I was passing the ball around very quickly. It was the speed of the game that suspended my belief. Working out how to try to get the ball up the field, action going back and forth. I found the gameplay incredible. What I was missing in Sensi was the audio feedback on the close calls at the net. And the characters themselves I just felt could be better. I felt there was a better presentation field for that product. I still play Sensi and think it's a great game. I think that's one of the games I'm always going to keep around and ensure that which ever platform I have available, I will be able to play Sensi. Generally, I keep old platforms around for great old games.

Would you say that in the first incarnation of FIFA, you missed out on the twitch gameplay that Sensi offered?

I think that's what we've learnt a little bit. That twitch gameplay is essential. A lot of the 32-bit games coming out right now are losing that, because they're trying to get 30 and 40 frame cycles on animation. They look really cool, but lose complete control. Sensi taught me that visual elements aren't enough. I think I'd agree that we could have done a better job in improving our gameplay, just as Sensible probably think their audio-visual elements could have improvement. In FIFA `95 I tried to bring a better gameplay to the product. And in FIFA Soccer `96 it is my number one priority. I think we were hitting some barriers on the sound on the carts, particularly with 16-bit. Where you can technologically innovate is on the gameplay. If you're talented enough, you can make your gameplay experience fresher and newer every year. Since the last incarnation of FIFA we've had people spending all their waking hours working on gameplay.

Will you be incorporating fewer frames of animation in FIFA Soccer `96?

No. We profile the game and look at what's important. Run it for a while and see which animations are called most. It's a very simple technique. Those animations need to be optimised. They need to look their best. You also have to make sure they're not slowing down the gameplay. What we found was, even if it seems pretty obvious, the dribbling, tackling, shooting and passing elements were called 80% of the time, and we had to make sure those things were optimised. As for the non-interactive side of the game, or rather one-sided interactive, like a goal kick or a throw in - those elements are called less frequently. They still need as much detail, but maybe should take less time for our animators. In the early days of FIFA we looked at everything, now we're trying to focus more on the main bits. We're also getting into things like more complicated pass-backs and special moves.

Special moves?

There's a lot of, what I'd call, special moves in soccer that don't read well. They don't read well in a video game or on the field. They just feel kind of cool. You see a guy, break with the ball and then be able to get around a defender because he does a special move. A lot of the crowd will have no idea what's happened. All they'll know is that the guy got around the defender. We've tried to not get so detailed that we put in a move that nobody knows about and just doesn't read so well.

We're putting special moves in the game that read well, so you know what you're doing and gives you a lot of control back. But essentially we're trying to make the game so you can develop a strategy. So if you play against me, you'll develop maybe a different set of strategies than I will. I might play a long-ball game, you might play a defensive strategy and kind of work your way up the field. That's what we're trying to do with the gameplay element.

How important is presentation for EA Sports products?

It is something we have paid a great amount of attention to and is another key element that separates our products from our competition. The entire EA Sports line-up this year has created a presentation quality that leaves our competition in the dust. Our 16-bit line-up across every sport has never been stronger and with the addition of our Virtual Stadium technology on the 32-bit platforms, 32-bit sports games have taken a significant leap forward. The future for EA Sports has never looked brighter.

What would you say is the coolest gameplay feature in FIFA Soccer `96?

FIFA Soccer `96's ball control, with the ability to lead passes, do dummies, nutmeg players, sprinting and very controllable give and go and diving headers is the area I find most exciting about this product. It adds a whole new feel to the product as well as bring FIFA that much closer to feeling like the real Football experience.

Would you consider using Virtual Stadium to do a management game?

Yes, most definitely. Virtual Stadium's architecture is ideally suited for this type of application and it would definitely provide a management game experience never seen or experienced before. I think this category is crowded with many similar products and it's time for something new to move it forward.

Have you started work on a Nintendo Ultra 64 version yet? And if not, do you want to?

I think Blackburn will need to pull up its socks quickly if it hopes to repeat last years Championship of the Premiership. I hope I answered your question.

Would EA Sports products make good coin-ops?

We've had a lot of interest in the games for coin-ops. I think it's well suited, but the big challenge with bringing out a coin-op sports product is that you're dealing with a one or two minute experience. A lot of sports don't make sense on that. I think FIFA would make a great coin-op. I'd like to build a great, expensive console to go round it. So, as a designer, I have my visions of what FIFA could be in the coin-op. As a business man I'm not sure if it would make sense. There are some good products in the coin-op area. I was really impressed with NBA Jam, we have a machine in our office. I think it's great and has captured an element of basketball. The action side. We have prototype versions of FIFA that could address these kind of issues very quickly, and we also have taken some of our other sports products and created prototypes of what it could look like in the coin-op area.

Is that a five-a-side FIFA Soccer `96 by any chance?

Yes. Less players, a faster gameplay element and more exaggerated action sequences. What's nice about the Virtual Stadium engine is that it doesn't care how many players there are or how big the stadium is. The render engine is independent of the artificial intelligence, and so you can just change that model.

You've remarked previously that all manifestations of FIFA are simply subsets of your ultimate game. What is this superlative soccer experience?

My ultimate game is in my mind. I haven't been able to find a platform yet that can deliver what I want to deliver. There's a lot of elements with respect to the player rendering. It's really hard work. I'm impressed with the SGi stuff, but I think we can go beyond that. Subtle character movements, emotion is something that has yet to be captured in video games, and yet appears all the time in real sports. And that goes beyond sports. In all video games emotion isn't captured. You go and see a great movie and get into the characters, the story - it touches you. If you're watching a football match and you're sitting on the edge of the seat, waving your fist in the air, it has touched you emotionally somehow. Photo-realistic rendering is going to be possible very soon as resolutions go up. The stadiums, the crowd issues.

There's a lot of things that go on in the game that you can't really touch right now, because of the memory considerations, the hardware. I'd like to look into different ways of presenting the product, with different views. With football there's the whole management element. The whole strategy on the side is important. Understanding how your coach feels about how you're playing. Being in the locker room at half-time and hearing that talk from your coach on how you can improve your playing. Being coached by the computer. You coaching your computer. Back and forth. Those kind of role playing elements haven't been touched at all.

So can we expect a locker room for FIFA `97?

If the hardware can support it. The last thing we want to do is be running redundant videos. That really annoys me when you play a game for 10 hours and then you've seen all the video elements. All the different permutations of things. I don't want to bring something like that unless it can really add to the gameplay element. I don't want to waste the space on the disk.

What's the future for Virtual Stadium?

We have only scratched the surface in what Virtual Stadium is capable of and future products will show there is still much more to bring to this industry in terms of presentation, quality and gameplay experience - not only in FIFA - but in all other major sports products.

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