here are few certainties in life: death, taxes, and a yearly edition of Madden. You may as well add rabid fans complaining about the game’s lack of innovation to the list, too. As the lone licensed video game for the country’s most popular sport, Madden developer EA Tiburon is under an intense scrutiny that few other game developers can relate to. Given only 10 months of development time between games, the developer works in a world of constant deadlines with little to no room for error. If the new version of Madden doesn’t raise the bar high enough, the fan backlash can get ugly. After a rather brutal transition to the next generation platforms that saw older games offer more features and better controls than the early Xbox 360 and PS3 titles, the scrutiny has only been amplified in recent years. Fans now expect the team to add meaningful new feature sets, fix former bugs, and polish minor flaws regardless of time constraints. So how does the game come together in this pressure cooker environment? We asked general manager Philip Holt to shed some light on the decision making process.

Game Informer: Can you recap the development timeline for taking Madden from scratch to store shelves for our readers?
Philip Holt: It’s between 10 and 12 months. As soon as we finish this year’s version (we usually wrap up in early July), the team takes a couple weeks off for vacation and comes back to work on early pre-production for the next game. Everybody who worked on the last title works on the next version; we don’t have a leapfrog team or anything like that.

GI: During your “Living With Madden” presentation at the recent Game Developers Conference, you said that since Madden is such a big title, you look at other blockbusters like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 as your main competition. Does the fact that these games have years of development time and you only have 10 months skew this comparison a bit?
Holt: In some respects they are different kinds of animals. We’re a sports title and they are more general entertainment titles. At a certain level there is a different audience expectation and at a certain level there isn’t. Clearly we’re competing for the same wallet share as those guys are. I think one of our advantages is that Tiburon has shipped 15 next-gen titles. The guys at Bungie, it was their first. With the longer cycles you certainly get more time to spend developing – and they have a lot of content to build that’s unique and they can’t really leverage from previous titles. We have a lot of content that’s already been built, so some of the work is about optimizing or making the game look better. We have the expertise and a lot of the things in place from having shipped so many next-gen titles. Our animation system, for example, is one of the best pieces of technology in the sports label. It’s had the benefit of eight teams that have used it over the years and collaborated and contributed to the underlying technology. While we have less calendar time and it makes certain things a lot more difficult, there are definite advantages because we go out every year.

GI: What is the yearly budget for the game?
Holt: Um…. It’s about a 35-person team. There are probably another 15 people who are in central groups that support the team directly. When I was working outside EA, one of the things you always think is that EA has these monster budgets that it spends on everything. But the Madden project, these guys are pretty efficient.

GI: Can you walk us through the decision-making progress of how new ideas are presented and which ideas are given the go-ahead?
Holt: Everyone here has a laundry list of stuff they would love to go build. So many people who work on the game have been lifelong fans of the franchise. When you grow up playing the game and then get to work on the title, naturally you’ve got lots of ideas. But that’s just the start. We do a lot of competitive analysis. We looked at [All-Pro Football 2K8] really carefully when it launched and tried to break it down. We look at all the big titles that come out and try to understand what they are doing that’s cool and we ask “is there an application in Madden for that kind of technology or idea?” We read all of the major boards. There are a lot of posts that start with “Madden 09 Wish List,” so we read through all that stuff. There is a lot of great feedback there, and a lot of things where we also agree “yeah, that’s got to go in.” And then we read all of the reviews. While everyone loves to see the real positive reviews, it’s definitely the more critical reviews that help you focus on the things you need to improve for next year. Then there are things we are building that are sort of multi-year features. If we’re building something bigger, it may not show up until Madden 10. Some portion of that development happens in 09 even though customers aren’t going to see it. All this stuff goes into our design database, which is a big tool that tracks all of our ideas. Then we go through a rapid process where we figure out what will it take to prototype each idea so we can prioritize those things. You start seeing some trends emerge from the list of ideas, and you try to focus on the meaningful innovations that customers are directly going to experience. That becomes the center of the creative effort, then you figure out what the supporting features will be and you build your feature set from that.