DEBUGGING MADDEN—FROM THE INSIDE

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"I'm telling you. Vick is broken this year!"

[Ed.'s Note: We've been bringing you Madden content all week here at ESPNthemag.com. You can find it all here.]

As the Development Manager on the Madden video game for EA, Ryan Ferwerda has been around. He started testing the iconic game nearly ten years ago, and has hung around long enough to have a role in everything from Peyton Manning's accuracy rating to Devin Hester's speed to implementing new features. Here's the skinny on Madden from the inside.

THE MAG: You've been around this thing since well before the game was bigger than the announcer.
FERWERDA: I've worked on and off on Madden for nine and a half years, so you could definitely say that.

That's not Tecmo Bowl level, but compared to now…
Yeah, that's from PlayStation I, so I've gone through several different systems and levels of hardware.

What are the best improvements the game has made in the time that you've been there?
There's been an absolute ton of improvements from year to year, but nothing was like when we jumped from PlayStation I to PlayStation II and Madden just sort of exploded. I think it was all the new player animations, and truly using the power of the system to show off motion movements. And now there's a new explosion of that as we get to PS3 and Xbox 360 where the fluidity and movement and player animation this year has really gone above and beyond anything we expected.

So this year should blow us away?
This year the ability to control players is really unparalleled. I think if you look over the history and realize when Madden became what it is, there's that point we reached where you allow players to feel like they do. And we are crazy about striving each year to make it where players are becoming more and more a re-creation of what they are on the field.

How many people have test driven Madden in the back room before the consumer sees it?
It kind of depends on time of year. We have a core team of about 30 to 40 guys, and that's just straight-up testers. On top of that we also have all our engineers, who implement all the features, they test it—so that's about another 30 guys, and then it gets another round, so all told, maybe 100 guys to maybe 120 get their hands on it before it gets out there.

And then the real testing starts.
Yeah, another funny thing, and a crazy statistic is, in our year-long testing, once it's released, more people have put more hours into the game in the first hour of release than we could ever do internally in the entire cycle.

So flaws will always escape the factory, so to speak.
Yeah, because if we see it five times, like a play, we try to extrapolate that out into how the game will essentially behave, but once it's out, everything truly does get extrapolated out. There's nothing left unturned.

It's like calculating for Pi, where you can get to 50 digits but they get into the thousands in an instant.
It's sort of like, that extra level. In that first hour, we get inundated with calls and emails, asking, "What's with this?" and "Why is this here?" There's always things we won't see. It's truly impossible to release bullet-proof software, and while we try our absolute damndest to get it done, it's just—(sighs)—Madden's just a huge game.

You don't want complaints, but if nobody calls, you know it's probably worse, right?
On Madden, everything you do seems magnified times 100. It's amazing, because there are whole online communities devoted to Madden, and even here we have a community manager whose sole job is to interact with players, make sure we get their ideas, what they want to see, compliments, complaints, and we work with it.

And they find stuff?
The players routinely find stuff we couldn't even imagine finding. It's incredible. And we welcome the feedback.

"His speed, and ability to pass the ball made him an absolute lethal weapon."

What's the biggest bust you've ever seen programmed into the game?
I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but, well, I don't know if you'd call it a bust; it's more like features that got too hard core. I would say the vision cone we added in '06—I mean, I wouldn't label it a bust, but it's not in the game anymore. (laughs) Most stuff stays forever. It was a cool feature, and some guys still want it back, but it's out. It's not a Ryan Leaf bust, because there's still a contingency of people that want that.

What about a player that people thought was just too unstoppable?
In the last ten years, it has to be Michael Vick from '04. He was on the cover, and we'd also implemented some things to make it more playmaker-controlled, so you could do more, and his speed, and ability pass the ball made him an absolute lethal weapon.

And that's a problem…
Yeah, to the point where the Falcons weren't that good, and still, everybody used the Falcons. The next year were sort of focused on defense and put in a bunch of controls where you could stop him, but yeah, Madden '04, if you have Mike, you had a pretty good time.

We had an editor that nearly got killed over an unstoppable screen play; meaning there's a play that has to be banned from competition. Do you have those happen and not realize it?
Yeah, we had a really good one last year, where there was a wide receiver double-pass, and essentially what you could do—and we didn't find this when we were testing—you throw to the receiver, and the pass icons come up for him so he can throw, but if you just took off running, the defense thinks you're gonna pass and you can just take off.

This could be my only way to win.
(Laughs) Well, it got to the point where it was banned in Madden Challenge. It's the classic play that in all the testing, we'd see maybe once, and in an hour, 5000 players have cracked it and we're hearing about it. In Madden '09 that one is taken care of. Can't do it.

Are there things you just can't see, that when it comes out, you just go "What the heck is this?"
We try to mitigate it, but one thing now is you can have online leagues. And we've tested it. We know it works. But day one, we don't know how many people will be on. I can't simulate two million people playing in online leagues all at one time, and that may very well happen August 12th.

What secrets do you guys put in that we'll never see as players?
Unfortunately, none. Some games people put initials in and stuff on their levels of other games, but not Madden.

What about the office copy?
Oh yeah. We can take the helmets off of players, change the quarters, or change stuff mid-play, but for the most part, what you see is what we see. There's nothing I can do to cheat against you.

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