Sports videogame releases are usually drab affairs. New versions come out every year, and beyond roster updates and a few gameplay tweaks, they don’t change that much from edition to edition. Unlike Grand Theft Auto aficianados, sports game fans don’t plan midnight release parties.

But EA Sports College Football 25, which will be released worldwide on 19 July, isn’t a typical game. It may well be the most anticipated sports video game release ever in the US. And to understand why, we need to go back to the beginning.

EA Sports first started making college football video games all the way back in 1993 on the Sega Genesis. Other studios would dabble in college football, but by the late 2000s, the EA Sports franchise, dubbed NCAA Football, established itself as the market leader. The games were usually critically and commercially well received, with the last version, NCAA 14, reportedly selling about 1.5m units.

But the NCAA Football franchise had a problem that had nothing to do with critics or consumers: the courts. (The terminology around the game can be confusing for people who aren’t fans of college sports. The NCAA is the main governing body of college sports in the US. The NCAA Football franchise takes its name from the organization).

Franchises like Madden, NBA2K or EA Sports FC negotiate rights not just with professional leagues, but with the various athlete unions, allowing the game to depict the likenesses of teams and athletes. But college students aren’t defined as professional athletes, and the NCAA organization’s policy in the 2010s prohibited players from earning any financial compensation from their abilities.

So while previous NCAA Football releases would include real teams like the Ohio State Buckeyes or Florida Gators, the athletes would simply be known as QB #7 or RB #21, rather than their real names.

But you didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out that, for example, in NCAA Football 2009, QB #15 just happened to have the same height, weight, hair color and skill attributes as Tim Tebow, the real quarterback for the Florida Gators.

The athletes figured it out too. In July 2009, former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon led a class action lawsuit of college athletes who claimed that the NCAA organization, EA Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Company illegally used their likenesses without compensation.

EA Sports and CLC settled out of court, while the NCAA appealed after losing the lawsuit. Rather than allow EA Sports to pay athletes for use of their likeness, the NCAA decided to cancel its licensing deal with EA Sports in 2013, with multiple colleges and major schools quickly following suit. The franchise had never featured real players, but now it would have to do without real teams or conferences, and without brands who pulled their sponsorship thanks to the game’s more limited scope. EA Sports felt the series was no longer viable: NCAA 14 was the last game in the series.

Until now. In February 2021, EA Sports published a tweet that floored the college football world. The game was coming back.

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By 2020, it became clear to college sports industry leaders that the NCAA’s strict policies against athletes monetizing their name, image and likeness rights would not withstand political and legal scrutiny. In July 2021, the NCAA formally changed the policy, allowing athletes to earn money from featuring in commercials, promoting products on social media, and yes, appearing in video games. With athletes having a pathway to earn money for their participation, schools quickly agreed to participate in the revamped NCAA Football series. More than 11,000 players real-life players will appear in this year’s game.

As the game nears its launch date, colleges across the US are leaning into the excitement. Mississippi State is throwing a launch party inside its 9,000 seat basketball arena, inviting fans to play the game with current and former Bulldog athletes. The main NIL collective supporting UCLA is hosting a similar event. So are smaller programs, like Georgia Southern and San Diego State. Other schools, like Boise State, tapped into the video game to announce new uniforms for their football teams. EA will also have developers on campers to install actual playbooks for the real-life teams in the make believe world, to ensure those student-athletes cranking games late at night can double up on their film study (the real playbooks will not be available for general gamers).

These events are meant to help bridge the different groups that make up the College Football 25 community: from new fans to those pushing 40 who remember the franchise’s previous editions. If you’re wondering why your colleague booked a last-minute vacation or is slow to respond on Slack, they probably have their eyes on taking North Texas to new heights in dynasty mode. There is a crop of sleeper gamers and NCAA zealots who haven’t picked up a controller since the game was shelved in 2014. But the passion for the game remained; more than 120,000 people tuned in for a fictional National Championship stream on Twitch during the pandemic.

That deep love of the franchise also extends to the folks who make the game. Christian McLeod, the production director at EA Sports, said in June that the entire development process “has been a labor of love for everybody on the team.”

The project is particularly fulfilling for McLeod, as he took a less traditional career pathway. McLeod, a self-identified college video game “diehard” since the early 1990s, originally worked as a chemical engineer, and wrote about sports video games on the side. Developers found his work and eventually reached out to him about joining the NCAA Football team as a designer. Other leading figures on the project’s development and design side also came from outside the games industry.

“I really believe that if you’re truly passionate about something, especially in the games industry, bring that passion to the table,” said McLeod. “We can teach you how to be a designer. We can teach you how to be a producer. We can’t teach passion.”

That passion has fueled the momentum behind the game’s return. When the series was discontinued, a group of fans launched a mod called College Football Revamped, which continued to update the game on PC. Other game studios would have tried to shut the project down with lawsuits. Instead, EA hired multiple people from the Revamped team to help make College Football 25.

The new edition won’t just be for fans in the US either. For the first time ever, fans outside North America can easily play the game without having to worry about region-locked hardware.

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One of those excited fans is Ben Parker, of Bishop’s Stortford in England. Parker told me he first found American football through the Madden series.

“I was already a big soccer fan, but Madden really taught me how American football is so much more than you might think … it’s like a human version of chess, which I thought was fascinating,” says Parker.

By following the NFL, Parker became aware of the college game. “I decided to buy a copy of the 2006 Rose Bowl from eBay. That was the year with Vince Young, Reggie Bush, Keith Jackson as the announcer, the setting of the Rose Bowl … it was perfect. And it was just incredible drama to watch, even so many months removed from the game itself, that I was like, ‘I’ve got to know more about this sport.’”

Parker managed to score an imported copy of NCAA 2006 from eBay, which he played religiously. Parker and many other Europeans and South Americans I talked to believe that the video game could be another pathway for college football to grow a larger international audience, especially since access to live broadcasts can be difficult outside the US.

While industry analysts expect the Madden series to still sell more copies than NCAA College Football 25, owing to the NFL’s massive national and international popularity, sources at schools and in the licensing industry are confident that this year’s college release will perform well commercially.

That would mean a new generation of fans get connected to the passion of not just the video game, but college football itself. And maybe that was worth the wait.

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