So I'm not into Madden at all; nothing against it, or anything, I just don't care for football, and I have probably played three sports video games in my life. I keep being vaguely tempted to pick up whichever baseball one it is that has the real players, so I can be Jeter and A-Rod, but that never materializes.The marketing of sports titles has always fascinated me a little bit, because gamers are generally stereotyped as inactive milquetoast nerds, and while the stereotype isn't universally accurate, of course, marketing suits often seem to think it is.
Of course, we Silent Hill purists, we eager Dissidia constituents, we MGS 4 over-analysts may sometimes become a bit insular, and forget that there is an entire audience of gamers who are rather unlike us -- but whenever I see one of those energetic, testosterone-fueled TV ads for a sports title, or when I note their faintly jingoist packaging screaming frathouse at me when I stumble accidentally into the wrong section of the game store, I remember.
Anyway, I was especially surprised to see what appears to be a mammoth effort on the part of Electronic Arts behind Madden 09's soundtrack -- not just in the assembling of a lineup of artists who will surely impress the game's main target audience, but in making the soundtrack part of a broad campaign. There are iTunes promotions, there will be a Madden music week on Jimmy Kimmel, there will be a Madden-palooza concert at the Pasadena Rose Bowl.
So I talked to EA's main music big Steve Schnur, and had what I think was a pretty interesting interview, best summed up by this excerpt:
"If there are 30 songs in Madden, we're not going to bat a thousand, because obviously it's subjective. But the goal was that after you played Madden in 2004, 2006, 2009... 3 months later when you hear that Trivium song, you're gonna go, 'Oh, Madden'."
That was the "aha" moment in the conversation for me, but the entire approach by EA is pretty ingenious, creating this virtuous cycle that seems to benefit gamers, musicians and EA on a self-renewing basis. Schnur's official title, by the way, is "Worldwide Executive of Music and Marketing," and now I get why music and marketing go so well together.
