Over at FiveThirtyEight, they have a pretty neat profile of Donny Moore, ratings god of Madden games.
On how Moore ended up working for EA:
It was against this backdrop that Moore began his professional affiliation with EA. In 1998, he was still a student at the University of Central Florida, pursuing a degree in political science, when in November when he noticed advertisements for an “NCAA Football 99” tournament at the student union. Moore and his roommates were devotees of the game — he recalls elaborate house rules requiring that a witness be present every time a game was played in the friends’ shared Dynasty Mode savefile. On a whim, he skipped class, entered the contest using Florida State as his team, and won first prize.
Moore’s detailed knowledge of the game’s minutiae impressed NCAA Football developers on hand for the tournament. On the spot, they offered him a part-time job testing the coming edition of the game, a break he would later parlay into a full-time gig as an EA Sports football tester.
See kids, if you’re REALLY good at video games, you just might end up making a comfortable 6 figures working for them one day.
FiveThirtyEight also highlights some of the history between sports video games and integrating tangible player ratings to enhance gameplay:
Translating the athletic skills of flesh-and-blood humans into digital form has been a necessary part of sports gaming as long as real-life players have been incorporated into the software. According to Good, that practice dates at least5 as far back as the 1984 release of “Micro League Baseball” for the Commodore 64…with the advent of licensed games, the stakes were raised. “You want Kirk Gibson to play differently from Tony Gwynn,” Good said.
The method of “Micro League Baseball” was to algorithmically translate a player’s real-world statistical benchmarks — his batting average or home-run total, for instance — into skill ratings that would presumably spit similar numbers back out on the other side of the simulation.
They also have a pretty snazzy interactive that tells you what rating you’d get.
Source: FiveThirtyEight
