Its fascinating to look back at the origins of this game. I remember getting hooked on FIFA98 on the playstation. I would venture to say the hardcore fans of FIFA each have dropped over $500+ lifetime on buying new versions of the game. Some easily $1k+ ($60/year over 10+ years).

I am surprised no one has built a truly good link between fantasy sports and FIFA/Madden or other sports franchises. Despite both being multi-billion industries, they still seem siloed from each other.

For a long while I thought FIFA wasn't a 'big' game at all, not worth my time. Turns out I was pretty wrong. If not already, FIFA is close to a billion dollar per year franchise.

"For this first game EA had to go without [licensing]. And so the dev team decided to put themselves in the game. Matt Webster went upfront for England. Joey Della-Savia was in the Italian squad. Assistant producer Marc Aubanel became a striker for French team."

Humble beginnings, indeed.

Having been a football fan for almost 20 years, I am not sure if this is a sad thing but playing Fifa is starting to give me more pleasure in enjoying football than watching games. Part of the reason is that in FIFA, controllers can see clearer the whole field than the limited vision real players have in the real world, so that often times controllers can make more creative plays provide that the AI controlling the teammates making interesting runs.

Now that I said that, I realized that creating such AI might be even more fun than the above two.

The real question for me is, how did an American company beat every European company to publish the leading FIFA game franchise, when the corporate culture was so hostile to the idea? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that whatever hostility US corporate culture had towards football, there was some countering factor in European culture otherwise a company on the continent would have published a better one.

I spent many many many hours of my youth playing that game. It was so groundbreaking for its time and just so much fun to play!

Does anybody else have favorite versions? I really loved FIFA 99.

Can we keep out the usual discussion about the game dev work culture from this one?

What EA did there was pretty inspiring.