EA Sports is bringing back college football with a brand new video game. Unfortunately, it likely won’t be until July 2023 when EA Sports College Football hits the shelves, but the game is coming back after a long hiatus. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Steve Schnur, the president of music for Electronic Arts, teased some details on what fans can expect from the game in terms of the music.
“I’m a hundred percent on it. I’ve already been all over it for a couple of months,” Schnur told PopCulture. “I can tell you that it will be very different for Madden, but it’s going to be so awesome because I have had an idea, a concept of what I imagined would be the most amazing college football musical experience.”
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Schnur went on to talk about the previous NCAA Football franchise and how he wasn’t involved in as much as he is now. “Our NCAA game was massive for years,” he said. “And I was barely involved in that. I remember we would just, what we would do then is we would license the existing hype songs from each school. And I think one year I did an alternative radio station in it, which was just my attempt of trying to break music in a different format. I was involved, but I was barely involved.”
The big reason the NCAA Football franchise was put to bed was the lawsuits EA Sports faced from former college athletes. But now with the NCAA allowing players to make a profit off of their name, image and likeness (NIL), it paved the way for EA Sports to make a new college football game. Fans are ready to get the ultimate college football experience on their favorite gaming consoles, and Schnur is confident fans will love the musical aspect of the game just like with another popular EA Sports game, Madden NFL.
“I think they really wanted it to be, at the time, such an authentic experience that they may have lost focus of the fact that video games can create an experience and don’t necessarily have to emulate something you’ve done before, they create a new experience,” Schnur said. “But when I pitched the executive producer on this idea, I don’t think it took him three seconds to go, ‘Go.’ And so I can’t give you details because I literally, I haven’t recorded a note yet, but I can tell you that if we could meet next year, I promise you — I will put a hundred bucks down — you are going to say to me, ‘That idea just kicks ass.’ And it’s going to be, I can tell you this, it’s going to be a music discovery experience, but nobody’s going to be able to do it like this because college football gives us really amazing opportunities to do something that no other sport can.”
