Without NFL star power, Blitz gets down and dirty

This year's National Football League season is shaping up as the least competitive in years-- if you're a computer gamer. That's because there's only one official league-sanctioned video game this year -- the 2006 edition of Electronic Arts' popular football simulator, Madden NFL. Thanks to some hard bargaining between the league and the world's largest computer game company, EA Sports now has an exclusive lock on NFL gaming titles.
That's bad news for gaming rival Take 2, which finally broke Madden's hold on the pro football gaming market last year with its superb NFL 2K5 game. Take 2's game was as good as Madden, at half the price, and sold millions of copies. EA responded with the nuclear option -- an NFL licensing deal that bars Take 2 from the market. Rumor has it that the company may try to re-enter through the backdoor, by creating a game that would feature retired NFL superstars. But not this year. The 2006 NFL season will be all Madden.
That's fine with the folks at Midway Games, which is odd when you consider that Midway also makes pro football video games. Unlike Take 2, Midway has no intention of bailing out of the business. Nor does the company plan to challenge EA's exclusive deal with the NFL. Instead, Midway is developing a different kind of football video game. Blitz: The League, which debuts in October, will combine sports action with seamy off-the-field drama, a combo that'll probably have executives of the image-obsessed stocking up on aspirin and Prozac.
Mike Bilder, the game's executive producer, said that Midway had planned to drop its licensing deal with the NFL even before the EA lock-down. ''Over the years, the NFL has gotten more restrictive," Bilder said. Blitz has never been a straight-up sports simulator like Madden. Born as a coin-operated arcade game in 1997, it featured exaggerated athletic moves and exceptionally violent tackling. ''It kind of bent the laws of physics and the general laws of football," said Bilder. The Blitz tradition continued as the title moved onto home video-game platforms.
But the NFL was uneasy about the game's outlaw aura, and resisted efforts to make Blitz a darker, edgier game. The league ordered the removal of some of the game's signature cheap-shot plays, like grabbing an opponent's face mask and slamming him into the ground. Bilder said the NFL didn't even want the game's digital players to suffer injuries. ''It was becoming very difficult for us to innovate," he said.
There'll be plenty of innovation in this year's Blitz. The game offers an entirely fictional football league, with teams like the Chicago Marauders and the New York Nightmare. In addition, ''this is the first football game with a story mode in it," said Bilder. Along with the hard-hitting games, players follow the lives of the team's manager and key players throughout the season.

Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff