Say hello (again) to EA Sports College Football. The beloved video-game behemoth is back
Gamers’ appetites for immersive sports video games have not changed much since the heyday of EA Sports' college football
In a Michigan basement decked out in maize and blue, a father sat with his son.
They’d bond over a football video game. One with a story mode that would transport the 7-year-old into a college dorm room, where letters from fans filled his mailbox, the campus newspaper teased a championship and a list of Heisman candidates adorned his computer screen. If he played well enough, his name might even appear there.
It wasn’t real. But who was to say it couldn’t be?
“You know, we’d always joke, because he was a big kid, that ‘Hey, maybe you’re going to be on there someday,’” says the father, Bill Swartout.
Today, more than a decade later, that 7-year-old — Brayden Swartout — is an offensive lineman at Central Michigan, living the story mode in real life.
Countless versions of that game, not made in over a decade, collect dust in basements alongside phased-out gaming systems. It’s the inevitable fate of old discs, gaming cartridges, RCA connector wires and the like. Give it all a good blow, though, and the dust clears to reveal an enduring cultural phenomenon that, in this modern world, is on its way back.
For a generation of youth, EA Sports' college football games fueled their aspirations in the sport. From the early versions in the 1990s to the immersive experiences in the 2000s that revolutionized create-a-player modes, the games became a must-have for sports and video-game fans.
As they grew more popular, however, something else grew, too: the chorus of voices that said college athletes depicted in the game should be getting paid. It was a notion that seemed preposterous in the student-athlete era. But
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