EA Sports’ beloved ‘College Football’ video game making a comeback. Here’s what to know
EA Sports nearly broke Twitter on Tuesday after announcing that it is rebooting its college football series for Generation consoles.
EA partnered with “collegiate licensing company CLC to make sure they had the FBS schools, traditions, uniforms and playbooks — among other things — ready to go for the game,” ESPN reported.
“As we look for the momentum that we’re building on in sports, it all starts with the passion of our fans and the opportunities of what they are interested in,” EA Sports vice president and general manager Daryl Holt told ESPN. “I don’t think a visit where I go outside wearing a piece of EA Sports branded apparel, that someone doesn’t go, ‘Hey, when is college football coming back?’”
A date for the game drop hasn’t been announced. But Holt did say that it won’t be in 2021.
As expected, fans of the game who had been waiting for years for an announcement like this took to Twitter to express their joy.
The last college football video game the company created was in 2013 before it was discontinued after EA and the NCAA were taken to court over the unpaid use of player likeness, The Washington Post reported.
The NCAA settled the lawsuit over EA’s video game series in 2014.
EA Sports Executive Vice President Manager Cam Weber told the Post that EA doesn’t plan for the new series to feature names, images or likenesses of current college players.
“We’ve just gotten to a point now where we think it’s the right time to bring [the college football game] back,” Weber told the Post. “And we think we can build a deep enough game that really delivers on all those other core components and brings these schools and this kind of gameplay to life. And we’re at a point in time where the schools and conferences are comfortable partnering and building a college football game again and … a lot of that is excluding name, image, likeness of players.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 12:30 PM with the headline "EA Sports’ beloved ‘College Football’ video game making a comeback. Here’s what to know."