When EA Sports welcomed a group of media members and streamers down to their Orlando campus for a launch event for Madden 25 and College Football 25, there was a palpable excitement from the EA Sports team to show off what they were bringing to both games. While I was there mainly to get a first look at the first college football game in more than a decade, it was obvious that they felt this year’s version of Madden was a real breakthrough moment.
A big reason for that was their new physics-based tackling and rushing system, BOOM Tech, which they felt was going to lay the foundation for the next generation of Madden games. The product of more than two years of development, is the first time the Madden team has been able to build a physics-based engine, which takes into account everything from a player’s weight to how fast they’re moving and in what direction at impact to deliver an increasingly realistic feel to the game. The hope, if all goes right, is that this is will let them add more physics-based actions to the game to replace animation-based gameplay.
Just after the game launched, Uproxx got to sit down with Clint Oldenburg (Production Director) and Kenneth Boatright (Game Designer), who both went from playing in the NFL to being part of the Madden team, to discuss the two-year process of developing BOOM Tech. While a physics-based engine wasn’t an initial goal the team set for themselves, it turned out to be the solution they found when exploring how to give players more control and feel as ball-carriers and tacklers.
“There were two steps that led to it,” Oldenburg explained about their realization. “Number one, our players were very clear in telling us ‘animation-based gameplay,’ as they referred to it, is not what they wanted anymore. They wanted more control, agency, and emergence in their gameplay. So that set the problem statement. And then once we started brainstorming with all of our internal teams — and that’s not just to say American football or Madden — we were working with some of our advanced teams around the entire EA Sports label to find different solutions for that. And when physics-based tackling became one of those solutions, then we started doing consumer insights, testing and stuff with our players, and that was the thing: Of all the different solutions that we had kind of brainstormed about how to accomplish the vision against that problem statement, that was the thing that the players that we surveyed said was most interesting to them. And so we started building it with what we call our A Team, which is an advanced animation team that every sports team at EA utilizes, and working directly with them to see how we could bring it to life.”
From that point, it was a matter of building, tuning, and refining the system, trying to strike the right balance between realism and player control — two things that don’t always work in harmony when building a video game. For as much as players want the game to look and feel like what they see on Sundays, they also want to be able to do things that you wouldn’t ever see on the field and are only really possible in a video game.
Both Oldenburg and Boatright pointed to that as one of the great challenges in designing the game. Whether the challenge was creating a running and tackling system, or building the game’s blocking system and tuning it to get it to work how they wanted and how they thought players would want it, the sheer size of this effort was one of the main reasons it took two years for BOOM Tech to make it into the game.
“The tools that we have are pretty powerful in that we have the ability to swing it pretty far in either direction. I wish we could, externally, show some of the early videos of this thing,” Oldenburg said with a laugh. “We’d tune the physics up so far that we can explode a player all across the field if we wanted, right? So we have mins and maxes, and obviously we’re not going to go to either end of that, because that would not be authentic or realistic, kind of funny to look at.
“But finding that center point is difficult and rewarding all at the same time, and the way that I think of it, football is a game of inches,” he continues. “Any coach or player will tell you that. And what we’re trying to portray to our players is that every inch matters. So as the tackle is starting, what is the approach and angle and leverage point of the tackler? What is his speed and momentum? And then that carries through into the point of impact. That pays off into the tackle resolution. And all of those factors of physics, just like they do in real life, impact the outcome of that tackle. And that’s why, you were at the media event, we referred to this as physics-informed animation selection. Very clearly not ragdoll. We could make it more ragdoll if we wanted, but that’s not what it looks like on Sundays. And so we’re literally using all of those different factors, different physics factors, to find the most perfect outcome that we can produce that looks as authentic as possible.”
That is also where having former NFL players like Boatright (a former defensive lineman for the Seahawks and Cowboys) and Oldenburg (who spent time with six different teams as an offensive lineman) on the design team pays dividends. They can provide firsthand guidance on what something should look and feel like, and also how the game’s AI should think and operate.
“I think the biggest thing is considering the player’s weight, player ratings, and really just thinking about a player’s intent,” Boatright said. “As a defensive player, I can be lining up a guy perfectly, but there’s certain elements that you just can’t account for: the ground, a blocker coming out that you might kind of stutter to deal with. But it’s just the feeling of when you have a guy squared up, you’re a cornerback, he’s Derrick Henry. Now, it doesn’t matter how much intent that corner has in them, there’s certain factors that come into play where it’s just like, hey, you’re not going to blast this guy the same way a big Ray Lewis type might with a smaller guy, you know what I mean? So just getting that momentum, getting that feel of, this guy’s a big dude that has punishing ability. Getting that intent, that momentum to feel proper, the way the contact and their approach angles change, just trying to make sure those things are correct. When talking to some of the other designers that were involved in this area, trying to make sure it felt like, this is the NFL player that has that boom to him. We got to make sure the way these guys fall feels accurate. So there’s just a lot of conversation around trying to make sure that the momentum of the stuff and the outcome of it looked realistic.”
The Madden team sees the game’s future as being physics-based, with BOOM Tech and the tackling engine as their first foray into the space. Their goal is to expand that to everything that happens on the field, but as they learned with BOOM Tech, that’s a process that requires considerable care and a willingness to be honest about when it’s ready to deploy. The goal was to unveil BOOM Tech as part of Madden 24, but they decided to keep it out of that game to give themselves another year to work with it, particularly as they ran into a number of unknowns in the development process.
By giving themselves an extra year rather than rushing out a product that wasn’t ready, they not only got more time to tune and get things right, but also avoided a situation where players decided that physics-based engines weren’t what they wanted because it didn’t function as intended at launch.
“The direction that we’re moving now and into the future is physics-based. We’re starting with physics-based tackling because that was the most obvious spot,” Oldenburg said. “But we want physics-based across all of gameplay, because that’s what our players are telling us. And to your point, if you put a feature out a little bit too early or a little pre-baked, the response is going to be, ‘We don’t like this. This isn’t what we asked for.’ Even though it might be in two, three, four years a really good feature, you’re not going to get the leverage or the ability to keep that in and keep iterating on it if it doesn’t hit the mark when it first comes out the door.”
One of those areas that can be expanded on in the future is blocking, which isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when people think about video game football, but will be the biggest complaint if it doesn’t work how players want it to. Oldenburg, the former offensive linemen, previously headed up blocking in Madden but recently handed that off to Boatright, who made his career on the other side of the trenches. They believe having that perspective from both sides of the ball has given them a more well-rounded approach to line play in the game.
Part of the challenge of developing better line play in the game is accounting for all the things that happen in video game football that don’t happen in real life. The principles that dictate how lineman move and function in various systems on the field can be broken when players get moved around the field in ways in a game that don’t happen otherwise, with how players will lurk and try to shoot gaps. As a result, they’ve tried to expand lineman logic to give them a bit more individual freedom to pick up defenders that might not be their normal responsibility.
“We got some new technology in place that allowed us to do some different things within the blocking realm. We added some new functionality between the pass protections. Users had a lot of issues with certain glitchy behavior being allowed, certain blitzes and metas or whatnot,” Boatright said. “But when you’re making a game it’s that piece that Clint talked about, one realistic and then the game world combined. There’s certain stuff that you can do in the video game that you have to account for that you just won’t see in real life on Saturdays and Sundays. So there was just a lot of work that went into trying to account for the freedom that we give users, the control that we give users, and then trying to allow each individual blocker a way to think a little bit more about his individual situation that’s going on between logic as well as animation play.”
There are still areas for improvement, but as they note, it has to be looked at as a years-long process. The reason physics-based tackling is in the game now is new game systems allow for that kind of detail and the technology has come far enough to make that a reality. The same challenge exists in expanding blocking logic, because there are limitations placed on what lineman can do because their movements and decisions are dictated by an algorithm. As Oldenburg explained, that is something they’re constantly working on and figuring out ways to expand the algorithm to take more into account and allow blockers to operate more lifelike.
“Open field blocking is one of those artificial intelligent pieces that I think we’re always going to be iterating on, year over year. What makes it extra challenging in real life as a blocker — and I was a zone guy, so I pulled a lot and I was downfield a lot. In real life, I have a brain, and I know the concept of the play,” Oldenburg explained. “And so instantly, as I’m running in the open field, I have an idea in my head where that ball carrier is supposed to be. And that’s going to give me a pretty good idea of who I need to block and which direction I need to block them in when I’m trying to find a target. In a video game, that’s just an algorithm. It’s basically an exercise in finding … every frame or every couple of frames, it’s running an algorithm to say, “Who is the biggest threat to the ball carrier at this time?” And that’s why you see, sometimes they wander and change their mind. They don’t have eyes, they don’t have brains, right? I know that’s kind of breaking down the veil of a video game. They can only do what the algorithm tells them to do, and improving that algorithm so it can take into account, where’s the ball carrier supposed to be? Or maybe, where is the ball carrier now? Or, what is my leverage point? Those are things that we’re always talking about to improve authenticity. Not necessarily simple to put in the game, but as technology grows, the hope is that we can take some of this data from real world NFL GPS tracking, and some of the knowledge we have about how a play should be blocked, and start applying that to the algorithm.”
The nature of building a video game with an annual release is as Madden 25 launches, the team is already focused on Madden 26 and figuring out how to build on the foundation that exists. Part of that is constantly evolving the game logic and taking advantage of new systems and technology that allows them to give video game players more to consider in real-time, so they can think and act more like the players on the field. Now, having built a physics-based engine for tackling and running the ball, they’re looking at where they can go next with that idea. Oldenburg hopes to add physics-based trenches to pass and run blocking, as well as how defensive backs and wide receivers interact.
Ultimately, the goal is to create less predictability and give users more control. The challenge is providing that control while staying true to the product on the field, which is the ever-present push and pull that exists with creating a sports simulation video game.
