EA Sports Mastered the Video Game Soundtrack During the PlayStation Era

That is, I think, as good a summation of the EA Sports experience as there is, especially during the PS1-PS2 era during which I was particularly devoted to the brand. When I find a musty copy of Madden or MVP Baseball at the thrift store and throw it in the old machine for a few days, I’m struck by how rough those games feel, how the endlessly marketed leaps in technology and gameplay mechanics scan not as the revolution they felt like in my youth, but as painful steps in an evolution towards simulating the look and feel of the games as they were presented, away from a sometimes liberal interpretation of how the action of a sport might make for an interesting video game.

But the soundtracks still sound good. Yes, the hit-to-skip ratio has skewed tremendously with the years, my tastes straying drastically from the mélange of pre-game hype CD hip-hop and alt-rock radio that informs the playlists of Madden, NBA Live, Tiger Woods, and other franchises. But Madden NFL 2004 was a day one purchase for me on August 11, 2003, which means that my second exposure to Outkast (after “B.O.B.” in Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX) wasn’t the globe-conquering one-two punch “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move,” but the Speakerboxxx deep cut “Church.” It compelled me to buy the CD.

It’s easy, I think, to praise the soundtracks of ubiquitous arcade sports efforts like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater because to many they define the entire subculture, but what the music supervisors at EA were doing at the same time strikes me as much more difficult, as they were attempting to craft a sonic identity for brands that were only just beginning to reckon with themselves as mass culture. It wasn’t always successful—NBA Live should have had as many star hip-hop syncs as Madden, NASCAR had a jam band centric year, and DMX’s “Party Up” was featured on a Tiger Woods game—but their NFL, NHL, MLB, and EA Sports BIG titles are riddled with hits, basically the equivalent of an aughts-era magazine pack-in CD.

The best of these, the one with the clearest vision, was NCAA Football 06. Eschewing the series’ traditional use of college fight songs, the soundtrack is a cross section of 1990s college rock radio, with Guided By Voices’ 1999 “Teenage FBI” the most recent to the game’s release. There’s no in-game reason for this—1991 Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard is the cover star, presumably to hype the game’s Race for the Heisman mode, but there’s no flashbacks involved, no focus on identitarian college culture or campus life. Pixies’ “Debaser” and Superchunk’s “Hyper Enough” and De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I” churn away in the background while you’re managing recruiting classes and drawing up playbooks, and, anachronism or not, it works for the same reason the Tony Hawk soundtracks do: it feels like the culture that makes up a college town—bookish, over-caffeinated, and a little dramatic.

Putting together a playlist of tracks from this era of games, I’m reminded of how small and insular my world was, how few avenues I had to discover new music until I went to college. I was obsessed with classic rock and hip-hop, I loved nu-metal, and hearing something like Santigold’s “L.E.S. Artistes” on NHL 08 broke my little world open, expanding the scope of what I knew and was curious about far more drastically than one typically imagines possible of a yearly sports game. It’s easy for me to romanticize this era—I stopped playing the genre long before their playlists became a homogenized smear of streaming stars who are more than happy to acquiesce to being the sonic wallpaper to a round of Madden Ultimate Team—but there were worse worse ways to discover music in the mid-2000s, and some of them were on PS2. I could have been a yearly Raw vs. SmackDown! player. Instead, I occasionally get the Von Bondies stuck in my head. I owe the person who put the Von Bondies in MVP Baseball 2004 instead of some late-era P.O.D. bummer my life.