How CMU Alumni Turn Football Into Best-Selling Video Games

Right now, Pittsburgh is gearing up for the 2026 NFL Draft: a weekend expected to transform the city into a sprawling celebration of all things football. It’s no surprise that football, by far America’s favorite sport, is capable of drawing crowds of hundreds of thousands. And through video games translating the sport into the virtual world, those hundreds of thousands of fans get a chance to become players themselves.

“Madden NFL” is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, with sales exceeding 150 million dollars worldwide. The franchise allows players to put themselves on the field and into the shoes of their favorite athletes by faithfully recreating the game, down to the smallest details: the physics of each and every tackle or end run, the blades of grass on the field — even the player stats, which are updated game by game as the real season progresses.

And the people behind many of those painstaking recreations? Alumni of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC).

For Abhijeet Singh Malhi, that experience is both personal and professional. After graduating from the ETC in 2023, he began working full-time at EA Sports on “Madden” and its spinoff “College Football.” But Malhi grew up playing sports games long before he ever helped build them.

“I love sports in general, and I grew up playing EA games,” he said. “Coming from India, cricket is really big there. EA had a cricket game in 2007 that was the last iteration they did of it, and people still play it.”

At EA, Malhi’s role sits at the intersection of art and engineering. As a technical artist, he focuses on improving pipelines: the behind-the-scenes systems that allow artists to efficiently create and replicate assets across hundreds of teams and thousands of athletes. “In sports titles of this scale, if anything changes in the assets or the pipeline technology we need to make sure it works for every other player as well,” he said. “We try to make sure that the artists don’t have to deal with the repetitive stuff so they can focus on the creative part of it.”

For a sport with over 1,500 active pro players at any given time, the scale is enormous. And every year, new team members require the creation of new 3D character models, as well as updated uniforms and stadium layouts.

For 2020 ETC graduate Healthy Moeung, now a 3D character artist on the “Madden” and “College Football” franchises, the challenge lies in translating real athletes into believable digital forms. “Capturing the physicality of a real sport in a virtual environment means translating how athletes look, move, and react into a digital character that feels believable in gameplay,” she said.

Moeung and other character artists rely on reference photos, anatomical study, and close collaboration with animation teams to ensure that players are represented accurately.

“A unique challenge is balancing realism with performance constraints,” Moeung said. “For ‘Madden’ and ‘College Football,’ there are always twenty-two athletes on screen and that does not include those on the sidelines and in the stadium. And we need to make all of the athletes look detailed up close while still being optimized for real-time gameplay.”

It’s as much a science as it is an art. That’s where technical artists like Malhi and his fellow ETC alumna, 2024 graduate Keyin Wu, come in. Wu, who works on the “College Football” franchise as a technical artist, described her role simply: “I develop tools and pipelines that streamline artists’ workflows, helping automate repetitive tasks and improve overall efficiency across the art production process.”

For Wu, who didn’t come into the job as a sports fan, working on football games has been an education in itself.

“I didn’t realize how many details go into the game, from the stadium environment to the traditions and mascots,” she said. “In my work, I sometimes need to interact directly with different parts of the game to validate features and ensure everything is working correctly. That process has given me a much deeper appreciation for the sport, and motivated me to learn more about how the game works.”

The expectations users bring with them is part of what makes sports games unique. Football games are rooted in a reality that players know intimately before they even begin playing, which means that developers have to balance that expectation of authenticity with entertainment.

“When you look under the hood in those games, so much of what we were doing as designers was putting our thumb on the scale,” 2014 ETC graduate and current ETC Assistant Teaching Professor Tom Corbett — who previously worked in Electronic Arts’s R&D division as an Associate Producer — said. “For example, you only have 20 minutes instead of the 60 minutes of official game time, but [players] still have the same expectation of a whole game’s worth of big plays. We were constantly leaning towards letting players make a big play or have a dramatic moment, instead of the yard-by-yard punts of a real NFL game.”

At EA, Corbett worked on several experimental adaptations of “Madden,” including a streamable version for Comcast customers and even a custom version of the game made just for ESPN. “It allowed the talent to break down a play by walking between the [player] characters, who were rendered in 3D in the studio,” he said. “I got to go to ESPN and sit behind the desk with the team for that, which was pretty awesome.”

ESPN using the custom version of ‘Madden’ Corbett worked on for their Virtual Playbook

Sports games like “Madden” and “College Football” are developed on an annual cycle, which means multiple versions are typically in progress at the same time. “One of the big challenges for Madden is they have to deliver a new version every year,” Corbett said. “Two years out from a new release, they’re designing the new features. For a release one year out, they’re making sure everything is going to work correctly. And then there is a live service they’re also maintaining,” Corbett said.

For ETC alumni, tight deadlines, teamwork, and constant iteration are familiar territory. Malhi credits the ETC’s project-based curriculum with preparing him to tackle the kind of work franchises like “Madden” require. “You get thrown into projects straight away [at the ETC]… so it sort of prepares you already for what a real work environment looks like,” he said.

The same goes for Moeung and for Wu. “Being in an environment like the ETC accelerated my growth and made stepping into a studio feel natural,” Moeung said of the transition. “I got used to talking to different people from different disciplines for ideas or to solve a problem,” Wu said, “and that’s kind of my daily work right now.”

For these alumni, all the work they put into these games pays off when they finally get to see fans react to it.

“The first thing I ever worked on for ‘College Football’ was the mascots. [The franchise] had been on hiatus for 10 years when I started, and the mascots were a big part of the first trailer that came out for it,“ Malhi said. “Just seeing that mascot in the game for the first time was a pretty huge thing for me. And even though I played a small part, seeing YouTube comments saying ‘there’s mascots!’ gave me a great sense of accomplishment.”

It’s proof positive of the enduring nature of the sport — whether it’s played on a field with helmets and padding on or at home with nothing more than a controller in your hand. As Corbett said of the game: “It’s a cultural touchstone for a reason.”

Banner Image: Still from “NFL Madden ‘26”