Etan Horowitz

Etan Horowitz, Sentinel Staff Writer

September 29, 2008; Pg. A1

MAITLAND — To many guys, Anthony White has a dream job.

Every week during football season, a little black box that looks as if it might contain nuclear secrets arrives at his desk at Electronic Arts’ Tiburon studio.

The box holds a portable hard drive with videos of the week’s National Football League games. White gets paid to watch them all so he can make sure EA’s blockbuster video game, Madden NFL Football, is as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

“Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” White said.

White’s path to his job will give hope to any young gamer who dreams of designing video games one day. He first played Madden in 1991 — two years after it debuted. He had just graduated from high school and was waiting to join the Air Force. He got hooked immediately.

“I would sit there and play continuously, all through the night,” said White, 35. “Mom and Dad thought I was nuts. . . . While most other guys my age were into hanging out, going to the mall, girlfriends and things like that, I’m at home drawing up plays on notepads and different things I want to try out in the game.”

He brought his passion for Madden with him when he joined the Air Force in 1992, staying up late with his buddies playing the game and continuing to make up plays.

Kicking off a career

In 1999, he teamed up with a friend to work on a Web site devoted to Madden strategy. That got him noticed by EA, and in 2005 he started work as an assistant producer at EA Tiburon.

White, now an assistant designer, also works on Tiburon’s other football video games, which include NCAA Football and NFL Head Coach. Since the NCAA does not provide footage of every game each week, White only watches a few college games a week and does the bulk of his film review after the season ends.

“He’s a savant,” said Larry Richart, an assistant designer at EA who was a backup quarterback at the University of Florida in the 1990s. “He lives and breathes it. This guy’s got so much knowledge.”

The ultimate fan

Despite his job, White can’t get enough of football. He watches NFL games live to try to pick out things to look for when the videos arrive Wednesday or Thursday.

“For instance, during the first week of the season, [Atlanta Falcons rookie quarterback] Matt Ryan threw his very first NFL pass, and it was a touchdown,” White said. “So you find yourself thinking, ‘That was a great throw; I can’t wait until Thursday gets here so I can pop that in and actually see what happened. What went wrong on that play for the defense; what went right for the offense?”

Inside White’s cubicle at EA Tiburon, a dry-erase board filled with diagrams of plays hangs on the wall. He has two computer monitors and a TV set that’s connected to an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 2. Once he gets the footage, he typically will start with his favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers.

Finding new formations

White says if an average fan watched the games the way he does, they probably wouldn’t enjoy themselves. He views the footage without commentary, first watching every offensive play of one team and then every offensive play of the other. It takes him about an hour to watch an average game — more than two hours less than it typically takes to watch on TV.

Each week he views the entire NFL schedule in about three days. While he watches, he takes notes in a decidedly low-tech way by marking a piece of paper that lists about 150 formations commonly used by NFL teams. As he goes through the footage, he tallies how often a team uses a formation.

When he sees a new formation or play, he stops the video and uses a program to re-create and import what he just saw into a working copy of next year’s game.

“I am responsible for the design of the X’s and O’s,” White said. “How teams play in the game. How players react to certain situations that come up. The coaching tendencies.”

For Madden 09, which was released in August, there were about 32 new formations and about 1,200 new plays added.

His wife, Sonya White, met him well after he’d fallen in love with Madden, so she never expected him to drop his passion when she came into the picture.

Still, Sonya, who’s training to become a mental-health counselor, sometimes gets a little annoyed when her husband’s job creeps into their lives. Like the time they were leaving a restaurant and White stopped by a whiteboard in the lobby to quickly diagram a play. He also has tried to explain football to her by taking 22 cookies she had baked and lining them up.

“He applies the strategy to everything he does, like dealing with household things or finances,” she said. “I’m a big believer in it being important for people to do what they love.”