NFL Head Coach 09 is a niche game inside the massively popular sports videogame genre. It's a coaching sim -- not a joystick jockey game (although I may have dated myself with that phrase). Despite its off the radar persona, the game has gathered a loyal following since its release so we wanted to chat with designer Josh Looman on a wide assortment of topics -- and to find out if the series has a future inside EA Sports.
Before we get into the game, tell us a little about yourself. How did you get involved in game design? What other projects have you worked on?
I started out in the industry about 9-10 years ago as a tester at Acclaim Entertainment. I tested All-Star Baseball, Quarterback Club and plenty of other games. After about a year as a tester, I was given a chance to be a designer on Quarterback Club. I worked on the game until it was cancelled and then I was hired by EA. The first game I worked on as a designer was Madden 2004. I worked on every Madden after that until coming over to be the lead designer on NFL Head Coach ’09. I learned so much over the years designing Franchise mode and Superstar Mode that I tried to apply to a lot of the designs in NFL Head Coach ’09.
What was the number one goal for Head Coach 09? What was the one area that the team felt that they absolutely had to nail down?
I think we had a few goals:
Provide one of the deepest sports strategy games ever made. We knew that the first Head Coach got a lot of credit for the concept, so we just had to execute.
Fix Core Issues from the first game. The biggest thing we had to focus on was the interface, logic and overall flow of the game and I think we were successful with how they turned out.
Make this game for the fans who had been asking for it and give them all of the features they’d asked for over the years…features like future draft picks, CPU to CPU trades, contract incentives, etc.
Immerse people in the Head Coach world. We spent a lot of time writing interesting rookie profiles, creating realistic playbooks and having players learn and think like they do in real life. We even built in surprises 4-5 years into your careers. When a game makes you feel like you’re part of that world, you become addicted to it.
Was there any feedback from NFL players or coaches during development?
Definitely. We got to interview every NFL head coach (except Bill Belichick) on camera and we were allowed to ask them any question we wanted to help shape the design of the game. We also brought in assistant coaches to pick their brains and we got to talk to agents and GMs. We had a ton of access that was invaluable to the design process.
Was there a level of anxiety when the game was released with Madden? The two games are so very different, how anxious/nervous were you about the reception not so much from the sim fans but from the every day Madden player?
There was never really a level of anxiety with me, personally. We knew that we’d made a great game and the reception from the fans before and after release has been awesome. We know this isn’t a game for everyone. It requires some NFL knowledge and it is a very deep game. You probably won’t sit down on your couch with your buddies and play this game and that’s ok with me. I see Head Coach as more of a Rome: Total War/Civilization/Spore type of game that you are going to sink hours, weeks and months into. It’s not the casual experience that some people out there are expecting it to be.
Head Coach is a niche game; there's a vocal subset of sports gamers who crave for a game like this but it's still far from mainstream like Madden and other popular hands on sports games. Does it frustrate you at all to read reviews by those expecting it to be something that it's not? This is a game that might be tough to match with the right critic.
It’s been all right for the most part. There have been some great reviews from guys like you and Terry Crouch from Operation Sports who truly ‘get’ the intent of the game and those have been rewarding. We expected some reviewers to not understand the game and we were prepared for that. It seems like some of the reviewers expected it to be Madden or NCAA and it’s just not that type of game. In order for a reviewer to really ‘get this game’, I personally feel like they needed to play multiple games and even play multiple seasons to see all of the detail and depth we put into the game. When you read things in some reviews that insinuate that there is no in-game engine or that approval doesn’t have any impact on the game, you really have to wonder if a reviewer played this for 30 minutes before they started typing their review.
