Xbox football season begins: `NFL Fever 2002' is perfect postseason entertainment for pro-football faithfuls

Insight on the News, March 4, 2002 by Joseph Szadkowski

Getting a group of surly, 250-pound football players to jump on demand has become a routine part of the workday for Kathy O'Keefe. She and a team of 40 other computer-graphics experts have developed NFL Fever 2002 for Microsoft's Xbox video-gaming platform.

O'Keefe, a 3-D artist and modeler for Microsoft Games Studio, did not foresee a future in sports games. While working on the design for an articulating lamp, however, she became interested in how flexibility could be translated to the computer screen. "I remember looking at my wrist and being amazed at how it could move," says O'Keefe. "Creating this game required that we first build a new race of men that moved in a realistic way in a virtual world that is based on a real-life paradigm, where there are rules you cannot break."

NFL Fever 2002 offers a fast-paced, arcade-style football simulation featuring players that eerily resemble their human counterparts. The ability to add "real-life" nuances -- eyes that dart back and forth, chests that heave, linemen's bellies that jiggle -- is a direct result of the increased power of the new Xbox gaming console.

"It is so powerful that it allows the game designer five times as much development power as we had designing for the PC" O'Keefe says. "Which means we are building more complex and challenging games that look and play more realistically."

For NFL Fever 2002, O'Keefe and her team began reviewing the characteristics of football players, reducing them to six general body styles that could be used for the 22 men on the field. The group used reference materials -- from fighter games to books such as Gray's Anatomy -- as well as O'Keefe's talents as a trained artist to guide the pencil sketches that eventually translated into 3-D computer models. They also did field research, taking O'Keefe back to her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Champaign, to watch her hometown Chicago Bears play.

"The Bears were using the stadium because Soldier Field was under renovation," O'Keefe says. "When I was in college, we went to the Rose Bowl, so I had seen quite a few games at Memorial Stadium."

Once the six body styles were established, the designers set them side by side to adjust height, mass and width, so they'd work in relation to each other.

"We are actually providing a very limited representation of all 1,600 players," O'Keefe says. "Our players are designed over skeletons with 80 bones, compared to the 206 bones in the human body, yet we had to have those bodies designed so that they move naturally within the gaming environment."

Some of the concerns for the artist were obvious, such as how high a knee rises when running; others were more subtle, such as the height a player can raise his hands over his head when wearing shoulder pads. "Whether we realize it or not, each person's eyes are experts and they know whether an on-screen movement is false or not" O'Keefe says.

The designer finds the Xbox environment exciting, particularly the new technological freedoms offered by the platform. "The most intriguing thing is how technology keeps on rolling," she says. "As an isolated team, we have had a complete and isolated relationship with the game and the Xbox. Seeing the platform become unveiled and being able to share our work with everyone has been very exciting to see."

JOSEPH SZADKOWSKI WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER DAILY, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.