It drives me nuts every time I hear it. A professional athlete delivers a gobsmacking statistical performance, whether for a single game or a longer span, and a commentator or a columnist inevitably describes him as “putting up video game numbers.”
One of the few broadcast features in Madden NFL 12 that I didn’t punch away with a quick button press was the official league bumper video at the end. You know, when the smooth narrator puffs up and says “This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL” and lays down the law of the league’s expressed written consent.
When Phil Humber threw the 21st perfect game in Major League Baseball history two weeks ago, he didn’t get to choose the batters he faced. When Dallas Braden threw a perfect game on an emotional Mother’s Day in 2010, against the winningest team never to put a runner on base, he didn’t stock the heart of its order with .200 hitters from the end of the bench.
The NBA Live development team runs a weekly game of basketball at a rec centre across the street from EA Sports’ studio in Orlando, Florida. When I visited a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to join them. Absolutely, I replied, but deep down I was still a little hesitant.
Though I wish I could say I was smart enough to think up this ruse in advance, I really did forget my backpack somewhere inside EA Sports’ Tiburon studio during a recent visit. This became an opportunity to roam all of its upper four floors of development, though not unescorted.
Brent Nielsen has a corner office catching 270 degrees of Florida sunshine, and his face lights up whenever you tell him a good golf story. Especially one that happened inside the game he makes, Tiger Woods PGA Tour.
I’ve played video games as seven-foot centres and hulking first basemen, I’ve probably pitched to or hit against the virtual counterpart of every Hall of Fame ballplayer who has appeared in the last 20 or so years. The idea of playing a sport as someone famous has well lost its novelty in the modern era of video games.
For years, EA Sports’ Tiger Woods PGA Tour series has allowed gamers to create female golfers and play with them, even against all-male tournament fields, on any course and in any of the events licensed to appear in the game. Last year, Tiger Woods added The Masters Tournament, the event hosted by Augusta National Golf Club, notorious for its all-male membership.
This week, the Portland Trail Blazers released Greg Oden after a five-year, injury-tainted marriage that was star-crossed before he could show up for his first training camp. Oden is one of the most ill-fated athletes ever to appear on the cover of a video game, starring on the cover of College Hoops 2K8. It got me to thinking about other cover choices that either were ill-fated, or ended up that way — for athlete, or publisher, or both.
