Director of Football

Director of Football Fever for Sega of America (and creator of Sega Rally) Mark Alfa Romeo tells us about his friendship with ESPN and his passion for creating games.

"Football Fever was designed to be football, but it was also a totally different kind of football game than a football game," he told us.

Ringo Romeo was the man who made the licensed game, Football Fever, which has sold millions of copies.

"Football Fever is the best football game of the year. And although I'm still a pretty new player, I've gotten my game quite a lot better with each one. And although the big differences between the PC and the console are... obviously the technology behind the game is different," he said. "There are several things that separate it from other football games, but from an arcade perspective, it's just different. We didn't see a significant difference."

For the rest of us, the game seems very much about playing football. But, even if you don't care about soccer or some of the other fantasy football games, you still have a lot to love about it.

"We had two versions - one was on the Sega Genesis, and the other on the PlayStation," Ringo Romeo told us. "In a simulation mode you are not running over on the field. Instead, you're on a game board, and you want to be as fast as possible. You want to keep your speed up - no matter what the pace is, you're not the last player on the field. Instead, you're just a guy in a simulation game."

Those thoughts were echoed by way of a simulation mode that simulates the changing world of football.

"When you're looking at what's happening in real football, I always thought we were just trying to entertain ourselves and how it's going to affect the outcome of a sport," said Ringo Romeo. "And then in simulation mode, the world changes. When you are in a simulation mode, you have to make decisions that are specific to that sport, and you can't just tell the player to be slow to make a decision. When you're in a simulation mode, it's not just a simulation, it's more like a simulation. We can't just have a game that looks like football, but gets the player to make decisions that are important to the player. So for simulation mode, you have to make decisions that are specific to that sport. You have to make choices that are specific to that sport. So the fact that you can simulate real football is really a different kind of innovation."

Ringo Romeo explains that the former Apple executive never gave up on the project, but he took time to consider the implications of the new battle-hardened company. "There are the things that are interesting about that battle-hardened company and that they do. So we really are trying to take the fight to the face of the game."

He added that Microsoft was always "somewhat under-served" in developing the Unreal Engine 4, but he was also amazed by the amount of power the Xbox One has over PlayStation 4. "It's a really powerful engine and it's really at the forefront of the industry in terms of what's going to happen in the console business for years to come."

He said that the Unreal Engine 4 was designed with Xbox One in mind, and developers could do justice to that technology. "It was designed with Xbox in mind, but in the past it was all about those [games]. I think the number one thing that has really changed, and it's really allowed the power of the Xbox One, is that we're building what we call the Unreal Engine 4 toolset. When you create a game like Halo, it's really powerful, and I think our teams and our developers really have been able to make something out of this that's so visually stunning and technologically interesting to you."

The story of the Xbox One's Infinity Engine 4 was particularly illuminating. "We used a piece of our Infinity Engine 3 for this. We're looking to deliver amazing next-generation gaming experiences," Robert Ansel, SVP of Xbox Platform Engineering, said in an interview with Metro, as part of an interview with VentureBeat. "And you know, when you create a game, you're actually looking at it from a first-person perspective, and you're just going to see what your player character looks like, and you're just going to have a really good, very powerful, very powerful, very powerful game experience on your Xbox."

"We've really got the best look, feel, sound, and everything that we can," he continued. "The first-person is the first-person perspective and we've really put in a lot of content, so we're very focused on delivering great graphics, very detailed environments, and amazing games to people who don't really own an Xbox 360.