What's In A Name?

If It's In the Name, It's In the Game
Kotaku.com

Two weeks ago, startled by hearing my tiny high school's unique nickname announced in NCAA Football 10, I vowed to track down those who put us in the game.

I found them, and found out why "The Buckin' Elks" of Elkin, N.C. High (pictured) - population 4,000, graduating class of around 70 - joined hundreds of other unusual mascots and monikers also introduced to a trumpet fanfare by the franchise's play-by-play man, Brad Nessler. It's one of the great underhyped features of a major sports title - not because of what it delivers to a million users, but because of what it might provide to only one or two of them.

For when you're nobody growing up in the middle of nowhere, no moment that puts you on the map for millions can ever seem small or will ever be forgotten.

NCAA Football's creative director Jeff Luhr (Osmond, Neb. Tigers, Class of ‘94) understands this. A dozen years ago, he was a playtester on the PSOne version of the game. "We had commentary but they didn't have my name in it," he remembers. "I submitted a bug report that said ‘this last name is not in the game.' I probably should have gotten fired but they actually fixed it. They took ‘Lewis' and ‘Kerr' and put them together and created a last name that sounded like mine."

Even though he wangled it as an insider, Luhr was forever bowled over by the game's inclusion of his last name. "So when TeamBuilder came around, that was the kind of thing I remembered," Luhr said.

TeamBuilder is the resurrection of the title's old Create-a-School mode, which devotees loved on the previous console generation, but which had been nonexistent on the current generation until NCAA 10. EA Sports decided to bring it back this past year with a heavy customization component, engineered through a web site. Users are free to enter their own team nicknames, as they did on the PS2 and original Xbox. But if the game can't match up that name to a sound file in Nessler's script, it'll be introduced as "The Home Team" or "The Away Team," - a call that destroys any immersion before it even begins. On the PS2, that database contained 300 names, 120 of them belonging to existing major college football teams.

Luhr knew the more teams that TeamBuilder reached with an authentic Nessler introduction - no matter how esoteric their created nicknames - the more chances his game had to deliver a wow factor that no other sports title can so far match.

"I couldn't prove that it would be popular," he said, "but I felt it in my gut, that when someone experienced that it'd be something appreciated, in the way I appreciated it when they put my name into the game."

As many of you may know I am an old school NCAA Football video game junky. With the BYB and my vast arsenal of favorite TV shows I don't have much time to play but I buy the game every year. I was also happy to see that the game has created a way to include high school football in the game. My only complaint is that I can't hear my high school's mascot as this happy fan does. Why? Because its mispelled.

That's right. We spell Broncos with an 'h' in Odessa. So when I name my school the Odessa Bronchos I have to hear "the home team" come out of Nessler's mouth instead of the mascot. So I implore Jeff Luhr (a fellow Cornhusker fan) to do something about this travesty. Don't punish me because my town's fore fathers were no spelling morons and drunks.