NFL 2K Series

It's fair to say that every aspiring game developer just needs someone to give them a chance. As irony (and luck) would have it, my first crack at it was the other way around. The result? An opportunity to help build one of the greatest franchises ever made.

Better Late Than Never

I first got asked to come work for Visual Concepts by president Greg Thomas about two weeks after I started at gaming entertainment portal IGN.com. Despite getting in to gaming journalism in the hopes of an offer of this ilk, I couldn't just leave my new employer high and dry after committing to help launch IGN Dreamcast, so I ended up turning him down. It took nearly a year for me to finally admit my heart was in game development, and Greg was kind enough to, as he put it, be "a little late to the party," offering me the opportunity to join the NFL2K team, which turned out to be one of the most incredible work experiences of my career.

I came in mid-cycle on NFL 2K2, the third release in the series, and ended up aiding on the development of four separate iterations of what is still widely regarded as the best sports franchise of all time. It was a small, tight-knit team full of immensely passionate, talented developers who were always willing to take chances on new ideas - no matter how insane they may have seemed at the time. This resulted in a host of opportunities to innovate, and really made the long march to release worth the extra effort.

A Franchise Player

Sports game development teams didn't really have a traditional split between design and production so, that meant we ended up responsible for everything from feature proposals to scheduling the team to implementing and tuning the nuts and bolts of our assigned features.

That meant that I had the opportunity to do things like propose and revise schedules, author game manuals, attend marketing meetings, conduct media interviews, and more in addition to traditional game design duties. Thanks to sticking around for 3 more sequels, the design side of the role was equally fulfilling as I got to do things like create one of gaming's first achievement systems, write voice over dialog, and establish rules and incentives to avoid online cheating.

But my favorite task?

Franchise mode!

When I joined the team, 2K had yet to move beyond a basic Season mode, and I got tasked to flesh out a best-in-class Franchise mode that would serve as an appropriate compliment to our award-winning gameplay while helping us compete with the likes of Sony and EA Sports in the depth department. It took a couple years and a ton of effort from a host of amazing folks, but after adding over 500 menus worth of team management features and in-game presentation elements, we eventually got recognized by the might Game Informer as the best Franchise mode in the biz, whose depth and authenticity was widely likened to a stand-alone sports RPG.

Now that's what I call taking it to the house.

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Project Highlights

SYSTEM DESIGN - ACHIEVEMENTS UNLOCKED

One of my favorite features over the years has to be The Crib. When asked to come up with an answer to Madden's user career stat tracking, we invented this odd little love letter to sportsball trophies, MTV's Cribs, and my Dad's memorabilia-laden basement that would not only become a fan favorite, but one of gaming's first achievement systems as well, beating Steam, Microsoft, and Sony's efforts to market by several years.

FRANCHISE MODE - A LITTLE SPOCK-&-ROLL

By the time Visual Concepts decided to add Franchise mode to 2K, we were about seven years behind the competition, so finding a way to make it stand out was tricky. Ultimately, we ended up with two points of focus - a virtual reality-style menu system and industry-leading logic that was dead-set on modeling the actual NFL, allowing users to feel like they were running a real-life team.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM - STANDING THE TEST OF TIME

Metacritic scores, end-of-year awards, Snoop Dogg randomly showing up each year to play your game....all of these are cool. But my favorite accolade ever has to be when Time Magazine rated ESPN NFL 2K5 their #43 video game of all time, placing it just above and below games we considered absolute legends. It's one thing to set out to make a great game, but to be listed right next to Half-Life, Resident Evil 4, and Smash Bros.? Just....wow.

AUDIO DESIGN - THE TRUTH FROM THE BOOTH

The audio package in the 2K series is still considered best-in-class some 15 years later. Our incredible audio team never blinked when asked to do things like programmatically describe specific moves as they happen, dynamically re-create a full slate of ESPN television programs, and let us use non-celebrity actors to ensure we could get as much variation and revision as needed to get it right. My hands are still cramped from typing it all out, but, y'all...worth it.

MULTIPLAYER DESIGN - QUITTERS (ALMOST) NEVER WIN

We did some crazy stuff with online multiplayer, including how we handled quitters. things like people pausing the game indefinitely and pulling their Internet cable when losing were big issues, so we leveraged our user profile system to allow the victim of these trolling tactics to finish the game against the quitter, with the loser still taking an L. This resulted in a massive reduction in quits, as the benefit was to leaving was gone.

UX DESIGN - ART IMITATING LIFE

When we nabbed the ESPN license, we wanted to make the most of it. This meant leveraging ESPN graphics in our menus, mirroring ever single television overlay, and my personal favorite: building and hosting a dynamically created ESPN.com website on the Internet that featured the players, stats, and user-created news from their online Franchise leagues.

COMMUNITY - YOU'VE GOT TO BE F%#@ING KIDDING ME

You think your fanbase is crazy? Try this one on for size: Once 2K Sports lost the NFL license, the fanbase didn't simply lay down and die. They loved our game so much that they decided to form an actual dev team, updating everything from rosters to UI to in-game elements each year to keep the game alive, releasing as recently as the start of the 2023 NFL season in full 4K. Legally troubling? Yes. Utterly humbling? Also yes.

Down...Set...CUT! CUT! CUT!

I wrote thousands of lines of dialog for the 2K series, but my unquestioned favorite had to be when in-game color commentary legend Peter O'Keefe reminded everyone of one life's cold, hard facts:

"You can't coach that!"

What started as a bit of a joke due to a bug that led to accidental repetition ultimately became a feature when we decided to make it Pete's catch phrase, but also reminds me of the the #1 takeaway from my time at Visual Concepts, and that is that you have to learn some things the hard way.

I say this because I can still remember when we the production team was asked to put together a comprehensive feature set for the ultimate football game while working on NFL 2K3. We brainstormed, we struggled, and I'm pretty sure 13-inch TVs were occasionally used as projectiles as we argued what should make the cut before our big presentation. It was a crazy, gut-wrenching process but when we finally come to a consensus, we were sure we had crushed it.

The result?

"This is incredible! Everything looks great. Fantastic job, guys....now cut 75% of it by EOW."

Needless to say, it was devastating.

But, after a few minutes of our collective face resembling a kid who just dropped their ice cream cone, we picked ourselves up and rallied around the task, and the lessons learned here proved invaluable. By working closely with art and engineering to understand what made our original goal so laughable, we were able to adjust our entire approach to the cut process and the resulting final schedule.

Ultimately, we managed to fit over half of our original goals into the final product but, more importantly, it also taught us countless lessons about cross-departmental feedback, leveraging scalable design to enhance agile development methodologies, and the importance of realistic scheduling that starts with responsible designs. That, and it really brought that core group of developers together moving forward, allowing us to make some incredible products.

I guess cuts aren't so bad, after all.

My other stuff

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Devil's Bluff

Project Management

Every game dev dreams of creating an original IP. How many fantasize about doing it with a tenth of the initial budget, a fully remote team, and a nine-month development cycle? A lot less, probably. To make this asymmetrical cross-platform survival horror title a reality we did it anyway — and boy-oh-boy, did I learn a lot.

Electronic Gaming Monthly

Editorial Direction

Never meet your heroes, they said. Welp, I've been lucky enough to work for some of the industry's best editorial minds and despite the aforementioned warning, it turns out you can learn a lot running one of gaming's most storied publications.

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