You can choose your parents. Think about that. Although not intended this way, it’s clearly a stroke of genius—allowing us to correct one of life’s great injustices. I’m talking about NFL Superstar mode, of course, one of the more substantial new features in Madden NFL 06, and how it lets you create a player right down to the nature-plus-nurture cocktail that makes him what he is, including his dad’s IQ, his mom’s IQ, both of their professions, and even their character strengths. How much would you give to be able to choose your parents’ character strengths in real life? So you could just go back in time, knowing what you know now, and get everything all tuned up so you’d have indestructible self-esteem, a bottomless supply of witty remarks, and such good-humored empathy that everyone would be your friend?

“I started as a tester back in Madden ’98,” says producer Phil Frazier, the man largely responsible for Madden’s on-going evolution, “and when Tiburon became an actual studio in the EA organization, I became an assistant producer on the NCAA product. Then I moved back to the Madden Franchise and I’ve been involved ever since.” Frazier’s average work day, he says, depends entirely on the time of year. “We start with preproduction, which is basically coming up with the new ideas, making the call that this is what we’re going to do this year.”

In the case of Madden NFL 06, that meant, first and foremost, looking at the passing game. “We came to passing by taking a step back,” Frazier says, “and focusing on something that really hasn’t been touched in a long time. And we wanted to emulate something authentic to the game of football.” Thus the new vision element, this white cone that shows you where the quarterback is looking on the field. “The more aware your quarterback is, the more he can see, so Peyton Manning has the biggest cone, and guys like Mike Vicks have a much smaller one, and they literally have to look at individual targets before they can throw to them. On top of that we’ve also touched the running game. This is a passing year, but we didn’t want to abandon the running game so we added the truck stick [which lets a running back drop a shoulder and flatten a defensive player], which is a direct match of the hit stick which is what we added last year as our defensive feature.”

Production mode comes next, when programmers and artists take Frazier’s designs and start plugging them into the game. “During production, which is the bulk of the year,” he says, “we basically have daily builds so we get to see the progress of the game every day. As soon as a feature goes in, we make sure it looks good on the screen, we make sure it plays good, and if not, we get with the engineer and decide if it needs more time or more memory. Then it’s just repeat and rinse until we have a final product. And as features get put in, there’s always funny stuff—like we added cheerleaders one year, and the first time we put them in they didn’t even look like girls, they basically looked like big pompoms. Everything starts out looking pretty rough until you refine it.”

Frazier also works on plugging holes in past Maddens—like the widespread success of money plays. “In previous versions,” he says, “you hear people talking ‘money play this, money play that.’ It’s been a problem in the Madden series since, well, since the dawn of Madden. Adaptive AI is that the defense is now watching the individual routes of the receiver, so if you find that a particular route is quote unquote “money,’ the defense will actually adjust to that route. Like if you find out that corner routes are particularly useful, and you run them over and over again, the defense will shade over.”

The sim quality has also come a long way. “If you pop in Madden 2001, the first PlayStation 2 version, and you compare it to this year’s, it’s like night and day. It’s more of a sim product today than it was back in the day, and back in the day people loved it as a sim product. So, the expectation level has gone up, we’ve gotten a lot of features that improve it in this sim aspect.” He’s talking partly about Storyline Central, of course, which includes the regional newspapers that help organize the information you need to run your team, and also the Tony Bruno radio show, which was added last year. “Every event that happens in your franchise,” Frazier says, “has an ID given to it. So if Brett Favre were to get traded, that would be flagged internally in the code, and then we’ve gone ahead and pre-thought of different events that might happen and then we ask Tony to comment on those things—elite players getting traded, elite players getting cut, hundreds of different situations that can happen within your franchise mode and we had him record that stuff.” But he’s also talking about the part that really matters, the part that starts right after the testers do their debugging and the rest of us boot up our consoles: picking our parents, I mean, because it just doesn’t get any better than that.