Peter Moore Pt.1

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It's both beguiling and off-putting to face a corporate interviewee who gives you a straight answer.

The games media is fed the same, PR'd-to-pulp quotes from the same, PR'd-to-pulp execs so often that CVG readers could probably write many of their sound-bitten, painfully predictable answers for them. Scratch that; better than them.

Thank the Lord, then, for Peter Moore: The man who loved Dreamcast even more than you during his time at Sega in the 1990s; who convinced you to buy an Xbox; and who helped bring FIFA back from being about as credible as John Terry's marriage vows to a position of unforeseen dominance.

Indeed, to stall on his Microsoft career for a second (2003 - 2007, fact fans), without his input into Xbox's life (and those colourful E3 appearances) Xbox fanboys probably wouldn't even exist.

Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate; his illustrious contribution to the video games industry is not.

Now steering EA Sports into another year of acclaim and expansion - with a Mixed Martial Arts and FIFA World Cup game waiting in the wings - he offers more know-how and wise opinion than at any other time in his career.

CVG caught up with him for a mammoth interview recently. Here's part one of three:

EA Sports seems to encourage its development teams to stay in touch with gamers through blogs, mailouts, videos etc. more than any other major label. Why?
It's funny, I think I really saw it at its best with Peter Jackson when he did King Kong. He did a video blog called 'Kong Is King'. I met Peter at Microsoft's X06 in Barcelona and he told me that he felt had an obligation to his community and customers to show them what he was doing everyday. It was a very refreshing outlook.

[EA] previously has this aura of games being a 'dark art' that must be grandly unveiled. Now, we still do all that with major features - because it's still a competitive environment out there. But as you're developing stuff, you've also got to engage the community, and use network tools to interact with them.

We've built up community guys whose sole job it is to interact with the development teams and then report out. They're very clear on what they can talk about, but we thoroughly encourage our developers to talk openly - without giving the game away, obviously.

We still have a cadence of announcements, but this [traditional marketing] concept of 'I'll give you a screenshot when I'm ready, and then if you're a really good boy I'll show you some footage, and eventually we'll get you so hyped up so you go and buy the game at midnight.' I think - or at least hope - those days are somewhat behind us now.

FIFA has put some clear water between itself and Pro Evolution Soccer in the last couple of years. What are doing to ensure the next game continues that trend - and that gulf widens even further?
The one thing we have in the FIFA team is an absolute paranoia about complacency. Whilst you say there's clear water between us and Pro Evo, EA Canada's mentality is that the competitor is breathing right down their necks.

A number of them actually worked on Pro Evo. They know the capability -as do I - of the very talented team at Konami has. They also know that you're at your most vulnerable when you think you're winning.

[We're about] continued innovation in what we do, in particular taking a very critical look in the mirror. And when I say paranoid, I mean it. The team listens brilliantly to its fanbase - because it knows there's always things you can fix; always things you can do a little better. The team will tell you they can do a lot better with Manager Mode [as seen in FIFA 10] - and they will in FIFA 11.

We've got a very complex game which is growing with things like Ultimate Team adding to that, but the team will never rest on its laurels. Coming into a World Cup year, they've got the bit between their teeth at the same time, they know they need to innovate because Konami will keep on coming, to their credit. They've built a great brand and they're having a difficult time right now.

We took a huge gamble four years ago on a brand new FIFA engine for next-gen. All of the downsides that gives you temporarily paid off eventually. It was a real gamble - look at our Metacritic scores from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and look at where we are now. The difference is incredible, and something I'm hugely proud of. But we'll never be complacent and we'll never believe the hype. We've done a phenomenal job getting to where we are today - but one bad iteration and it starts to crumble again.

FIFA World Cup 2010 is round the corner, but some CVG readers have asked us: Why release a standalone World Cup game? Couldn't it just be DLC for FIFA 10?
If you read the background on it, we've got all 199 teams, all the South African stadiums, you've got a good chunk of home stadiums for the teams involved. Make no mistake, this is a seriously big game.

The World Cup has always been a major event [for EA] every four years - and one we spend a lot of time and a lot of money getting ready for.

Who's not to say four years from now at World Cup 2014, it may be downloadable content? But right now, when you see the magnitude of the game we've delivered and the marketing plans we have in place, it's deserves to be a standalone game. And this is the first time we've shipped a World Cup games as [our FIFA engine] is in the ascendancy [vs. Pro Evo etc.]. We're very excited about it.

EA has made great strides in moving away from being seen as a faceless corporation that produces generic games - and that's particularly true for EA Sports. What lessons did you learn at Xbox in shifting that brand's identity away from the giant Microsoft Corporation?
One of the greatest challenges when you're a part of a very large organisation like Microsoft - probably the most polarising corporation in business history, that I have incredible fondness for - is recognising that, to consumers, its ubiquity and presence in everything is polarising. What we had to do at Xbox was take the 'goodness' that was Microsoft, but at the same time look at the issues the company was facing.

Remember, this was a company the US Government was suing to try and break up. It was an enterprise company - not an entertainment or even a truly consumer-focused company. Our job was to create an entertainment consumer company with cool hardware, cutting-edge software and an awesome online service like Xbox Live - all within the confines of still being Microsoft and being darn proud of it.

But we had to make sure that we weren't so inexplicably intertwined that we couldn't create our own identity. We moved away from the main campus and got a little bit of our own space. Then we created an identity that was still Microsoft, but was separate and stood for different things. We knew that was the only way Xbox as a brand could stand on its own two feet.

Check back over the weekend for the second part of our chat with Peter for more on his career - and EA's challenges in 2010.

Tim Ingham