Alex Morgan, Christine Sinclair become first women to grace FIFA 16 covers
EA Sports’ FIFA 16 will be the first of its franchise to feature a woman on the cover of the game and women’s teams within the game.
U.S. women’s national team forward Alex Morgan graced the cover, which was released Monday, alongside Leo Messi, who is widely considered the world’s best male soccer player. The Morgan/Messi duo is the primary cover art for the North American version of the game, though Messi and Canadian forward Christine Sinclair, the all-time leading scorer for the Canadian national team, are featured on a version sold in Canada.
“We actually made the decision to put Alex on the cover several months ago before the Women’s World Cup,” David Pekush, Senior Global Product Marketing Manager for EA Sports, told Yahoo Sports. “We knew and we wanted to celebrate women’s soccer. And the fact that the women won the World Cup, it’s really icing on the cake for us.
“We know that in North America, in both the United States and Canada, women’s soccer is a very integral part of soccer culture and it’s also helping to grow the sport in North America. So we wanted to celebrate that by putting Alex on the cover.”
Featuring women in the game has actually been three years in the making. According to Pekush, the first prototype in 2012 helped EA Sports identify places that needed improvement in order to make the gameplay more credible. He said it was important to make sure the female players moved like female players and that they had the right body types and hair animation. Players from both the U.S. and Canadian women’s national teams visited the EA studio near Vancouver to do motion capture to help create a more authentic experience.
“We really wanted to get women right when we put them into the game for the first time,” Pekush said.
The game, which will be released September 22, will allow users to choose to play as one of several different women’s national teams, including the U.S., Canada, England and Germany.
Following the U.S. women’s national team’s World Cup victory, fans created an online petition to put the entire team on the FIFA 16 cover, but Morgan, who is one of the world's best players, definitely wasn't a bad choice.
“It is an incredible honor to be one of the first women featured on the cover of EA SPORTS FIFA,” Morgan said in a press release from EA Sports. “I know people all over the world play this game and I’m really excited that FIFA 16 is putting such an important spotlight on women’s soccer. And now to share the cover with today’s greatest player is surreal.”
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