My girlfriend and I were talking about the leagues and some of the issues with Madden last night. Somehow the conversation turned into how passionate I was about games growing up and how I got to where I am now. She thought I should share it with you guys. I don't want to make this a thread about me though so I want to hear about what got you guys into sports games and how you wound up in sim leagues. I'll still share my story for those who are interested.
The Beginning
I started out playing sports games back on the regular Nintendo when I was in elementary school. I would play Baseball (yes, that was the actual name of the game for you youngin's lol) and write out lineups for the teams. All we had was generic teams like California and New York back then. But I would create lineups of real players and pretend that they were the guys batting and pitching and keep box scores from all of the games I played and compiled stats for the entire season. That transitioned into Tecmo Super Bowl which we played all the way up to middle school (several years).
Love Affair With EA
Middle school brought John Madden football and NHL hockey, both of which I fell in love with. I also loved World Series baseball but wanted EA to make a game. So one summer I put together a five or six page feature list for a potential EA Sports baseball game plus 26 pages of rosters for every team complete with stats and sent that to EA. I had actually done this a few times, minus the rosters, for Madden and NHL. I would send them my wishlist for next year's game every year. I don't know how much they read, but I do know that my last name made it into NCAA the year after I sent my wish list to them. Maybe it was coincidence? Who knows?
Live Play-by-Play
When I got to high school my dream was to be a play-by-play commentator for a Major League team. I used to sit in front of my Sega Genesis and turn the volume off and do my own play-by-play for World Series baseball. I did it at times for Madden, NHL and the EA basketball games too. I entered a video productions class in high school and did play-by-play and color commentary for our district football games and the school's basketball and baseball games.
Love Turns to Hate
After high school I went out into the working world and finally had to pay for my own games. That's also when I found forums. I began to develop a sense of entitlement and an expectation about what I was owed for my hard earned money. I became one of the biggest critics of EA on forums for many years. I spewed venom and made assumptions about what we should be receiving. I began hating the games more for what they weren't than I enjoyed them for what they provided me. Surprisingly, during this time, I was also playing Madden tournaments for money and paying my rent with them. It was a weird love/hate relationship.
Roster Czar
During my time of criticism, rosters were one of the things that drove me the most crazy. I could never understand why my beloved Tar Heels never had the right players and why some guy were white when they should be black and vice versa (oh how enlightened I was when the lawsuits happened). So I began editing rosters on my own. It started initially with, I believe NCAA 98. The first year you could edit 12 teams for your dynasty. That evolved into me taking rosters from PSX Sports and updating them with my own ratings edits. That transitioned into doing the same with Operation Sports rosters. I would usually do a ratings edit for the beginning of the season for dynasties to use and then again around bowl season.
The Birth of PX1 Sports
Eventually I created the freencaa14rosters.com site to house all of my rosters along with all of the free rosters from the community. I had also joined a site that ran sim leagues and began running leagues for them for both NCAA and Madden. But I didn't agree with the way some things were done over there. While it was a great place to find a lot of leagues in one place, every league was run by someone different. They all had their own twist on sim and they all kind of had a different approach to handling things within the leagues.
Eventually, I decided to leave that site and merge freencaa14rosters.com into a new site that I named PX1 Sports. My goal was to to not only create the most authentic representation of the NFL within the context of a video game, but also to run all of our leagues by the site or site admins so that we could provide a consistent experience to each of our members.
This is also when my stance started to soften on criticizing the devs of the games that I played. I started to learn how one character that was left out or misplaced in my HTML or CSS code could completely change the entire website. I spent hours looking at code trying to find the one character that was making this look wrong or distorting that page. I also started exploring what goes into being a game developer (naturally thinking I could do it too). I realized very quickly how insanely complex the whole game making process was and that HTML and CSS was a painful enough experience for me.
The Evolution of Sim Leagues
Initially, when I started PX1, it was just a hobby and I ran our leagues on the side while mostly keeping the same format we picked up from the site I had left. However, last year I decided that I wanted to change the way that people thought about sports gaming leagues. Online streaming was a reality and online gaming had grown leaps and bounds. So I started the CFA, our EA Sports UFC league. We had members pick rosters of fighters (kind of like fight camps) and then put on live cards just like the UFC. We would run 10-12 fights, all in order, all in one night. We kept rankings and had title fights. It was a lot of fun and something that nobody else out there was doing.
Then Madden came along and I decided to run league Red Zone shows (again, being the first to do so). We only did two last year because of schedules and production time, but one of those broadcasts had 200 people tuning in to watch us on Twitch. This year we decided to expand our league offerings (mostly in VIP league) to not only more Red Zone shows with better production value, but also live play-by-play broadcasts for also, as far as I know, the first time ever in Madden leagues. As you can see, we try to do things a little differently here. We don't want to be a run of the mill league site. We want to have the most unique and engaging content, provide a consistent and uniform feel through all leagues and push the bounds of what people think is capable in relation to sim leagues (and leagues in general).
----------
So, there you have it. Hopefully I didn't bore you to tears. That became much longer that I thought it would when I began it. However, I'd love to hear how everyone else got into sports video games and how you transitioned into sim leagues like the ones that we offer though. I think it will be a great way to get to know each other and see how each of us became the sim players we are today. Hopefully it will help us pass some time while we wait to kick things off as well.
The Beginning
I started out playing sports games back on the regular Nintendo when I was in elementary school. I would play Baseball (yes, that was the actual name of the game for you youngin's lol) and write out lineups for the teams. All we had was generic teams like California and New York back then. But I would create lineups of real players and pretend that they were the guys batting and pitching and keep box scores from all of the games I played and compiled stats for the entire season. That transitioned into Tecmo Super Bowl which we played all the way up to middle school (several years).
Love Affair With EA
Middle school brought John Madden football and NHL hockey, both of which I fell in love with. I also loved World Series baseball but wanted EA to make a game. So one summer I put together a five or six page feature list for a potential EA Sports baseball game plus 26 pages of rosters for every team complete with stats and sent that to EA. I had actually done this a few times, minus the rosters, for Madden and NHL. I would send them my wishlist for next year's game every year. I don't know how much they read, but I do know that my last name made it into NCAA the year after I sent my wish list to them. Maybe it was coincidence? Who knows?
Live Play-by-Play
When I got to high school my dream was to be a play-by-play commentator for a Major League team. I used to sit in front of my Sega Genesis and turn the volume off and do my own play-by-play for World Series baseball. I did it at times for Madden, NHL and the EA basketball games too. I entered a video productions class in high school and did play-by-play and color commentary for our district football games and the school's basketball and baseball games.
Love Turns to Hate
After high school I went out into the working world and finally had to pay for my own games. That's also when I found forums. I began to develop a sense of entitlement and an expectation about what I was owed for my hard earned money. I became one of the biggest critics of EA on forums for many years. I spewed venom and made assumptions about what we should be receiving. I began hating the games more for what they weren't than I enjoyed them for what they provided me. Surprisingly, during this time, I was also playing Madden tournaments for money and paying my rent with them. It was a weird love/hate relationship.
Roster Czar
During my time of criticism, rosters were one of the things that drove me the most crazy. I could never understand why my beloved Tar Heels never had the right players and why some guy were white when they should be black and vice versa (oh how enlightened I was when the lawsuits happened). So I began editing rosters on my own. It started initially with, I believe NCAA 98. The first year you could edit 12 teams for your dynasty. That evolved into me taking rosters from PSX Sports and updating them with my own ratings edits. That transitioned into doing the same with Operation Sports rosters. I would usually do a ratings edit for the beginning of the season for dynasties to use and then again around bowl season.
The Birth of PX1 Sports
Eventually I created the freencaa14rosters.com site to house all of my rosters along with all of the free rosters from the community. I had also joined a site that ran sim leagues and began running leagues for them for both NCAA and Madden. But I didn't agree with the way some things were done over there. While it was a great place to find a lot of leagues in one place, every league was run by someone different. They all had their own twist on sim and they all kind of had a different approach to handling things within the leagues.
Eventually, I decided to leave that site and merge freencaa14rosters.com into a new site that I named PX1 Sports. My goal was to to not only create the most authentic representation of the NFL within the context of a video game, but also to run all of our leagues by the site or site admins so that we could provide a consistent experience to each of our members.
This is also when my stance started to soften on criticizing the devs of the games that I played. I started to learn how one character that was left out or misplaced in my HTML or CSS code could completely change the entire website. I spent hours looking at code trying to find the one character that was making this look wrong or distorting that page. I also started exploring what goes into being a game developer (naturally thinking I could do it too). I realized very quickly how insanely complex the whole game making process was and that HTML and CSS was a painful enough experience for me.
The Evolution of Sim Leagues
Initially, when I started PX1, it was just a hobby and I ran our leagues on the side while mostly keeping the same format we picked up from the site I had left. However, last year I decided that I wanted to change the way that people thought about sports gaming leagues. Online streaming was a reality and online gaming had grown leaps and bounds. So I started the CFA, our EA Sports UFC league. We had members pick rosters of fighters (kind of like fight camps) and then put on live cards just like the UFC. We would run 10-12 fights, all in order, all in one night. We kept rankings and had title fights. It was a lot of fun and something that nobody else out there was doing.
Then Madden came along and I decided to run league Red Zone shows (again, being the first to do so). We only did two last year because of schedules and production time, but one of those broadcasts had 200 people tuning in to watch us on Twitch. This year we decided to expand our league offerings (mostly in VIP league) to not only more Red Zone shows with better production value, but also live play-by-play broadcasts for also, as far as I know, the first time ever in Madden leagues. As you can see, we try to do things a little differently here. We don't want to be a run of the mill league site. We want to have the most unique and engaging content, provide a consistent and uniform feel through all leagues and push the bounds of what people think is capable in relation to sim leagues (and leagues in general).
----------
So, there you have it. Hopefully I didn't bore you to tears. That became much longer that I thought it would when I began it. However, I'd love to hear how everyone else got into sports video games and how you transitioned into sim leagues like the ones that we offer though. I think it will be a great way to get to know each other and see how each of us became the sim players we are today. Hopefully it will help us pass some time while we wait to kick things off as well.
) and this is the best one I have been in which is weird saying having not played a single game that actually counted yet... But the community is great communication is great (which is huge to me) you and 
