So where did this mode come from?
At the start of the design phase for FIFA 08, we knew people played FIFA games a lot with their friends on the same couch. We all do this – your buddy comes over and you play match after match head-to-head. I challenged to team to figure out a new way we could encourage people to play together – a new offline co-operative game mode.
Last fall, we started prototyping what it would be like to play FIFA 08 only controlling the mid-field, while your friend controlled the strikers (like with foosball or table football). When Neil, our AI engineer, and Marcel, our AI producer, set up the prototype, they also included the ability to play as just one player.
I still remember the first time I played locked to one player at Neil’s desk. It was fun, but it became a lot more fun when Marcel jumped in on my team also locked to one player. A couple days later in our weekly team meeting, we got four people playing on the same club locked to one player and they had a blast. That’s when we realized the core of the mode was to have multiple people playing on the same club playing each as one footballer.
