Tech behind EA's March Madness 2007

While many students tirelessly pursue a degree at Tech, many graduates are putting the skills and knowledge they learned at Tech to good use out in the real world.

Joe Stalling, a graduate of Tech in 1992, has gone on to work for EA Sports and was a producer of the game NCAA March Madness 2007. He worked primarily on game design and project management.

The photorealistic game attempts to capture the small elements of Tech's own Coliseum that only true fans would be able to recognize.

"We have recreated Alexander Memorial Coliseum. Tech fans will notice the student sections and where we place them in relation to the court. We usually check with not only Georgia Tech, but all schools for updated models and photos of the venue and then we use those as textures for the venues. The textures of the court will look authentic. We also have the Georgia Tech logos and the banners hanging from the stadium," Stalling said.

The design team had to pay special attention to the Georgia Dome, the location where the Final Four will be played this year.

"[The Georgia Dome] was a pretty significant model for us to make because it's so huge," Stalling said.

The team works year round with schools like Tech to create a more authentic experience within the game.

One aspect that is given more attention than others is the mascot, like the Jackets' own Buzz.

"We hired the Memphis Grizzlies mascot. We show him a lot of Buzz's antics, like the ones he performs at half time. He puts those sensors on and we capture them using Maya. We take that into the game and we create high-level character models of all the mascots," said Stalling.

Maya, a program used for digital animation and modeling, is regularly used by game designers to recreate the motions of the players and the mascots within the game.

"We usually render out artwork from the game and send those to the schools and ask if it looks right or not. It's actually kind of funny because a lot of schools will tell us that it doesn't and we send it back to them and keep working. We definitely don't have a blank check. We really try and get as close to authenticity," Stalling said.

The department must thoroughly research every aspect of the game in order to recreate the experience of actually watching the game inside of each school's stadium.

"We work with the publicity departments of most of the schools and the NCAA, the collegiate licensing company. We go through reference materials.

We have media guides for the past five years for 300 plus basketball teams and we go through those. We have research analysts to contact the school," Stalling said.

While Stalling has been able to live out many of Tech students' dream job by becoming a lead producer on a major video game, he began as just another basketball fan during his time at school.

"I was such a basketball nut at Tech. I was there during the Lethal Weapon 3 and the first Final Four round. I actually asked Brian Oliver if I could come to his dorm room and have him and Kenny Anderson and Dennis Scott sign a jersey for me. It's one of my most prized possessions. I just ate and breathed college basketball while I was at Tech," said Stalling.

After graduating, Stalling went on to work for another company, but he was unable to stop thinking about pursuing one of his passions: video games.

"I was promoted to vice president of marketing but couldn't shake my love for video games. Much to my wife's chagrin, I left the company as vice president of marketing in 2002 and started my own video game company, an independent company that made sports simulations," Stalling said.

Stalling learned the video game industry and was soon on the EA Sports team helping produce other games like NFL Head Coach.

His opportunity to recreate the sport he loved in college came when he was assigned to work in Vancouver on NCAA March Madness 2007.

In the technical field of the video game industry, Stalling doesn't have something that many people think is a prerequisite to getting a job: an engineering or technology based degree. Stalling graduated from Tech with a degree in International Relations.

"I did not [graduate with an engineering degree]. You don't have to have an engineering degree to get into video games," Stalling said.

Still, with the diverse background of people in the video game industry, Stalling stresses that the most important factor in pursuing a job is not the degree, but the motivation.

"For people who are interested in the computer science part of it, if you have any computer science or technology degree from Georgia Tech, you could probably walk right into the front door of EA. It's not just about having a 4.0 and being able to code in C++. There are people here from the art background, design background, cinematography background, software engineering background. It's a really cool industry to work in," Stalling said.