Designing NHL video games for a living sure looks like fun
Former basketball player from Vancouver heads EA Sports team that made NHL 18
If you’re into hockey and video games, EA Sports must be a really cool place to work.
The Montreal office for EA Sports is on the sixth floor of an office building on Stanley St. with a great view of downtown and a beautiful outdoor terrace. Inside, there’s modern furniture, a video studio, a pool table and a foosball table, along with a large cafeteria-style kitchen with several stocked, stainless-steel fridges and shelves with just about every kind of breakfast cereal you could imagine. There’s also great music playing on the sound system.
It’s that type of work environment that first attracted Sean “Rammer” Ramjagsingh to the video-game business after he finished school at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and later played pro basketball in New Zealand.
The 6-foot-11 “Rammer” — a nickname he earned while playing high school hoops — was back home in Vancouver trying to get a new contract to play basketball somewhere when some old university buddies who were working for Radical Entertainment said he should think about joining them.
“I went for lunch with these guys … beautiful sunny day downtown,” recalled the 42-yearold Ramjagsingh, who is now the EA Sports producer of the NHL series and was in Montreal Wednesday to promote Friday’s launch of the new NHL 18 game. “They had no set lunch break … we had lunch for two and a half hours, we had a beer at lunch. Went back to the office and there was literally a wall of free food, a fridge full of drinks. They had unlimited candy and they had a keg of beer on the counter. Everyone’s wearing shorts and T-shirts, and this is work? You’re making a basketball video game and a hockey video game?
“You see parents going to work and grinding it out and waking up the next day and grinding it out again. I thought, this is what work can be.”
Radical Entertainment needed someone who knew basketball, and Ramjagsingh ended up doing some contract work there until the company lost the licences for hockey and basketball. After EA Sports acquired the rights to NCAA college basketball, a friend of Ramjagsingh, who worked at EA Sports, asked if he wanted to join the company.
“It was a no-brainer,” said Ramjagsingh, who joined EA Sports in 2000.
He later worked on the NBA Live game before switching to the NHL game in 2008. A diehard hockey fan while growing up, Ramjagsingh now describes the experience as an “awesome ride.”
The Montreal EA Sports office is cool, but the EA Vancouver office — it’s really a campus located in Burnaby, B.C. — sounds even better. Ramjagsingh said there are about 2,000 employees there and the facility includes an outdoor soccer field, a basketball court, a beach volleyball court and a full gym with classes and personal trainers. He said you can also bring your dog to work and there are no real office hours or dress code.
Ramjagsingh leads a team of about 250 people in Burnaby with an average age in the low 30s, who only work on the NHL game.
While we from an older generation grew up pretending to be Guy Lafleur or Bobby Orr when we were playing road hockey, today’s kids can sit on the couch (often for far too long) and be Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby in a video game in which the reality factor has increased every year since NHL 94, the first year the game was licensed by the league and the players’ association.
NHL 18 has added some creative dekes like the “Forsberg tuck” and “Datsyuk flip” — as described by Ramjagsingh — along with more control on defence. There’s also a new NHL Threes 3-on-3 arcade-style game on NHL 18 that doesn’t require someone to be a hockey or video game expert — or even know how to work a controller that well. Basically, it gives a father a chance to maybe beat his teenage kid.
McDavid, the cover boy for NHL 18, was born in 1997.
“These young kids in the NHL now don’t know any time when there was no hockey video game,” Ramjagsingh said. “They’ve grown up with it their entire life.”
Ramjagsingh didn’t really get into video games himself until he was in university and would play the NHL or Madden NFL game against his roommate, with the loser having to do chores like wash the dishes or clean the toilet.
“It was a way for us to compete … a winner and a loser and the loser had to do something that wasn’t necessarily fun,” he said.
Now video games are his job and “Rammer” sure seems to be loving it.
“It’s fun,” he said. “The years go by quick. But at the end of the day, we’re making a piece of entertainment software, we’re making video games and we’re making sports every single day with a passionate team.
“You come to work, work hard, do your job, have fun while you’re there and make it a place you want to be.”
These young kids in the NHL now don’t know any time when there was no hockey video game. They’ve grown up with it their entire life