![]() ![]() ![]() Yet LeBron, alongside other athletes and pop stars (Justin Bieber: “ I’m getting nice at Fifa. In 2013, the NBA star LeBron James, who features in numerous EA-made basketball games, posted a photograph to Instagram of his sons playing Fifa alongside the caption: “ Game is fresh to death!” Celebrity endorsements like this on social media can cost more than £10,000 a go. The series has sold more than 150m copies, its popularity extending far beyond the world of football. On any given Sunday, the day on which it is played most often, more than 200 million matches of Fifa take place in living rooms, studies and bedrooms around the world. In many parts of the world, the word “Fifa” is synonymous not with football’s scandal-ridden governing body, but with the video game that licenses its name. For many, Fifa is the only game they buy each year. The system that Tian implemented over the following weeks to fix the game’s problems with positioning laid the foundations for what would become the world’s most profitable video game franchise.Īlong with Mario and Tetris, Fifa belongs to an select group of video games that are familiar to people who have little further interest in the medium. He dropped his bags off at home, washed his face, then drove to the office in a jetlagged fug. Ten hours later, on a Saturday afternoon, Tian landed in Vancouver. On any Sunday, the day on which it is played most often, more than 200 million Fifa matches take place around the world After a moment, Tian was handed a plane ticket. There, they stood a little distance away, while the man leaned over the counter conspiratorially, and whispered to a colleague. He took the envelope from Tian’s sister and motioned to the pair to follow him to the ticket office. Now, he just needed to find a way to get back to Vancouver quickly, but when he checked, every flight out of Beijing was fully booked.Īt the airport the next day, a man from the airline approached, wearing a dark blue suit. While he was at his father’s bedside, a solution – involving “tricky methods and algorithms”, as Tian puts it today – finally came to him. “Believe it or not, it’s the most difficult task to program correctly.” “People may say, what’s so difficult with positioning?” Tian told me recently. Before he was called to China, Tian had been wrestling with a knotty programming challenge: how to automatically position players around the pitch in a way that resembled professional football, rather than a playground kickaround where children swarm after the ball. Speaking to an industry magazine in 2013, Neil Thewarapperuma, then EA Sports’ marketing manager, put it bluntly: “EA didn’t give a shit about Fifa.” ( Fifa 2016’s development budget, by contrast, is estimated to have been in the region of $350m.) Even so, Tian and his colleagues feared the game might be cancelled at any moment. They had less than five months.įifa International Soccer, as the game would eventually be titled, was a modest bet, costing around $30,000 a month to develop. For the game to be on shelves by Christmas, it would need to be finished by October. The release date for EA Soccer, his current project, had recently been brought forward, after an executive walked past an office and heard staff, who were playing an early version of the game, whooping with excitement. ![]() As concern yielded to relief, Tian’s thoughts returned to the work he had left behind in Canada. The previous week, he had received a phone call to say that his father had suffered a stroke and Tian’s bosses had booked him an emergency flight to China.Īfter a week, the doctors had given their prognosis: Tian’s father would be paralysed down his left side, but would recover. But Tian, who had graduated from Beijing University a decade earlier and now worked in Vancouver for the video game company Electronic Arts, had not come to sightsee. It was May 1993 and China’s capital was humid, its parks ablaze with tulips, crab apples and red azaleas. Beside him, his sister held an envelope containing a thousand yuan, close to her entire year’s wages. Jan Tian stood in nervous silence in the departure hall of Beijing Capital International Airport. ![]()
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