Codemaster's Club Football
by Jolex Del Pilar

Monday, June 3, 2002

Game announcement comes during the World Cup, how fitting.

Codemasters will digitally recreate Europe’s finest soccer players for its series of Club Football games, coming to America next year to the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system and The Xbox video games system from Microsoft.

Set to revolutionize the soccer games market with its innovative approach – the company will be developing individual games for each of seven UK clubs – the game is also revolutionary in its technology. Twenty-two players from each of the 15 headline clubs* - including Sami Hyypia, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Dennis Bergkamp, Emanuel Petit, Darius Vassell, Lorenzo Amoruso and Rio Ferdinand - are being individually photographed using a new high-resolution graphical capturing techniques designed, especially for the game. This means that fans will be able to control the most realistic soccer players ever seen in a video game – striking right at the heart of soccer fans.

“The 15-game Club Football series is absolutely for the fans – and they’re expecting to play alongside their heroes looking like the real thing, as they’d see them from the terraces or on television,” explains Rachel Wood, Club Football’s Lead Artist. “The level of facial detail we’re working to is very high and will provide an immersive and thoroughly believable gaming experience.”

A total of 330 players from the featured headline clubs will have their faces scanned in meticulous detail. The scans will be used in a bespoke facial modeling system created by the Club Football team. It is a massive effort in the Club Football project, itself Codemasters’ most ambitious game development and publishing exercise to date. The process involves a team of artists visiting each of the clubs to meet with the players. A digital photography rig is used to capture images of each player’s head. These images are then taken by the team’s artists and through a highly developed technique, used to construct an accurate 3D model of the player’s head.

“It’s a great system that gives myself and the other artists an incredible level of detail to work with. All the headline clubs’ player models are portrayed at a level of detail that is closer to photo-realism than we have ever been able to achieve,” Wood continues. “No other soccer game has previously gone to such lengths to ensure that its real-name players are portrayed as accurately as they are in Club Football.”

Codemasters’ series of Club Football titles is currently under development and scheduled to launch in America next year for PlayStation®2 and Xbox.

--- Jolex Del Pilar, Super Six One