The story of FIFA International Soccer development begins not with a football, but with a beach volleyball game pitched from a house in Widnes, and a father peering over his son’s shoulder asking why the pitch couldn’t look more like the telly. Thirty-two years on, with the FIFA World Cup 2026 now under way, it is worth revisiting exactly how that moment on a Sega Mega Drive led to one of the most commercially successful video game franchises ever made.
Originally released on 3 December 1993, FIFA International Soccer was developed by a small team at EA Canada in Burnaby, with support from EA UK in Guildford. The franchise it spawned has sold over 325 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling series in gaming history. And yet it very nearly never happened, or nearly happened under an entirely different name.
From EA UK’s Marketing Desk to a Widnes Living Room
The origins of FIFA International Soccer development lie with EA UK’s marketing and production teams, who spent years trying to convince their North American parent company that a football title for the Mega Drive would sell. Neil Thewarapperuma, the game’s product manager, wrote what EA called a ‘WhyEA’ document making the case. Nothing came of it immediately. Then, in 1992, Matthew Webster put together a more detailed design document for a title he called EA Soccer, and began hunting for an external development partner to build prototypes.
He found Jules Burt and Jon Law in Widnes. The pair had been pitching a beach volleyball game to EA, working from a makeshift dev kit: a wire-wrapped board connecting to the top of a Mega Drive and interfacing with a Commodore Amiga, sourced from a German salesman at a trade show. On Webster’s third visit, he arrived with his boss John and told them EA would not be signing the volleyball game. Would they consider football instead?
Over the following three months, Burt and Law produced three prototypes: a side-on parallax view, a Madden-style perspective, and an isometric look that came about after Burt’s father kept wandering in and asking, ‘Why can’t you make it look more like TV?’ That third prototype, with Jon Law laying out the isometric pitch and Burt getting the scrolling working, was the one that caught EA’s eye. Webster recalls, ‘We saw that isometric view and we were like, “Well, that’s it! That’s different, that’s fresh.”‘
The FIFA International Soccer Development Team Takes Shape in Canada
EA then moved the project to EA Canada, a studio formed from the 1991 acquisition of Distinctive Software. Burt and Law were offered jobs at the UK branch, where they later worked on Rugby World Cup ’95. Webster stayed on as associate producer, keeping in close contact with Canada before temporarily relocating there.
The initial core team at EA Canada comprised producer Bruce McMillan, development director Joe Della-Savia, and engineers Jan Tian and Brian Plank. Tian had just led development of 4D Sports Tennis; Plank was an audio programmer. Both were tapped in December, though Plank recalls they did not get going in earnest until January. Tian built an AI testbed on a PC, drawing a field with square lines, a stick figure for the player, and a white dot for the ball, simply to prove the passing and movement concepts. McMillan remembers the discipline of that early phase: ‘We just had two characters on the screen passing the ball back and forth. That’s how the game started.’
Plank eventually converted Tian’s C++ testbed to C by hand over two straight days, acting, in his own words, as ‘a human C++ to C compiler’, to get the code running on a Genesis development kit. From that point, the game progressed quickly, with artists and sound designers joining to flesh out the experience. The team watched stacks of VHS tapes, breaking down player positioning and movement frame by frame. Lead artist George Ashcroft recalls the tapes being ‘well-worn, for sure.’
The pressure on Jan Tian during this period was severe. He sent himself to hospital three times with stress and anxiety, worked through nights, and admits his young son once rang the studio and asked Bruce McMillan directly, ‘Can you make Dad come home please?’ McMillan’s response was to lock Tian’s keyboard. ‘Jan is a brilliant guy,’ McMillan says, ‘but he would work through the night if we didn’t send him home.’
Securing the FIFA Name and Nearly Losing It
For much of its development, the game carried no FIFA branding at all. The licence was secured after Webster rang FIFA’s offices in Switzerland and asked to speak to Keith Cooper, a Welsh football referee and FIFA representative, who pointed EA towards ISL (International Sports and Leisure), FIFA’s licensing arm at the time. Tom Stone, EA’s former vice president of European marketing, recalls that a deal was reached quickly: ‘We shook hands over dinner and said, “Okay, we’ll become your worldwide official licensee.” It was a four-year deal.’ Thewarapperuma is candid about the licence’s limitations: ‘I think enough time has passed to say it’s not the license we wanted. It really isn’t.’
The name itself almost disappeared in North America. EA’s US marketing division pushed to call the game ‘US Soccer’ for the American market. Producer McMillan confronted EA co-founder Bing Gordon directly: ‘I’m going to bet my whole job, my whole career, that if we call it US Soccer, it’ll be a failure. We have to call it FIFA.’ The unified name was ultimately saved when Mark Lewis, the Vice President of Electronic Arts Europe, pointed out that unsold stock could not be moved between regions if the title differed.
EA threw a special launch event on 8 September 1993 at Wembley Stadium, timed around a World Cup qualifier between England and Poland. Guests were seated in a part of the stadium that offered an isometric sightline down onto the pitch. ‘A guy said, “Oh look, has the football started?” I said, “No, that’s our game!”‘ Stone recalls. FIFA International Soccer launched on 3 December 1993 and received strong reviews: Mean Machines Sega awarded it 94%, calling it ‘utterly amazing’, while Computer & Video Games gave it 92%.
From Mega Drive to EA Sports FC 26
After the Mega Drive original, FIFA International Soccer was ported to the 3DO, Commodore Amiga, MS-DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Sega CD, Sega Master System, and Super Nintendo. FIFA 95 followed, adding club teams, and the series grew year on year.
In May 2022, EA announced it was dropping the FIFA brand and moving forward as EA Sports FC. The split came after FIFA demanded more than double its existing fee for the latest licence renewal. Webster’s verdict: ‘The video game doesn’t need those four letters… it should have happened years ago.’ The rebrand has not slowed EA’s development pace. According to Yahoo Sports, EA FC 26 is confirmed for global release on 26 September 2025. Ahead of that launch, EA Sports announced that the World’s Game Update launched on 28 May, bringing a new 48-team international tournament mode from 4 June, with 53 fully licensed and playable national teams, 41 of them competing over the summer. It is a direct nod to the same global football ambition that McMillan fought for in that Vancouver boardroom in 1993, when he insisted the game had to be FIFA, worldwide, in every market. Electronic Arts may have shed the name, but the philosophy behind that original pitch has not changed in over three decades.
