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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
For UFC and video gaming fans, Wednesday brought about another exciting announcement from EA Sports. The two companies revealed that they had come to a deal with one another earlier this year, and EA Sports on Wednesday revealed that they've tapped an award-winning development team for the first iteration of the game.
The team handling the first EA Sports UFC game will be Team and Action Sports General Manager Dean Richards (Fight Night, NHL, SSX) and Creative Director Brian Hayes, who helmed both Fight Night Round 4 and Fight Night Champion. The Fight Night franchise has consistently been regarded as amongst the best fighting games, winning several awards throughout their history, and now the team behind those innovative games will tackle the UFC.
"When we found out that EA and the UFC would be working together, the team was excited," Hayes said in the announcement from EA Sports. "Most of the team didn't even know about it until the announcement at E3. We were all watching it together and when Andrew Wilson and Dana White took the stage, everybody starting cheering. It was great."
"For me personally, the UFC is something that I grew up with. I remember watching the first UFC events when I was a teenager and it’s amazing to see how they have evolved and flourished. Ultimately, we're huge fans, we think we have a great team and we are really excited to be taking on this new challenge. We look forward to bringing the UFC video game experience to new heights."
Penick's Analysis: This is very exciting news for the kick off of the UFC franchise with EA Sports. The Fight Night games have brought some fantastic innovation for boxing games, including unprecedented realism for that sport. There have been excellent aspects of the UFC games from THQ, as well as the first EA MMA game, but there have also been a lot of flaws from all the games in capturing the sport in a more realistic manner. This team knows fighting games, and we'll see how they can present the sport with their own iteration when it eventually comes out.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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