Clint Oldenburg: From the NFL to Madden NFL

For every highlight-reel play in football, there's one block — or more — that made it happen.

"It's the unsung hero, both in the video game world and in real life," says Seann Graddy, line producer on Electronic Arts' Madden NFL series of football simulation video games. "If you think about how every play plays out, blocking — whether it's a pass play or a run play — is critical to that play being successful."

Offensive linemen tend to be the largest players on a football team, standing upward of 6 feet tall and weighing at least 300 pounds. But they must also sport tremendous intelligence and quickness, whether they're a tackle fending off a speedy defensive end or a guard getting across the field to be the lead blocker on an outside run. It's a demanding endeavor, especially since a poor blocking technique often results in penalty calls like holding that can wipe out a big play.

"Most offensive linemen will tell you that ... no one notices when it goes well. The only time you're ever called out in a game is when it's a penalty, usually," says Roy Harvey, Madden's executive producer.

Blocking represents a significant challenge for the developers at suburban Orlando, Fla.-based EA Tiburon, the studio behind the Madden franchise. They have to build the artificial intelligence for defensive linemen pursuing the quarterback and make offensive linemen smart enough to stop them, and as with everything else in Madden, it has to look and feel like real football.

"I kind of fought with it internally for two weeks, talked to my family, talked to everyone, and just kind of weighed the pros and cons and tried to figure out what my best opportunity was," says Oldenburg. "What were the chances of getting back to the NFL at the age of 30? You know, having been around the NFL a while and having a bunch of injuries, [I knew] the chances weren't great."

The closer came when Oldenburg found out he would need ankle surgery in order to play football again. That's when he hung up the cleats for good and accepted the gig at Tiburon, becoming the first former NFL player to join the studio as a full-time developer. Officials at the company had recently implemented their plan to revamp Madden gameplay, including blocking, and Oldenburg was just the guy for the job.

"I didn't feel like we had the right designer on staff, until Clint was hired, to have the correct vision that we would need to achieve," says Dickson. "We needed somebody that was a subject-matter expert and understood the real-world rules of blocking. And that's why, one of the reasons why, Clint sort of unlocked our ability to go after this feature."

To be sure, handing such a monumental responsibility to a first-year designer was a risk. According to Dickson, Oldenburg exhibited an encouraging level of initiative. But more importantly, his lack of experience as a game developer was actually something Dickson was looking for.

"I didn't want a game designer ... to design the blocking rules. I wanted someone who knew, real world, like, what the rules are, how they're coached, how they're taught," Dickson explains. "When we set out to design this, he came to me and he said, 'I've never designed a game before. I've never designed a video game system before.' And I said, 'I don't want you to.'"

Oldenburg's task was to condense 25 or 30 different NFL pass-blocking schemes into one for Madden that could still seem faithful to the NFL. Then he had to communicate his ideas to the team of engineers and animators working for him, in a way that would allow them to implement his design in the game.

He believes his unique background, both within and outside of football, played a major role in his ability to move into his new career and contribute to Madden.

Communication is a vital skill for a game designer — especially one in Oldenburg's position, which doesn't entail any knowledge of programming. His degree in technical journalism from Colorado State gave him the ability to write about dense topics in a technical manner, as a developer would do in a design document, and to distill those subjects down into terms that a layperson can understand. And Oldenburg says his football experience — specifically, being able to work with a team and compromise to get things done — helped him collaborate with the people who put his designs in the game.

That working relationship is "an iterative process," says Oldenburg. "My job as a designer is to give the engineers the problem space, and then let them figure out how to solve it." The engineers build prototypes of Oldenburg's designs, and like a football coach watching game film, he assesses the fruits of their labors in game footage.

"When I watch the 'film,' if I find something that I don't like — whether it be techniques, scheme, whatever it is — I tell them, 'Hey, this is the problem we need to fix.' They come up with the best way to solve the problem without breaking other stuff in the game, they do their work, they give it back to me, and then I go back and 'look at film' and see if we've fixed the problem or if it still has other issues," Oldenburg explains. "It's just give-and-take, back-and-forth, until we get the product that we want."

But Oldenburg's efforts, and the directive from Madden officials to focus on fixing long-standing problems, ran into a roadblock. Phrases like "improved blocking" don't pull in a lot of eyeballs on the back of a game box, and the marketing department and others weren't convinced that it was worth spending significant resources on blocking. The naysayers pointed out that it's an under-the-radar feature governed primarily by AI routines, and one that players have no control over. So in addition to designing the blocking in Madden, Oldenburg was called upon to justify the value of his work and the development approach of his team leaders.

"Clint had to actually get up there and sell this feature," says Dickson. "And that was a tough sell initially, until people started seeing the results in the game."