Pitt football, along with all 134 FBS Division I teams, will feature in the new EA Sports college football video game set to come out this summer.
The EA Sports account, along with each individual FBS team, including Pitt football, announced their inclusion in the upcoming video game on Thursday.
The first college football video game came out in 1993, named Bill Walsh College Football, after the legendary head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and Stanford. His name stood on the cover for the next edition, until College Football USA 96/97, for the following two editions.
NCAA College Football 98 would start the branding of the NCAA itself from 1997-2013, with NCAA College Football 14. This allowed all FBS teams to become a part of the video game, official bowl games, dynasty mode and sometimes included teams in the FCS. The game featured on a number of consoles, including PlayStation, XBOX, Wii, GameCube, Windows, and more.
Many great names graced the cover of this game, including Pitt football legend and 2003 Biletnikoff winner in wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald for NCAA College Football 2005.
Legal disputes soon arose in 2013, surrounding the use of college athletes’ likenesses, Electronic Arts and the NCAA. Due to the NCAA arguing for the amateur status of student-athletes, conferences backing out of future games and the uncertain future of how to properly compensate players, the last college football game that came out was NCAA College Football 2014.
The new era of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), which allows student-athletes to earn money by their own profile, allowed for the new college football game to come out. Pete Nakos of On3 released an article on Thursday, that athletes will receive compensation for their participation in the game coming out to $600 and a free copy of the game, which costs $70.
EA Sports is working with One Team Partners to deal with NIL rights and CLC, which is the country’s top college trademark licensing company, allowing over 15,000 current student-athletes to make merchandise deals.
The Compass CLC app allows all student-athletes, starting on Thursday, to opt-in or opt-out their NIL of the upcoming video game.
One of the big benefits for student-athletes not only receiving compensation for the game, is that they themselves will fully participate in the game.
Previous college sport games did not have names or actual descriptions of the players for the most part. Instead, players numbers and randomized appearances took place, since video game companies couldn’t portray them as who they were. Now, expect full names and proper descriptions of those student-athletes who choose to participate in the game.
With the last game in 2013 selling around 1.5 million copies, expect the highly anticipated return this summer to break that number by quite some margin.
I actually liked playing the game with random names. But video games aren’t what they used to be.