The Change Mariner

College Coaches Add Realism to New Video Games

Redding.com:
Williams and the 12 other coaches who appear in Electronic Arts Sports' new "NCAA March Madness 2004" receive just a few thousand dollars apiece for their roles as motivators and strategists. Some — such as Williams, Oklahoma's Kelvin Sampson, Florida's Billy Donovan and Utah's Rick Majerus — have been to the actual Final Four, with actual players, coaching in actual games.

Others, such as Fran McCaffrey, the coach at North Carolina Greensboro, or Tim Buckley, who coaches at Ball State, are off the mainstream radar. The game, though, is one way to get on it.

"The kids will see me, and if a kid's making a decision (on which school to attend), I'm not saying he'll choose us because we're in the video game," McCaffrey said. "But if you're not even in it, then you must be one of the bottom teams in Division I, in the kid's mind."

Three game makers — EA, Sega and Sony — are licensed by the NCAA to produce video games based on college sports. At the pro level, where athletes can be paid for their participation, the task is fairly straightforward: Find a marquee figure, such as Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, and both build and market the game around his skills and image. That's the formula for EA Sports' hugely popular "Madden NFL 2004." Game makers, though, must work within the NCAA's guidelines when producing college games. No names of players. No accurate likenesses. No money back to the kids.

"When you look at the bylaws, there's only so much the video game manufacturers can do with us," said Melissa Caito, the NCAA's director of licensing and brand management. "They want to push the envelope and make the games more real, and we want to protect amateurism, so we work collaboratively."

It is a market the NCAA clearly wanted a piece of. Projections predict the global market for video games to top $35 billion this year. As NFL, NBA and NHL games became popular in the early 1990s, executives at the Collegiate Licensing Corp., the Atlanta-based company that holds the NCAA's licensing rights, watched colleges being left behind.

"We felt it was important for teen-agers and people in their twenties, the people that play these games, to have a college option," said Pat Battle, president of CLC. "Sega and Sony and EA have done a good job capturing the things that make college sports college sports, the pageantry and the fight songs and those kinds of things."

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