From Madden to NCAA: Orlando producer back to 1st love at EA

It just wasn’t the same for Christian McLeod.

As much as he loved working as a producer for Electronic Arts’ legendary Madden football video game series, another game tugged at him even more.

McLeod had started his career with EA in Orlando in 2011, spending two years working on the company’s college football title before it was formally discontinued in September 2013.

So when the gaming giant announced the return of the title this year, McLeod raised his hand.

“It goes back to when I was a kid,” he said. “I was born and raised in green and white. Michigan State University. That was my life.”

Now, the Michigan State University alum serves as lead producer of the new title, EA Sports College Football 25, which debuts on all major platforms July 19.

“College football was always my love,” McLeod said.

Challenge of Tradition

One of the natural challenges of building such a big game comes in meeting expectations. College football fans will know if something about a school’s tradition is off, he said.

“At the end of the day, every team is somebody’s favorite team,” McLeod said. “So, Florida Atlantic University needs as much love and attention as our Florida State University fans do, as Texas fans do.”

Fortunately, McLeod said, “we’re college football sickos.”

The game includes 134 schools with each having unique touches to their stadiums and experience, including fight songs or hand signals that add to the pageantry.

For instance, expect an accurate representation of the atmosphere of UCF’s FBC Mortgage Stadium, nicknamed “The Bounce House.”

“We have immersed ourselves within the college football ecosystem,” he said. “We immersed our team in the atmosphere. It’s about feeling the pageantry and being on the field.”

Add in that this represents a resurrection of a beloved franchise 10 years later and the challenge grows.

“We needed to make sure this wasn’t just a simple, ‘check the box’ exercise,” McLeod said. “There’s a certain pageantry, a certain affiliation that everybody has in college that is so much different than in the pro game and we had to capture that, as well.”

Individual Stadium touches

At Centennial Bank Stadium, home of Arkansas State University football, for instance, fans like to take a look and share pictures of the waterfall that sits on both sides of the north end zone.

Scoring a touchdown as the Red Wolves in that stadium in the game will trigger a water show within the waterfall, as it does on many fall Saturdays.

That’s just one of literally hundreds of little touches that make each stadium unique and immersive, he said.

“You’re going to be able to discover all new traditions,” he said. “Pageantry like this is going to make people fans of college football. We lost an entire generation of people playing this game. We are going to have a new generation experiencing this for the first time.”

The advantage of Electronic Arts’ location in Florida certainly helped the process, as well.

The state has several powerhouse football programs, each of which welcomed the EA team to campus to capture footage, stadium details and other authentic aspects that will be part of the game.

“Going to (UCF’s) Space Game and bringing a bunch of people from the team to the space game, just experiencing that in person, was amazing,” he said. “Making this product in a hotbed of college football is a pretty amazing thing. It’s a dream come true every single day.”

A ‘dream job’

McLeod’s plans initially had nothing to do with video games. His goal was medical school.

But first he wanted to take some time off.

As he was writing for a community website, he backed into an opportunity at Electronic Arts. The rest, he says, is history.

“I had my dream job right out of school,” he said.

The saga of the college football video game is a tale of millions of dollars, powerhouse conferences and an industry giant reaching an impasse 11 years ago.

A franchise renewed

The title was discontinued in September of 2013 after a 20-year run as complications arose about using realistic representations of players in the game.

So, this year’s version release marks a certain kind of history in video games.

It is the first major release of a college sports game since the NCAA adopted so-called “name, image and likeness” rules in 2021 that govern how college athletes can earn money while in school.

That meant Electronic Arts had to negotiate with individual players to include them in the game.

As of March, according to EA, the company had reached out with offers of at least $600 and a copy of the game to players, with more than 11,000 NCAA players accepting the offers.

As offer letters were returned, developers started to include real names in the game.

“To see them in the game as they start to sign and be put in via the rosters, it was surreal,” McLeod said.

With that major obstacle out of the way, developers could look toward creating a realistic setting.

That meant targeting moments that would evolve as “can’t miss” within the game.

For instance, bowl games.

Bowl games

“That’s the payoff moment,” McLeod said. “If I’m in a dynasty and I’m busting my rear to get into a bowl game, you better believe that if it’s the Pop Tart Bowl, it’s the Cure Bowl, there needs to be a giant payoff moment so we went pretty big there.”

McLeod wouldn’t reveal all the secrets but he did say the bowl games will have their own small touches that make you want to reach them.

“That’s a huge payoff moment for a user in their career loop, so we want to make sure to pay it off,” he said.

The process has been time-consuming, tedious, stressful, at times.

But, McLeod said, the effort to reignite a classic gaming franchise has been worth and has only just begun.

“It’s going to take us a few more years to just keep going deeper and deeper to where we want,” he said. “By then, there will be more new traditions out there, as well.”

With each version, it will also be important to stay informed on what players want, McLeod said.

“Players’ expectations have changed a ton in the last 10 years,” he said. “We want to make sure that we took the good parts … but then said, ‘Hey, 10 years later, what does a user want?’