A Sporting Chat With Peter Moore

7/31/2008 6:19 PM | 0 Comments | Page 5 of 7

Crispy Gamer: Can you say whether or not it was favorable?

Moore: No. I won't. But he had an opinion. Madden, to your point is a huge Brett Favre fan. I've actually talked to Madden about Favre, which was a great moment for me. I sat down with him in his office actually about three weeks ago and he said, "Here's a player that embodies everything that I always thought was great about the NFL." This is a classic Madden guy. Blue collar. Throw anything into the wind and get it out there. Gun slinger. Madden has a huge amount of respect for Brett Favre -- probably more than any other player in decades.

We got a lot of internal abuse. "Why would you put a retired player on the package?" Because it was the right thing to do.

Crispy Gamer: One thing you're introducing with the Wii is the All-Play concept. What was behind the decision to go with All-Play? Why not just have All-Play as a mode for all three of the consoles?

Moore: The first one is simple: Because we were not doing what we needed to do for that consumer. The experience on the Wii -- we were not delivering the experience that the Wii is built for. Just flat-out not doing that. Family Play got us into the game a little bit last year with Madden. We said time out. We just hit the reset button and have spin-off teams focused on the Wii. Build it from the ground up. Let's change the graphical interface. Let's stay with our licenses.

People said, "Why would you stay with the Madden name? It's about hardcore football!" We've taken that risk and we've gotten the Madden name on there but it's a completely different experience. There are unique modes and presentation. Even different packaging, and we've never done that before.

Second, we needed to get it right here, but it's really built for the Wii remote. So you've got a lot to do to make it intuitive. When you play Madden Wii, to snap the ball you do that [pulls back Wii remote], when you throw the ball you do that [flicks Wii remote forward]. If you want to -- which helps me a lot because I'm not good at the Xes and Os -- if you want to get the receiver route you use "Call the Shot" where you use the remote almost as a cursor and when you throw the ball it lands right there. It's a little different when you have a controller that needs to be held like this (mimics holding a traditional, two-handed controller) to register any kind of motion.

But at the same time we're doing more and more things about approachability inside the game [on other systems]. It's not All-Play -- we know that's specific to the Wii -- but look at Madden. Have you gone in the holographic trainer? It'll recognize what you're doing. We've got to keep bringing people in the first time every year. Let me tell you, myself included, you get there and start going, "I have no idea. Maybe I'll figure out how to drop back and pass. Maybe I'll figure out how to get my receiver there." The nuances of the game are built for core consumers, obviously. Building in the idea of going into the trainer and the game figures out how good you are, and like any intuitive adaptive artificial intelligence, it will back away from you and say you need help. It'll then do Backtracker and show what you should have done. Then your football IQ, I think, is something that people will love seeing progress.